My family and I are getting ready to move. Have I told you that? Our house has been packed, the movers finish loading today, and then, after a good scrubbing (the house and us), we’re off. While we’re all excited for the adventure that awaits us, leaving the home where we’ve raised our littles is a touch bittersweet. Each time I push them on the swings I wonder if it will be our last in this house, the only place our children know as home. As I look past the creek to the trees beyond, I am reminded of hunting for dragons, of camping, and of imaginations bringing to life the kinds of adventures born only from the minds of young children. We’re quite sure our own personal forest houses fairies, and dragons, and gnomes. We know it houses deer, and opossums, and snakes, and rabbits, and also the occasional house cat, as ours have frequently ventured forth and brought us souvenirs from their escapades. And so as we walk around to inspect what is left to be done before we walk away from this home for the last time, I see things in a new light.
There is a hole in our deck. It’s small, a knothole, really. But it is big enough to be interesting to a pair of small children about to turn two. “What,” I used to imagine them thinking, “could we put in that hole?” That question was answered many times, with innocuous items being pushed inside, to fall between the deck and the metal sheeting below. When we moved to Georgia just more than two years ago, we “enjoyed” many of our meals outside in the 100 degree heat. When we first arrived we didn’t have outdoor furniture, or an umbrella to protect us from the sun. But the kids asked almost daily to eat on the deck and we mostly happily obliged because kids+outside= goodness. And then, after one such meal, Henry, with what seemed like little contemplation, promptly went to the hole and knelt down, fork in hand.
“Don’t do it,” I heard my husband say. “No, no, no, don’t do it. I’m telling you, don’t do it. Get away from that hole!” I chuckle to myself, thinking back on that day, because a hot, tired, cranky-at-the-end-of-the-day parent is pure gold to a toddler about to get in some mischief. And then, “Augh, why did you do that?” Sofia, not about to be left out of the fun of pushing daddy’s buttons, then deftly pushed her own fork into the hole as well. Because these are some of the things I happen to find funny, and wanting to hide the amusement that was sure to be found on my face, I promptly went inside with our empty, forkless, plates, leaving a red-faced daddy in the heat with our pint-sized miscreants.
Over the past two years, the kids have periodically asked about that night, and I’ve found myself retelling the story to peals of laughter. And what is it that they find so funny? Daddy getting mad. His anger and frustration didn’t teach them a lesson about not putting forks in random holes where they may be lost forever, though not having a fork to eat with at the next meal certainly did. It was, for them, humorous.
You see, once the fork is under the deck, there is nothing to be done. It doesn’t mean we don’t address it, but this is almost always best done with calm. After all, a toddler (or any child, for that matter) doesn’t often learn well from a red-faced, angry parent who has devolved into a tantrum of their own. When we yell at our kids, the message we are trying to impart gets lost. At best, they simply miss out on the message, but at worst, they learn to fear us, or tune us out completely. The way we respond to our children in trying times models for them how they should respond to issues in trying times. And so, I smile to myself as I look at the knothole on the deck. We will always have the funny story that goes with it, and the reminder that losing a couple forks isn’t worth losing our cool.
So, what’s under your deck? What reminder can you find to help keep your cool in trying times? I’ll miss this house of ours, but will carry with us to our next home, and beyond, all the lessons I’ve learned from my kids these past couple years. We’ll learn new lessons together, we’ll swing on new swings, we’ll hunt for dragons in some other forest. But the memories of our children’s first place to really call home will stay with us forever. Lost forks and all.