Her husband sets up the two adirondack chairs ten feet apart on the front porch before he leaves for work, and she sets up their three-year-old with "sports and toys," as he calls them -- badminton rackets and birdies, a basketball, and then a blanket and peg board and music and chunky pad and pen. He wears a mask if he comes close to the porch, but off on the grass he can do as he likes maskless.
My friend and I sit in our chairs, sipping tea and eating scones. We talk, full sentences even at times when the three-year-old allows it. He wants company or a playmate or attention. His mom volleys herself between keeping him occupied and sitting with me.
I sit, looking at their light blue hydrangea, their wood chips (red or brown?), the stack of toys on the blanket. It's a summer morning, but it could be any morning with a three-year-old at home. I have not thought of these days in a long time. My kids are now eight and ten and thirteen and fourteen. Those slow, quiet days with them at home, when we would just sit or play around the house and yard for a morning feel long ago.
But maybe it's not that they're so long ago; it's that they look different now. Like my friend's three-year-old, my kids get antsy; they don't want attention so much as something to do. But it's the same idea: they say, "I have nothing to do. I'm bored." And like my friend going back in and out of the house with toys and blankets and sports equipment, I say, "You could read or play a game or do a puzzle or go for a bike ride," and they, like her son with the toys she brings out, don't like any of these ideas. They don't know what they want, but they don't like my ideas.
The three-year-old finds a song he likes and yells, "Mama! Listen!" and my friend looks over and smiles and hums a little, delighted. I think of my ride here. I had driven about a mile when I put the radio on. The first song to come on had the refrain "Before you go, is there something I could have said to make your heart beat better?..." My kids and I have been singing this song for days, especially after I was singing the wrong lyrics (I thought "faster" -- but it's "better," they tell me). I call my thirteen-year-old and put the phone near the car speakers so she can hear the song. We sing a few lines together and laugh.
Sometimes when I'm sitting on the back porch reading a book, one of the kids will come out, plop down in a nearby chair, and start talking. Or I'll ask one of them to play Connect Four or ping pong or to go for a walk.
I watch my friend and her three-year-old, nostalgic for those early days, this slowness, this simplicity of a morning. If I take this morning home with me, though, I'll see the toys and talking and requests for attention, hear the quiet between the talk, hear when they are looking for attention, stop to see their three-year-old selves in my kids with their eight, ten, thirteen, and even fourteen years. The three-year-olds are there, and so are the slowness of a morning, the connection, the morning snack, the sweetness.
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