Thinking out loud

This morning started off like so many of them do, that is, optimistically. Early in the day, before the weight of things has started to assert itself, it's easy to be forward-looking, easy to imagine that on this day, things might come together, everything might really work out after all. By seven-thirty I was on the computer, reading my usual papers, and thinking about what sort of things might spin themselves out of the day's fibers. What piles of gold. I wasn't thinking that the phone would ring then, but it did, and the call was from my son at school, who had forgotten something crucial to his day. This was really a minor matter; my reactions to it were not. It always surprises me, my ready slide from annoyance, to anger, to fury. Organization has long been one of my son's challenges, although his teachers have told me that overall, his abilities fall somewhere in the middle of the boys his age. Not so bad, in other words. But I don't compare him to his classmates, I compare him to his sister, whose own organizational skills developed at warp drive. It's always unfair to compare kids, yes, but I am angry now at the interruption, angry that I have to drive the fifteen-mile circuit from home to school to home again. And, once my morning has been interrupted like this, my mood is likewise in free fall, and of course, there will be no meaningful work done for the day.

I debate: is the right thing here to bail him out, take the missing papers to the school, or is the right thing to be a tough love parent now and make him endure the backlash from forgetting his work. The real question is, do I want to teach him consequences or do I want to teach him that there are second chances? I think about it while already knowing I'm going to opt for the route of second chances, and here, it's his history that's working in his favor. My son watched his father get a second chance when he went into remission from a serious cancer, and then watched him die anyway after the cancer came back. That's something no one can undo; now, I decide, all I can do is go ahead and offer help when I am able to do so. Try to prove that sometimes, things do work out like you hope they will.

By the time the car is warming I've dampened enough of my anger to start thinking more clearly about my son. Yes, he's messy and disorganized where his sister is precise and methodical. But he is also empathetic where she is self-absorbed, compassionate where she is sarcastic. And in many ways, at twelve years old, is more mature than I, who am so ready to be overwhelmed by my anger some days. When they were both much younger I decided once that what kids lack is perspective; these days it is my own shaky perspective that is out of step with what's really going on in my world. That amplifies my reactions to the point where they drown out everything else.

Truth is, sometimes the kids just get in the way, and when I'm yelling at them, it's not them that I'm angry with. This morning I was less angry with my son's forgetfulness than I was with my own creativity's skittishness. Why, at the first sign of imbalance in the day, does the desire to write, to create, run away and hide itself in a cave? And why will nothing coax it back out, all the rest of the day? I sometimes imagine that my own kids are comparing me to their friends' mothers, and not favorably: I am sure those women seem worlds kinder, more patient, more successful than I. Today I can imagine that my wounded writing impulse is sitting by itself somewhere, also comparing me--also unfavorably--to all the other writers to whom it might have belonged, other writers who are smarter, more centered, more productive than I have ever been able to be. How, I wonder, to convince it that there are also second chances there. What word, what gesture, will it take.