Water Confidence
My son brings chaos and joy wherever he goes.
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“Is Linus’s party a wild cat theme?” a parent of one of my son’s friends texted in our preschool parent text group. Already things were going off the rails. The wild cat thing wasn’t our idea. In fact, our son hadn’t actually mentioned anything about it to us at home. When we asked him about it he just shrugged. But at school, apparently he had told many of his friends that the theme for his upcoming birthday party was “wild cat”. Naturally, when the day of the party arrived he refused to dress like a wild cat and instead donned his usual florescent orange shoes and a “muscle tee” revealing his skinny body. But you know, it was his birthday so I didn’t fight him about it. On the cake — which my wife had ordered before we heard anything about wild cats — was simply a big number 5.
As the children arrived at the restaurant at the appointed time they were dressed in wild cat ears and tails and patterned shirts. We appreciated their efforts. But our son was nowhere to be found. He had run outside, then beyond the bounds of the restaurant’s child-friendly exterior, then through some tall brush and straight into some creek-water flowing under an overpass. I thought I would let him explore for a minute before the party really got going. But then one, two and soon a gaggle of children ran after him and the next thing we knew the party had migrated to under a nearby bridge. He was leading some kind of quest.
No parent would actually choose this location for a birthday party. You can imagine it: when the water runs slow it smells like trash and fish. It’s dark under there, even on a bright summer day. There are jugs of unknown substances scattered about. There’s rusted metal. There’s a makeshift dam of sticks and branches tangled in wet grasses and the whole thing is framed by spray-painted concrete walls. It’s the perfect spot for a graffiti artist meet-up, a rock band photoshoot or perhaps doing heroin on a rainy day. But what could I do? It’s his birthday, I thought again to myself.
As the children began joyfully digging into the sandy dirt and wading into the icy water in their dresses and khakis parents seemed both horrified and delighted, the one-two punch combo of emotions that my son tends to elicit in adults wherever he goes. This is a situation I now often find myself in: torn between forcing my kid to try to maintain some sense of decorum and just allowing him to run wild. I shrug to other parents as their own kids get drawn in. Usually, I feel a little embarrassed both by his insistence and my own leniency, but then also somehow a little proud. I don’t have the words for it.
Many of Linus’s friends are the sons and daughters of professors, owing to his long tenure at the day-care run by the university where I work. Although I can be studious and cerebral, I also grew up rarely wearing shoes during the summer, with little to no parental supervision. This, I have found is unusual among the parents I know now, who grew up in much larger homes and not in particularly rural situations. My house, by contrast, was the house where the private school kids came to really let loose. I seem to have inherited this dynamic from my parents, for better or worse. Yet there’s a part of me that sometimes feels a responsibility to let my son be a little wild. It’s good for him. It’s good for the other kids, I tell myself. Maybe it’s even good for the parents, too.
For over an hour the adults took turns urging the children to return to the restaurant. I participated in this effort several times and finally, for about fifteen minutes of candles and cake cutting, it worked. Briefly, the birthday party resembled a birthday party. Then, the kids all ran back to the creek in a stampede. Finally, one of the fathers said heartily, “they are developing some water-confidence!” And with that the kids had won: through their dogged insistence on having fun the kids had finally conjured up a noble learning objective in the minds of the adults.
Two hours later the children were all soaking wet, shivering, covered in mud, laughing and climbing up the slippery creek bank. Then it hit me: they looked like wild cats.