Early Rites of Passage

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I sat in a room with about 30 other parents to dab discreetly at our eyes and take pictures of Gabriel as he took his turn to cross a stage and receive a certificate. By my estimate there will be at least three more occasions of this, including the reading of The Places You Will Go - as we get through the K-12 years at far too brisk a pace.  In the future, it will be his full name - perhaps with both middles thrown in to reflect the formality and significance of the occasion - and the tears will flow a little longer.  He has graduated from daycare.  Today, however, he was back in day care and he'll continue going through much of the summer until that point in August where the goodbye will be less formal and more intimate (and teary) than they were yesterday.

Earlier this week Gabriel also learned that that he, perhaps by no more than the thickness of a sock, has outgrown the height restriction of a shopping centre playground. There may be an attempt to sneak him in, but I won't be attempting that one. He may be more interested in the access he will gain on certain rides at the local amusement park to ease his anguish about his growth.

I am torn over the formality of the graduation yesterday. It was an opportunity to mark his imminent departure from daycare even though it is still about 2 1/2 months away and I am glad that the educators at the daycare had the opportunity to say goodbye in the manner that they did yesterday. It is probably all too easy to rush through this particular goodbye to the women who have had such a significant impact on Gabriel.  I still foresee an informal good bye that will be quite heartfelt.

My issue is that there may be too many ceremonies and celebrations of this sort and that each rite of passage will get over formalized.  A more mindful and conscious acknowledgement of those passages will be valued as well and I suspect there may be a risk of either celebrating small accomplishments on scale that risks blowing them out of proportion or bringing a formality to the occasion that does not seem appropriate.  Yesterday's ceremony was sweet.  The kids all sang a song about growing up and being ready for "big kids' school" so there was a sense of culmination about the event.

The more mindful recognition of those rites would be more appealing to me. There are countless other little achievements that a child goes through as they mark their growth and advancing independence and I would prefer that people be conscious enough of those steps to mark them in their own personal way that aligns with their values and interests. We will have plenty of those little moments and it may just be that the improvised moments that mark those rites will be more valuable and memorable than the formal occasions.

In my own case, waaaaay back in March 1975 I had my first communion on my own.  My father, was heading off to sea with the Navy just before I was supposed to have my communion with my catechism class.  Instead of marking it on a sun-kissed Sunday morning, I believe it was on a Thursday night during Holy Week.  I don't recall if the priest made any special announcement to the congregation that night, but I do recall a woman who qualified as elderly to a certain 8-year-old (me!) giving me either a dime or a quarter after mass to congratulate me for it.  I had the sense that she had always seen me in church and that the coin came as an unprompted acknowledgement of my communion rather than something prompted by words from the pulpit.  After mass, my parents took me to a department store to get my first watch.

With Gabriel, I value those similarly informal moments and acknowledgements of his growth: the way the baristas light up when he leads me into Starbucks on Saturday mornings to make our order is one example, though it may not necessarily be a rite. This week though, at the mall as he left the playground for the last time - unless he tries to sneak in on a quiet day - the attendant gave him an ink stamp on the wrist and said, "You may be too big for the playground, but you're never too big for stamps.  Okay?"

Game Time

I am always conscious of how much time I spend with Gabriel and how good that time is.  Still, I have a gag response to the term "q--l-ty time" that inhibits me from forcing the matter or parenthesizing a moment as one of intense purposeful bonding that I could close and discard. Instead I've contented myself with being there with him for walks to and from daycare; and books, whether read on the sofa, in bed or from the side of tub. Whenever I give into his request for TV I try to sit with him to avoid using it as the electronic babysitter. Invariably, though, I will gravitate toward the kitchen to prepare supper or tidy something up rather than zone out or silently critique as Gabriel makes the mental shopping list required for him to achieve his (apparent) goal of becoming a Paw Patrol completist.

Because of his attachment to TV time and my tendency to disengage when he's in front of the TV, I have grown conscious of that void in the day where we are out of touch with each other.  There will be programming at some point that we can connect over and talk about, but the programming for a five-year-old only prompts conversation if there is a nostalgic, "This is what I watched..." introduction to the likes of Friendly Giant or Mr. Dressup.

In the face of the void that TV imposes on the day, I've tried a few times over the last year to get him interested in board games.  The gathering around the table for a board game, cards or a jigsaw puzzle each is loaded with memories of family and place that is immensely evocative. I've tried quite a few times to interest Gabriel in a game and there have been a few lapsed-attention efforts at Snakes and Ladders and a few occasions where I've gotten Trouble out of the box but could not engage him in much more that the percussive sequence of crush-pop-rattle that was the "roll" of the dice.  His mastery of jigsaw puzzles, like that of Lego is set and it is easy for him to lock in on the challenge when it is in front of him, but that can leave me on the sidelines.

Last night, with a stint in front of the TV finished and him asking for more TV after supper, I attempted to get him to try Trouble and we finished two games.  Best of all, this morning he asked if we could play again.  He counted his turns properly and mastered the simple task of starting his count on the next space on the board rather than the one he was in.  Rules were grasped and followed.  They were tested at times to but it comes with the territory.  There will be many games to follow.  I'm recall my capability to play double solitaire when my grandmother at the lake when I was seven and ponder introducing Gabriel to war (the card game).  More games will appear after Trouble, in their rightful sequence: Sorry, Clue, and maybe we will, in time, aspire to Life, Monopoly and the board flipping etiquette of Risk (ok, maybe not that one.)  All things to look forward to for the laughter and small lessons that will come from them and the closer connection that will come from sitting face-to-face on the floor or at the table.

At a time when he is holding his own more and more in conversation and surprises with the turns of phrase or topics that he introduces it is good to discovery that a refuge in the week where we will slow down to connect face to face.  He is in the middle (or early stages) of a growth spurt that has turned him ravenous, cranky and drowsy at times over the last 5-6 weeks and it is one of the unnecessary-necessary reminders that this will blur by fast and that the bond will be challenged by friends with the lure of video games, suppers over at friends, after school activities where he'll be home later and the kitchen is nothing more than a transit point or a node of quick fuelling as lives diverge step by incremental step. There will be stolen conversations on the road but the first successful foray introducing the game habit will promise a stillness and trove of memories that we have not been able to form yet.  It is a comfort to see his growth be complemented by the capacity to sit through a game and finish it, not to mention dust himself off for the needed rematch.

By the way, if anyone has a green peg they can spare, let me know.

As Ever, On the Cusp of Transition

I should treasure this day for the more fleeting moments of childhood that adorn calendars on the theme of innocence or some such attribute of early youth. The sight of him stopping to smell a neighbour's flowers as the thunderclouds loom and darken. His fascination with the spores of a dandelion as he sends them into flight. The translucent down on his upper arms as I put sunscreen on his arms. These are all things that we try to convince ourselves that we saw and treasured, but there is the risk that we have a template of our child's growth and experiences that we assume conforms to a catalogue or a parenting magazine rather than be mindful and conscious of them as the occur out of the corner of our eye.  Today I can assure myself that I did indeed take note of them, and magnified those moments.

There was much today that made me note that those innocent explorations and discoveries will pass. The cool years, much like those thunderheads, seem to loom. With Gabriel at 4 1/2, I may be getting ahead of myself but it is hard to gauge how precocious each generation of kids is actually becoming. That aside, I'm conscious of how my earliest memories take me back to age 5 and also noticing the ways that Gabriel is asserting himself more and expressing his wishes.  I get the sense of the quest that will shape the next decade of his life as he seeks friends and acquaintances to fill the ineffable void that only a sibling can fill. There are also the times when he wants to play with his mother or I and we fill the time as well as we can - ever, in my case, conscious of playing in a way that gives him the lead and lets him set the rules and the standards of mastery.

Today, on a Saturday morning, the challenge was to get him to listen and as a result of that challenge it took him about three hours to get out of his pyjamas and dressed for the day. The carrot was that I'd play with him when he was ready for the day. Despite that, the hours drifted by and he only got dressed when he was ready to go out late in the morning while I mentally checked off the moments that we were setting aside in exchange for a stand-off that may have ultimately been about redefining independence or influence over one's day.

As for Gabriel, he has made his expectations of me clearer and clearer. Whenever he makes an extended visit to the toilet he expects two books to be read to him, even if their length leaves his dangling legs asleep and piercing him with pins and needles before the second "happily ever after" is checked off. This morning I was in the middle of something far less important and he called out "I've been waiting," in his effort to nudge me to set things aside and read Charlie Brown while perched on the side of the bathtub.

For all the sense of transition that the day posed, it is a normal one where the poignant glimpses are too brief and too easily overlooked.  Instead, the negotiation between two wills becomes the highlight - the dramatic highlight stripped of any of the gentle sense of passage or childhood that came with those more photogenic moments. As he sits for a calm moment with his first-ever bowl of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream cooling his stomach, and I brace myself for the task of assessing the ROHSI (return on housespace investment) of the toys he doesn't think he's outgrown, I want to take a moment to attach the same appreciation of the moment as I have to seeing him become more expert with the camera. He's not growing up in every way at every moment, just a few ways at a time.