Not Mine.

The other morning I dropped Jonah off at school, and like every other morning, he was in charge of putting his lunch box into the bin of lunch boxes. He looked in the bin and noticed a piece of plastic. He became concerned and leaned over to fish the plastic piece out of the bin.

I thought he was just being obsessed with a new shiny thing. He saw something cool and wanted to play with it. I was mistaken.

“It’s Zoe’s,” he told me. Prior to that I didn’t know why he cared about it. I tried to tell him to just leave it in there; to not bother with taking it anywhere because eventually the owner would figure it out and see it when they dropped their lunch in the bin. My crotchety reaction was that we shouldn’t touch it because whoever dropped it will look in the bin as one of the steps back in the retracing process. Locating its owner seemed too much like work. AND I could imagine the daycare workers looking at me trying to explain where I got this seemingly unimportant piece of plastic and thinking “well what do you want me to do with it?”

Because this is the crazy that goes on in my head. Every day. I have no idea where it comes from. But it got me thinking about my son, and where his irrational thoughts will take root. Have they already? Am I too late? Is it inevitable?

Sometimes when we’re at the playground I don’t want to let him play with the other kids. I know that he needs to learn to deal with different personalities and temperaments in life beyond the playground, but it’s hard to stand there and watch him interact with other kids. He has this light in his eye and it hurts me to think that he will ever want to withdraw; that he will ever feel shitty about who he is. I know that he will face disappointment. That his heart will break. That he will be sad and feel lonely. And I don’t know how to deal with that. The worst part? I know that there will be times when it will be me who lets him down.

Now that it was Zoe’s I understood. He wanted to make sure she got it. He was being sweet and considerate and wanted to return this little piece of plastic to its rightful owner. So we took it upstairs to his teacher and they left it in Zoe’s cubby. Problem solved.

Sometimes parenting is harder than math.

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Amalah

This reminds me that I am glad glad glad to live in a place that is dry and cold. The weather here does not lend itself well to raging populations of icky icky bugs.

While Hawaii may be beautiful, it does have bugs.

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