“Can I walk to the pool?”
Most people would consider it an unremarkable request.
No big deal.
Five blocks through a quiet neighborhood, where the busiest street is a 25 m.p.h. zone adorned with traffic calmers.
And yet, somehow, I find myself the kind of mother who views, “Can I walk to the pool?”as a request requiring more than a few remarks.
It’s not just me. I know that.
How hard it is to let our kids do the things we were free to do at their age seems to be a Top Ten topic of conversation among the parents of elementary-school-aged kids, at least the ones I know.
“I suppose it’s safe,” we venture. “But I’m not quite ready.”
“It was never safe,” others point out. “Our parents just didn’t know that.”
At this point in the conversation, I will trot out the bit about the time my third-grade teacher gave us a list of famous Los Angeles landmarks during our study of our city’s history and challenged us to see how many we could visit. I brought it home to show my mother, and she granted me a generous zone around our home in which I could bicycle to a number of them.
Did I mention this was in the heart of Los Angeles? That I rode my bicycle on the sidewalks of major thoroughfares and crossed others from side streets? That I cycled to the La Brea Tar Pits without a responsible adult there to text my parents when I arrived safely? Seriously, anything could have happened to me between 3:00 when school let out and 5:30 when my mother arrived home, and no one would have been the wiser until I didn’t show up.
No blame here. It’s what everyone did.
Which perhaps puts Jake’s request to take a five-block walk through our quiet neighborhood into some perspective I may just be sorely in need of.
In fact, he had already begun taking walks by himself.
A little over a month ago, one quiet Saturday post-soccer-season afternoon, Jake asked if he could visit a friend of ours who lives about 3 blocks away.
I took a quick mental account of the turns to be made (left, right, left), ensured the entire distance included sidewalks, and ran down all the neighbors along the way who’d know where to return him should he end up, as I did one day when I was much younger than nine, sitting on the curb two blocks from home crying desperately because I was completely and utterly lost.
“Yes, you can walk to Kate’s house,” I said, and gave myself a figurative pat on the back for being such a relaxed mom.
I was allowing my son to make his way in the world!
To express his independence unfettered by my helicopter!
To engage on a grown-up level with an actual a grown-up, sitting in her kitchen sipping Pellegrino and discussing the finer merits of American Ninja Warrior.
Still, I was caught short when Jake suggested he walk to the pool by himself.
I was loading up the car with the cooler and bags of towels and sunblock and Lily and her friend, who were appropriately impressed with Jake’s derring do.
“Um,” I said.
“I walk to Kate’s,” Jake pointed out.
“Um,” I replied. “Why don’t you just ride with us?”
“I don’t want to. I want to walk.”
Fair enough, I told myself. No big deal. Only two blocks further than Kate’s house.
This is what I told myself. I was less than convincing.
“Look both ways when you cross,” I warned him. “And stick close to the side of the road when there’s no sidewalk!”
“I know!” he yelled over his shoulder.
“I’m going to follow you in the car!” I cried after him.
And it was done. My big kid had officially become a Bigger Kid.
I hustled Lily and her friend into the car, cursing the lack of speed with which seven-year-olds tend to buckle seat belts, especially seven-year-old girls engaged in conversation with one another.
“Come on!” I urged from the front seat. Little footprints of nervous mommy fear were pattering their way up my breastbone. “We have to catch up to Jake!”
Left around the corner we went, and then right.
“There he is!” I crowed as I spotted a figure in swim trunks half way down the block.
“That’s not Jake,” Lily said, incredulous that her mother’s ancient eyes could have made such an obvious mistake.
“Oh. Right. That’s an adult. And he’s not wearing a shirt,” I observed.
As we drew closer, I noted that Shirtless Guy had a few Shirtless Friends, all of them strangers to me, all of them apparently just waking up at noon. One of them exiting a large, red-and-white van with something like “Merry Pranksters” painted on it. You’d think I’d remember exactly what it said, but I was too busy panicking because it said something like “Merry Pranksters.”
“I guess if they were doing anything illegal, they wouldn’t paint the van red and white like that,” I muttered.
“What?” asked Lily and her friend.
“Nothing.” I tamped down my rising panic. These were just young, shirtless guys, living in a van for a while, visiting friends. The scariest thing about them, I told myself, was how dirty they were.
Maybe a little stoned.
Maybe hungover.
No big deal.
Unless you’re a nine-year-old boy all by yourself who’s had little experience with dirty, shirtless, stoned guys living in a van.
And then, as we passed and I craned my neck trying to get a glimpse inside the van just to, you know, reassure myself, Lily’s friend said, “Why are there mattresses in it?”
I will not share the images this question unleashed in my mind. Suffice to say, I will never quite forgive myself for reading a certain book by Dennis Lehane that you should definitely not go trying to find yourself if you’re a parent.
By now we were making the left turn that led to a straight three-block stretch that would bring Jake to the pool. Three blocks. Should take a kid a while, I figured.
No Jake.
“Do they sleep in that van?” Lily’s friend asked.
“They might not have money for a house or an apartment,” I explained, my voice shaky.
“So that’s what the mattresses are for?” Lily said.
“They’re just some young guys, probably musicians, not making a lot of money right now, so they have to sleep in their van,” I told myself, um, them. That’s what the mattresses are for, I thought.
“Hey,” I added to foreclose any further discussion of the unfamiliar van with the mattresses and the half-dressed intoxicated men that my beautiful young boy had walked by, alone and helpless. “Let’s look for Jake. He can’t have made it all the way to the pool already.”
“I don’t see him,” Lily said doubtfully, as I split the difference between creeping along the better to spot underaged pedestrians and flooring it so as to call the police precious minutes sooner when I discovered that Jake had been snatched. Images of what could be happening to him in those precious minutes obscured my vision.
Down the hill we went, and across the traffic-calmed street. My pits were wet, my heart banging against my ribs, my hands slipping from the steering wheel. Mommy panic. Feral, irrational, a sort of precursor to superhero transformation, like when the Hulk’s muscles start ballooning and his jaw clenches up.
We were now at the pool’s parking lot. A minivan blocked the entrance, and my view of the sidewalk where, I prayed, my boy would be waiting for me.
A teenager slowly emerged from the minivan. She leaned in to talk to the driver.
“Do you have to stop right there?” I growled. “Can you not pull over so I can see if my son has arrived safely?”
Lily and her friend wisely remained silent.
And then, from the shade on the passenger side of the car, came a wave. A smiling face. A pleased-with-himself boy.
Jake grinned as I pulled around him, finally free of the minivan, and screeched into a parking spot.
“How did you get here so fast?” I yelled as I emerged from the car, as if not getting here so fast was one one of the rules I had given him.
“I ran,” Jake answered, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Which, considering I was having this discussion with a nine-year-old boy who was sort of getting into distance running at the time, it was.
“Wait,” I commanded when he ran ahead of me toward the pool entrance. “You need to give me a hug.”
Willingly, he pressed his growing frame right against my heart and tucked his head under my chin, where it barely fits anymore, and I considered myself lucky.
Not so much lucky that he’d passed by the imaginary threat of some twenty-something musician types who’d slept in their van.
And not just lucky that my nine-year-old son will hug me so enthusiastically in public, for which I do, for the record, feel extremely and hopelessly lucky.
But lucky to be willing to listen to my kids when they tell me, in not so many words, that they’re ready to grow up a little. When they ask to take a walk by themselves instead of just doing it. Listen patiently to my concerns and ground rules. Show up at the other side grinning at the feat of outrunning the car. And guide me through this parenthood thing.
With this act of brokered independence, Jake helped me understand the context for the Bhagavad Gita, the universal text of Hinduism that translates earlier philosophy into the practical path of yoga, which I’ve just begun reading.
What struck me, as I thought about my journey through Jake’s Walk to the Pool, is that the Gita takes place during a mighty battle not unlike the one taking place inside me during that Jake-less drive.
Before him on both sides Arjuna recognized fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, teachers, and friends. When he saw all these familiar faces confronting one another, he was filled with deep compassion and sadness.
(26-27, translation by Ranchor Prime) In his commentary on this passage, Ranchor Prime remarks:
Arjuna had not wanted this war. So it is with each of us: we may not seek conflict, but in response to the choices we make in our lives it often seeks us. Arjuna has made his choices, and Krishna has become Arjuna’s chariot driver to lead him wherever he wishes to go. In the same way God does not interfere with our choices, but helps us fulfill them.
Overreacting—or not—was actually a wonderful way to embrace the choice I’d made to let go and give Jake more independence. It was a powerful means of taking my own journey to the pool, with enough conflict to make me sit up and pay attention.
It’s scary to let your kids wander alone in this world, especially when they’ve got such a safe community of parents and school and after-school and friends to protect them. I faced my small war between these safe places on one side and Jake growing up on the other. I love them both. I made a choice. I gained a little spiritual, or parental, or maybe just sane guidance.
Not that it was a big choice to make. Not that I expect congratulations for letting my nine-year-old walk to the pool.
But we all have our small battles, our personal triumphs that we know other people achieve all the time without considering them noteworthy at all.
It’s recognizing those little triumphs that I’m celebrating.
That and the fact that my nine-year-old son still gives me full-on hugs in the pool parking lot.
YogaMamaMe 