I feel, at the outset, that I should be clear this story has nothing to do with my second child, despite being about Second Child Syndrome. Or, at least, nothing directly.
But I do feel, rightly or wrongly, that my ability to walk away from my not-yet-four-year-old as he played with the toy train set in Barnes & Noble to check out the Mo Willems selections an aisle away stems directly from the fact that I have a second child and have been practicing such cavalier parenting for nearly nineteen months now.
Which doesn’t make me feel any better about the big, silent tears streaking Jake’s cheeks when I found him wandering around the escalators in search of his absent mother ten minutes later.
None of this would have happened if I had made the time to buy Tina’s birthday present a few days earlier. But when you head out with your child to purchase a gift for the party that is scheduled to begin in an hour and a half, and it happens to be a Sunday, your options turn out to be pretty limited.
The plan was to spend the morning at the park with Grandma, sufficiently exhaust Lily to get her down for a nap that would not interfere with the 3:00 party time, and then whisk Jake off to the nearby independent toy store to see if the Playmobile line that is oh-so-popular as a birthday gift for four-year-old boys includes something that would appeal to a four-year-old girl as well. (Yes, yes, yes, gender differences do exist regardless of what they taught me in college, and I am neither creating, nor, frankly, perpetuating them by wisely declining to waste my money pressing fire trucks and superheroes on Jake’s female friends.)
My first mistake was being afraid to put Lily down until she was good and tired. Which meant we didn’t leave the playground until 12:15 — fifteen minutes after I reckoned I should have her down for nap in order to account for her wild Saturday night at the outdoor movie party next door and to make sure I got her up in time to make it to the party when it started because it was scheduled to last only two hours (the absolute maximum amount of time you want to have 30 three-to-four-year-olds running around your living room). Probably we would have been okay, except that when Jake asked if we could stop at the nearby barbecue restaurant for lunch I realized that I was pretty hungry and therefore able to convince myself we could be home by 1 and Lily could manage on, oh, almost two hours of nap time.
This is how I found myself hustling Jake out the door of our house at 1:45, with Lily’s eyes just barely closed and me already plotting how I could — a mere hour hence — get her into the car for the 20 minute drive to the party without interrupting her nap. (Before you try similar plotting yourself, let me save you some time. It’s not possible.)
I was still feeling confident, since the independent toy store is just a five-minute drive up the street and has a whole wall of Playmobile selections, plus some pretty decent Melissa & Doug backups in case Playmobile had nothing to offer that did not include hard hats or a gun.
The thing about independent toy stores is, they tend to be closed on Sundays. Probably because the people who own them prefer to rest occasionally rather than meet the no doubt not uncommon needs of harried mothers who make a habit of shopping for birthday presents at the very last minute.
Finding the store dark and the front door adorned with a CLOSED sign, I faced one of those parental crisis moments. Time was running out; I wasn’t quite ready to convince myself that the pop-up Wizard of Oz book we had purchased for the birthday party of another friend who loved The Wizard of Oz so much he had already received two copies of it by the time we wandered in the door would make a great gift for a kid who didn’t particularly love The Wizard of Oz or, for all I knew, know what it was; and Jake was still in that optimistic frame of mind of a child who has no idea that a crisis is occurring and really shouldn’t know, if you want to keep the crisis manageable.
I quickly ran through my options. The other independent toy store was just as likely to be closed. Target had some forgettable books on offer and a bunch of toys that would probably be just fine, but they didn’t gift wrap, and our dwindling time demanded this option. Then, with a Eureka!-like cry, I hit upon it. Barnes & Noble.
“At the mall?” Mike asked incredulously, when I later pointed out to him my brilliance. And it’s true that the mall on a gloomy Sunday afternoon is not the best place to be when you are in a hurry. But if you are adept at grabbing a small parking spot encroached upon by an illegally parked white Escalade with Georgia plates — and can do so even when approaching from the wrong direction — you might allow yourself a moment to wipe the sweat from your brow, silence your curses at the other drivers aimlessly creeping along in search of a parking spot, and drag your still oblivious son into Barnes & Noble with a good 45 minutes to go before the start of the birthday party.
As soon as we made it to the children’s section, Jake alighted upon an Elmo book.
“Look! A new Madlenka!” I chirped in a fruitless attempt to divert him from branded crap.
“It’s Elmo!” Jake pointed out with the crystalline logic of his age.
“You love Madlenka!” I protested.
“I like Elmo,” Jake countered.
“Well, I’m not going to get Elmo,” I said, finally reverting to the only way a parent can win an argument — brute force. “Come on,” I added, grabbing Jake and the Peter Sis book. “Let’s see what else there is.”
If only I had been content to walk into a party with a perfectly lovely book and nothing else, both Jake and I could have been spared unnecessary trauma. Had I not been indoctrinated by the same forces that cause book selling chains like Barnes & Noble to subsist on moderately book-related merchandise, we could have been right on time for the party. But I and my she’ll-never-learn sense of time felt the need to add just a little something to the gift, as if anyone would notice or remember.
This is how we made it to the toy train set that you can count on finding in every Barnes & Noble kids section. This is usually a good thing, since I tend to find myself in the Barnes & Noble kids section either on rainy days when I am desperate to find some activity that will get my children out of the house or after a dinner out with the kids when I feel a great need to let them walk around somewhere that is far from me and the restaurant table where I have spent the last hour nervously trying to convince them to sit quietly and eat their macaroni and cheese in a manner that will neither disturb nor gross out the neighboring diners.
This time, too, I saw the toy train set as a great aid in my time of need. If only Jake could play with it for five minutes, I could settle on the perfect gift and get us out of the store in time to be only fifteen minutes late to the party.
I circled the display of stuffed characters from children’s books as a boy playing with the trains showed Jake how the lights on one of them worked. Naked Mole Rat! I grabbed at one of my favorite characters and frowned at his $18 price tag.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jake demonstrating to his new friend how Thomas is “the number one train.” I picked up the Mo Willems pigeon. More reasonably priced than Naked Mole Rat. Perfect. All I had to do was grab a Mo Willems pigeon book (because I am not yet so done in by capitalism and chain stores as to leave a book store with purchased items that do not include at least one book) and I’d be done.
This is where my mothering skills went seriously awry. Because, really, how many seconds would it have added onto my shopping trip to take Jake with me to the aisle with the Mo Willems books? But, see, that would have entailed effort on my part. And the corner of my brain that has for the past eighteen months gotten away with leaving Lily standing on the couch in the living room prepared to climb onto the table behind it — because, after all, Jake was there with her — was giving me that, “What’s the big deal? You scared or something?” shrug that eleven-year-olds who used to get me in trouble when I was ten used with such great success.
So I took off. I did not tell my son I was going lest he try to follow me and slow me down with more sightings of Elmo books. I didn’t so much as glance back. I just disappeared behind a shelf full of books and then compounded my disappearance by crouching down to the one with the alphabetically challenged Mo Willems.
It gets worse. After I had picked out the book to buy and went to grab the stuffed pigeon from its perch by the toy trains, I noted that Jake was no longer playing with Thomas and his new friend.
“He’s probably looking at books,” I thought to myself in what is truly a shocking display of carelessness and lethargy. I figured I could drop the Madlenka book back in its correct spot and, while I was at it, take a final scan of the shelves to make sure I had the perfect gift before, um, looking for my son.
I could. But I would also end up finding him not, as I noted with no small sense of rising panic, among the seemingly multiplying and way too tall shelves of the children’s section but out in the main aisle between puzzles and cooking looking grim, and stunned, and very, very small as he headed away from me.
“Jake!” I called, still not fully attuned to the depth of his despair.
He turned and ran to me, the aforementioned tears making ruddy crinkles down his cheeks.
“Were you looking for me?” I asked in one of those displays of the obvious that you can get away with when your children are very young and still quite literal as I hugged him to me.
“I couldn’t find you,” Jake said. His voice wasn’t just sad. It also had the growing maturity he has begun to display in the last week or two, the child who was old enough not to break down and start screaming when his mother disappeared in a way likely both to get him some adult assistance and to grab the attention of his mother ten feet away in the picture books aisle. Instead, nearly-four-year-old Jake had gone in search of me, his anguish kept to himself except where it leaked out his big, round, scared blue eyes. Seeing him alone and determined against the dark floor tiles and faux walnut shelves of Barnes & Noble was about as heartbreaking a vision as I’ve ever encountered.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated, over and over, pulling him against me. “That was scary, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Jake replied with great honesty.
I’m happy to report that by the time we picked out a lovely book (um, bribe?) for him he was feeling much better. He was even happy to sit in the car “reading” it as I grabbed a groggy Lily at home and slid her into her car seat.
In fact, proud as Jake was to carry the hard won gift to Tina’s house, the second he spotted the party in full (for half an hour now) swing, he tossed it at me and ran off to play with his friend Wendell, not the least bit damaged. I know this because he did not once last night wake up screaming that he had lost his mommy in the book store.
So what do I take from all of this?
Not blame, actually. I mean, I am rightly ashamed for ditching my son in Barnes & Noble, though really not as ashamed as I probably should be.
Rather, I look at it in a rare moment of looking at a mistake in a useful way. Instead of dwelling on the mistake part — you know, the part where I decide that I won’t even bother to tell my child I’m leaving him in a big, crowded store and then don’t bother to look for him the second I realize he is not where I left him — I am mostly embracing the what-I-learned part.
What did I learn? For one thing, that my child is growing up with all its heartbreaking, exciting, face-in-a-crowd implications. What makes me saddest is how he set off to find me on his own, so tiny among those big bookshelves and unnoticing people. And I think I’m sad partly because I’m so proud. I feel blamed (by him? by myself?) partly because I’m part of what made him grow up a bit in that store.
I also learned that no method of parenting is perfect, and that even though I feel just right in my ability to let my children out of my sight even at sometimes highly inappropriate moments, my choices will bring misjudgments and guilt and tears to my children’s eyes. No matter what those choices are. As Buddha said, life is inescapably painful. As parents, we do what we think is right and yet we still mess up. A lot. So I continue to believe in letting my children have their independence, even if it breaks my heart to find them wandering alone in a Barnes & Noble. My mistake for the moment, but not for the method.
And of course, I learned that I will not walk away from my children in a public place without at the very least clearly notifying them of my intent to do so. Which is maybe not something I should have had to learn, but we all have our flaws and learning to accept them is a big part of yoga.