The Dawdle: Lessons for Dad from the Walks to Daycare

We have had the good fortune of a great, supportive daycare for the last few years. A few days ago we found ourselves quizzing Gabriel on continents he learned and can add that his math is coming along too.  The care and attention he has received was a key factor prompting us to hold him back a year. One major advantage of that daycare, however, has been the location.  Daycare is a scant 500 metres away and apart from allowing me to pick him up and drop him off, it has meant walks to and from daycare to bookend our Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays.

At the start of the day, there is the hustle to determine if he wants to walk with me or get a drive with his mother and to get him out the door.  On the night before, it may actually be a strategic move on our part to ask, "Who's walking you to school?", instead of the more neutral, drive-with-Mom-is-a-possibility use of "taking." (As I write this, I wonder if there is the slightest component of a quiz or a call for an expected response in our question rather than allowing him to flex some independent decision-making.) Getting him fed, dressed and out the door ends with him wanting to sprint down our apartment hallway to start our day.

The walks are consistent. I am always in more of a rush to get going and ensure that I'm at the office in time for the start of my day.  At the end of the day, there is less urgency on my part but the speed of his walk is dictated by his mood and energy level at the end of the day.  There are days when he wants to play king of the mountain on each pile of snow.  On others, he pays homage to the same tree (stump now, actually) that got knocked down in a hailstorm in June 2015. Some days he is exhausted and inconsolable. We race each other or run holding hands for the sake of speed without the competition. I am unrestrained in my paranoia about the traffic that is around and striving to ensure that he is vigilant about the cars.  We examine the skies on the predawn walks to acknowledge the huge moon or the colour on the horizon that promises a beautiful day makes us heed the coming of night.  We pause to take in the towers of downtown.

My mood is a factor on those walks as well.  In reality, I am writing this post to work through and trade in my own rush to get home for the presence to take in that dawdle more appreciatively.  My desire to cover those 500 metres quickly can take the opportunity out of the walk because of my poor perception of time. We do race from time to time on the walk home so I ought to take it when it comes.

If he wants to take a different route and walk through a path of large boulders to test his balance, his will wins out, as it should. When I am in a rush, I wish I could pressure him to pick up the pace or take a more direct route, but ultimately this part of the day, unbound by the walls and fence of the daycare is a moment that is his own. Apart from the simple exercise of the walk, there is a measure of independence that he can exercise by stopping the way he does and dictating a change in route if one appeals to him. Ironically, despite the independence that we might associate with the car -- it is mere mobility that a car provides -- it may actually be during this walk that he can develop autonomy with each step he does or doesn't take.  Whether I am holding his hand or a few dozen metres away beckoning him to catch up or cautioning him to watch the car there is an independence that he can exercise with each (watched) step he takes.  The talks about the day become familiar as he talks about a friend he had a hard time with.  I try to tell him to ask how his friends are rather than distancing himself and wait for the time when he can tell me he did and that it worked.

It will be years before I know if these walks amount to anything resembling an independence or autonomy that car-bound kids lack. In reality it will be a theory tested by evidence that I select quite carefully. Next September, when he starts -- as he already puts it, "real school" -- the walk will actually be a little shorter and we will start to grapple with the question of when to let him walk entirely on his own.  I started that walk one my own right away.  It was a 200 metre walk (thank you Google Maps) and I only had one residential street to cross.  Gabriel's will be a little longer and cross a major thoroughfare where moving violations occur with regular, cacophonous frequency.  As I did in the 1970's, I am confident that Gabriel will, when we allow him, be able to navigate that route with the good sense that I did.  For now, though, we will dawdle.

The Same Boy

The question is already asked: "Where did the time go?"  Gabriel is only five now but the time has done what it intends to do.  I never quite get in the moment as often as I could or ought and I'm looking ahead, wondering what a particular bout of rebellion or rambunctiousness will amplify to when he is older and bigger and I am forever pondering the butterfly effect of a moment that got away: I'm impatient for a moment or inattentive and there is that erosion of the connection that sends him down a path that reflects so badly on me.  Robin Williams used to raise that self-doubt by contrasting two futures: one where is child is accepting a Nobel Prize and at the other extreme asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

There is probably no advantage in looking back rather than behind.  The ideal is to be in the moment and absorbing the opportunity as it is.  There are the easier moments that are still and captured. Looking at his awed, rapt face as it is bathed in the blue glow of the screen in a darkened theatre and he is transported and transfixed one of those few times (to date) that he has had the experience of a movie.  The uncertain but committed buy-in to the excitement of the first New Year's Eve he stayed up for.  There was the sense that this was a Big Deal, and he threw himself into it, but he was in no way certain why.  The tentativeness as he rushed to the video of the countdown was subtle, undeniable but amusing.

The routines are harder to get that stillness and contentment within.

A few days back, Friday, he and I were together for the day and there was little that I could interest him in doing out of the house.  All he really wanted to do was put together Lego and, to my surprise, he was not quite engaged enough in that to finish it all the way through.  He would recruit me for long stretches of the construction and it was more likely out of his disinterest in the task than a desire to include me in something other than sorting through the pieces for him.  He was not interested in any of the outings I've normally gotten him to leave home for and the lone exception, a trip to the playground was clearly scheduled for, "The middle of the afternoon."  No earlier.

When we finally got outside and headed to the playground, he dawdled and played in the snow, stopping regularly to kick and stomp at it wherever it captured his imagination more than the destination did.  After a few hours of cabin fever around the Lego, the delays in the walk taxed me a little.  After stretching the distance between us a few times and never prompting him to catch up, I managed, somehow, to flash back to the same walk years earlier -- I somehow make that sounds like decades, when it is just 2-3 years -- when he did the same thing, but was only able to call it, "No." He is the same boy.  I waited and watched as he Godzillaed a few mounds of snow to dust and moved on to the next.  When he finally caught up, I rested a hand on my head and reminded myself that he's the same boy. At the same time I suspected that this particular fascination with the snow would get buried in maturity and expressed differently, if at all, as he gets older.

At the playground there were reminders again. We were alone but he was untroubled by the solitude or the cold and he took to the same routines as in previous years.  The swing captivated him but he graduated out of the bucket and into the big swing.  I pushed him for 30-45 minutes as he struggled to pump himself into motion.  Godzilla was not able to crush the snow down sufficiently to give him the room his feet needed to pump.

In that rhythm, standing behind him and taking his guidance on how many hands to use and how hard to push, I ceased to look ahead or back and I just settled into the task of pushing him just right each time as the snow seeping into my shoes.