One Foot in Front of the Other

Today feels a bit disjointed, so it seems only appropriate that this post would be disjointed, too.  I have all these thoughts floating around in my head, these flashes of thought trying to spin themselves to maturity, about how our role in Lincoln's life has begun to change now that he's growing into a real boy, a big, active, independent boy.  On the way home from a long morning at church just now, Linc fell asleep in the car.  Normally, I would go through a variety of theatrics to keep him awake till we got him home so he wouldn't spoil his nap, but today he was just too far gone.  I looked back at him and saw, fleetingly, the baby that he was, with impossibly long lashes touching his round cheeks, cheeks that were flushed in sleep, and his head falling back against the seat to reveal the vulnerable skin of his neck.  In that moment, I saw again that he is not a baby anymore.  His shape has that toddler stretch to it, that newfound length that takes the plumpness of infancy and thins and elongates it in the sudden approximation of adult form.  Like little toy men, the proportions almost there, scaled down to a third the size they will become.

Thursday night, when he was up making us nervous with his croupy wheezing, he became babylike in his fatigue and desperation for comfort.  He curled up against us as he used to, his body nearly obscured by a blanket, his face half covered by the mask of his nebulizer, all big eyes and damp eyelashes and clutching fingers.  Sam and I both remarked then that he looked like such a baby, and there was a sting to it, saying it aloud to each other with the implication that most of the time he simply does not look like a baby anymore.

I thought because we had the baby stage with him longer, it would be easier to see him leave it, but it turns out it's just as heartbreaking no matter when it happens or how long it takes to get there.  Of course I want him to outgrow infancy, I want him to be able to do more, and I want to have the bit of extra freedom that comes with having a more self sufficient child.  I just also want him to want to curl up against my chest and hold me with that grip that is tighter and more sincere than any other embrace I've ever experienced.  No one, and I mean no one, gives hugs like Lincoln.  He's darn near famous for it.  Can't I just have it all, independence when I need to get the dishes done and helpless need when I want him to curl up in my lap and hug my scattered thoughts away?  Is that too much to ask?

I recognize that it's time for my approach to change, that I will have to start expecting more of him and stop making excuses when his behavior becomes the difficult toddler variety.  He is giving us hints that he may be headed for tantrum territory, which we have been miraculously free from with him.  We see him asserting his will in increasingly vocal, and often grumpy, ways.  And although we consider these all good signs of his intellectual development (because those toddler tantrums do serve a developmental purpose, teaching children consequences and planting the seeds for patience and self control, among others), we also consider them, as all parents do, incredibly annoying.  While we had clear cut expectations for what Nico was and was not supposed to be doing at any given point, what was fair for us to expect of him and what was appropriate for us to give to him, those lines are blurred with Linc.  We don't want to increase his frustration with the world and with his potentially limited ability to understand and communicate (and therefore increase his frustration with us) by expecting him to live up to a set of standards beyond his ability to comprehend.  And at the same time, we don't want to set up a culture of permissivism based on the worry that he doesn't understand and thus shouldn't be expected to conform to certain rules.

To make it all even more frustrating and confusing, we don't feel like we did a particularly good job in this aspect with Nico, and we are still riding out the backlash.  We learned too late that waffling over our expectations or having one set of expectations around mommy and another one around daddy was a recipe for disaster.  This week I am realizing that we are about three months behind in creating a set of basic rules we expect Linc to adhere to, and now I am struggling to catch up with the fact that he is old enough to need more structure, both in the sense of feeling behind logistically and in the sense of feeling behind psychologically.  In other words, I have been in denial over how far he's come lately, and I have been treating him like the baby he was rather than the child we want him to be.  Good grief, I've spent so much time with him telling myself not to think three steps down the road, not to focus on when will he get there but to enjoy where he is now, that I guess I missed him getting there.  I just woke up one day and there was a child, whose knees were suddenly bumping up against the edge of the table, where the baby had sat so long that I forgot there would ever be a time when we wouldn't have a baby to hug and comfort and subtly spoil.

Ironically, I've been celebrating the little aspects of his big boy-ness for some time now without putting all the pieces together.  I love how much he loves to eat now.  He insists on a bite, fills his little mouth, and does a happy dance in his seat to celebrate his favorite foods.  He climbs into his fort in the backyard and plays unguarded up on the elevated platform.  He walks in to school, wearing his backpack, and puts it in his cubby just like he's supposed to (okay, sometimes with a little help).  Linc does so many things that a typical three year old would do, and though he's been doing many of them for a while now, I just realized that all together they paint a pretty surprising picture of where he is on his path of development.  I guess if you put one foot in front of the other long enough, even if you stop paying attention to your goal, you eventually reach the end of your journey and find yourself at the destination you forgot you were pursuing.

It seems the next steps will be mine, though, to prevent us stagnating here in this spot.  I need to let go of my attachment to baby Lincoln and embrace life with the boy he is now, while somehow always moving forward, upping the ante on my expectations with him, putting one foot in front of another even if I refuse to look ahead to the next big milestone that all these steps are leading us toward.

And here's where I get disjointed.  I've been thinking a lot about three college kids I met this week on campus who were raising money and awareness for Down syndrome in the middle of the West Mall.  Among signs for fraternities, political affiliations, sports teams, and student organizations, there was a little table with a sign than said "Ban the R Word."  I was so shocked, and pleased, that a student group had put up a table for Down syndrome awareness week, I stopped, thanked them profusely, and took their picture.  Ignoring the fact that my fat thumb is encroaching on the image, when I see this picture I can only juxtapose it against the image of the nineteen year old boy who walked onto campus last month and sprayed bullets from an AK-47 over half the forty acres before taking his own life. 



I see where I want my kids to go.  I know I want them to be thoughtful, compassionate, joyful people, the kind of people who would sit at a table in the middle of campus and declare the unpopular idea that using the R word is not cool, not acceptable.  It's just that there are about ten million steps between where we are and that end goal, and it seems that if we veer off slightly, just a few degrees to the left, they could end up in a far different destination than I had in mind.  Again, all of this is confusing enough with Nico, for whom I have clear images of what success and failure might mean for his life (and no, they do not correspond even remotely with career success, financial security or any of the other typical definitions of success).  But with Lincoln, we just don't know what he might be able to achieve, and so with him I am even more afraid of under-expecting and facilitating a mindset of indifference that will ultimately keep him from achieving something greater than any of us ever expected.  I know there will be numerous forks in the road, like the one I have recently arrived at with Linc, where I will have to choose to let go of my outdated notions of who he is in order to accept all he has become while I was too busy watching my feet.

I like this video, in light of the thoughts that are churning around in my brain today.  It addresses expectations, and how they can warp an image completely.  I can only hope that my expectations for both of my children help them find a place in life where they have the kind of joy that Jimmy exhibits in this video and the respect that Jimmy deserves.