Sunday, June 5, 2016

The Discovery of Calm

For about a month now I have been trying to figure out an option to my overwrought urgency whenever Gabriel is on the verge of endangering himself. Usually it is nothing more than an attempt to keep him from wandering off a berm by the side of the road and into traffic. I will begrudge the admission that I might let paranoia get the best of me when it comes to Gabriel's well-being.

Another inner dialogue that I have been having of late surrounds my tendency to postpone Gabriel squirrel away a moment to myself before giving him my time. It is a bad habit, even though it is nothing more than me saying, "Let me get my glasses," when he asks me to read, or a chore of some sort I want to do first. I have made the vow to not blow him off anymore. May be not quite anymore but nudge that up the requisite six or seven dozen percentage points that are easily in range.

And so those two things converge...

Music class is finished and we are looking at a 15-minute wait for our bus. Gabriel normally fills the time in the best ways he can dawdling through the garbage, balancing himself precariously on slabs of concrete and exploring whatever the landscape might provide - a range of activities that empties my quiver of "Stops," "Come here's" and "Look out's" that I try to deploy in the face of preschool curiosity and boredom-busting. Impact: zero.

On this occasion, though, I've taken a more relaxed approach. I'm still immersed in a novel -- Andrezej Stasiuk's Dukla a jaw-dropping novel of breathtaking imagery and writing, by the way. The novel is just a diversion for a deliberately relaxed vigilance.  Gabriel does his thing and I keep my attention divided between him and the book. Given the chance to utterly endanger himself in the face of my restrained silence, he does not. He diverts himself with ryegrass or indian grass (I believe), which he yanks out of the ground and stacks.

"Can you help me?"

My cue.

I put the book aside and join him, without delay, taking directions on how he wants me to proceed as we address the stack he is building. I show him how to strip the spikelets - those little bits on the end that evoke the thought of bran or wheat - off the stalk of grass and add them to the pile. I offer to take direction from him and determine if a grass with a coarser, larger set of spikelets would suit his purposes for his pile or construction of grass.  We passed our block of time in this fashion and when the bus arrived I reminded him to pick up the toy truck he insisted on toting along throughout our Saturday.

And I learn to lay off and ease my vigilance to something more detached. I give Gabriel a little more room to roam and more independence and I get a little more calm (and reading) to myself. In that moment, I get the calm island that I have, to this point, failed to squirrel away to myself time and time again. Control relinquished and a balance between father and son is struck as rarely before.

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