In this world, there are people who are good with children and people who are, well, not so good. The ones that are good with children seem to know how to play, enchant and delight them. They are shepherds of a precious flock and uniquely gifted.
Frankly, my gifts seem to lie elsewhere. It’s not that I don’t like little ones or admire them. I do. I’m just not what one would call very child-like which to me is an essential ingredient in one’s ability to see the world from a child’s vantage point. I don’t know where I lost that perspective. After all, I must have had it at some point, having been a child myself at one time.
Perhaps it has something to do with my unfortunate experiences with baby-sitting when I was a teenager.
I got a summer job looking after three children, ages seven to thirteen. They seemed like a perfectly normal family to me. They lived in a very nice house, nicer than mine, and in a very nice neighbourhood too. I was to take care of them while their parents went to work. For this, I was paid $25 per week.
The experience for me was not unlike how soldiers have been known to describe their wartime adventures, that is, long hours of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. These kids were out of control. The youngest was seven and given to frequent catastrophic temper tantrums and running around the house without her clothes. Dennis, the middle child, lived up to his name by proving to be a genuine menace. And Jeff, the eldest, although the least troublesome, found it great fun to use his father’s golf balls as weapons against my girlfriends and me on the one occasion that I invited them over for an hour of some much needed companionship.
None of the children had any structure in their lives. They didn’t know what it was to sit at a table and have a meal, at least not a meal that didn’t involve a food fight. The two boys fought one day in the bathroom, brandishing razor blades at one another. And Dennis shoved me into a six foot deep sand pit, which lay beyond the backyard, while I was attempting to rescue a little boy who he had also pushed in. Dennis eventually helped the little boy out but left me there until a neighbour finally and mercifully came to my aid.
I remember yelling from the bottom of that hole, “Dennis, you little bugger!!” to which Dennis, peering triumphantly over the lip of the hole, replied,
“I’m telling my Dad that you swore!”
Later, when relaying Dennis’ transgressions to his father, I realized the source of the trouble. Dad’s response was,
“Oh well. Boys will be boys”
That was the end of it.
Perhaps it is that I expect too much from children, particularly other peoples’ children, that I find myself so often at odds with them. They are, after all, learning life’s ropes just as we all had to, but I find that I have little patience for parents who do not correct their children when they are being rude or unnecessarily disruptive. Unfortunately, that impatience quickly transfers to the children themselves.
When my own children were small I think there were times when I was too hard on them. I wanted them to understand that their behaviour, good and bad, had a way of affecting those around them. I felt that having good manners, being considerate and kind and working diligently at whatever task they were given (or set for themselves) were important components of a successful life. I still feel that way. Perhaps though, my expectations of my own little ones were at times unreasonable. Maybe it might have been helpful had I been more playful, less authoritarian. Who knows? In any case, their father was more good natured when it came to the children and so, I suppose things balanced out. They must have, because both my sons managed to grow up to be good men and people whom I am proud to know. That has to count for something, surely.
Now, I am a grandmother. Am I chomping at the bit to baby-sit? Not so much, as they say. But when I do, I learn something new about this little girl who has truly captured my heart and made me feel as I have never felt for another child. There is truth in the observation that while one loves one’s children, it is the grandchildren that carve out the largest chunk of the heart to keep forever.
My granddaughter is teaching me how to play in Elmo’s World and in spite of my non-childlike demeanor, I am learning to see the world from a new perspective because she is in my life.
Perhaps there is hope for me yet.
