Car Ride Conversations

"My friend at school says she's rich." This is how our morning car ride to school starts, Chloe making this announcement in a voice half awed, half accusatory. Ashton huffs, his usual wiser than the world reaction. "Please. That doesn't mean anything. One thousand dollars to her might be rich." Chloe asks, in her high, clear voice- she is so naive, so sweet: "Well, what is rich?" Ashton sagely replies, "Like a billionaire. Or a trillionaire." Obviously Ashton has lofty ideas of wealth. I'm reminded of Marianne from Sense & Sensibility, telling her sister that her "competence" is the same number as Elinor's wealth. All I can think is how rich I would feel with one thousand dollars in my bank account. If wealth is relative, poverty certainly is too. I don't really wish for more. We have a roof over our heads, food in our stomachs, clothes on our backs. A vehicle to drive instead of resorting to public transportation. These are all things I'm grateful for, and try not to take for granted. Most times, we have more than we need. But I never wanted my kids to have the childhood I did. The kind that encompasses stressed out parents and scraping the bottom of the barrel for bills, the kind where we drive by the houses and they imagine aloud what it would be like to live in one. It is a nose pressed against the glass childhood. But Chloe, while she wistfully says she would like to have a thousand dollars so we can have two bathrooms, is never discontent. She loves life, she loves simplicity, and she is simple about it. She doesn't wish for more of things we can buy. She is so different from me in so many ways that sometimes I wonder where she came from. She sees good in everything, in everyone. I worry about her sometimes. I worry about her being hurt because she believes everything everyone says. She can't perceive when someone is mistreating her because she simply cannot process it. She is rare, so rare. I don't want whatever magic dust the fairies sprinkled on her when she was a baby to be rubbed off by the world. But Chloe, she would rub it off on purpose, if it meant others got to share in it.

On the way to get the older kids from school, Atleigh talks my ear off. Her conversation varies from day to day, but it is always imaginative. A few months ago, right before Halloween, I took her into a Halloween store looking for costumes. It was a mistake. In her defense, the place was creepy. Flashing lights, talking statues, creepy zombies and clowns and children. She melted down and I had to carry her out, kicking and screaming. She stood outside the store and shivered and sobbed, and I felt terrible. The store clerk brought me the costume I was trying to get her to try on, and let her try it on outside on the sidewalk. And brought her M&M's, which Atleigh took without making eye contact. For weeks afterward, every time we drove by the store, she would talk about her terror. Randomly throughout the day, she would ask me if we would have to go there again. Her trauma seeped through her bones, into her everyday conversations, and I felt it seep into me with a heavy guilt. But at least she was processing it aloud, talking it through. Atleigh is braver than she thinks, so brave that she doesn't even realize how brave she is. Today, on our way to the school, she was telling me that whenever Ashton tries to scare her, she just tells him, "Stop! I'll punch you!" She accompanies this with her little snort wheeze laugh. It's a unique sound, a little like Ernie from Sesame Street's chuckle, and a derisive sound in the back of her throat, like she's laughing at herself. Then she says to me, "I think, next year, if we go to the Halloween store, I'll be braver. Those things scared me, but I know they weren't real. Next time, I'll just say, 'I'll punch you!'" Again with her laugh. She says it in passing, but it strikes me profoundly. Obviously, I will never take her back to that store. But her willingness, even at 5, to face her fears, sticks to me like a sand burr in my sock. It rankles a little. Am I brave enough to face my fears, to stand up and say to them, "I'll punch you!"? The answer is one I don't like to admit. I'm not good at being brave. Bravery is hard. It requires something of me, an effort that is exhausting. I don't like stepping out in the open, making myself vulnerable. And while Atleigh knows the things she feared weren't real, do I know that about mine? Can I separate them from myself and look at them with the reckless courage of a child, and order them to stop? Adult fears are not physical things, scary zombies and loud noises and flashing lights. They are deep, insidious beings that wrap themselves into our very marrow, become part of who we are, baggage we carry with us from childhood, adolescence, adulthood- thus, they are harder to define.

Tonight on the way to basketball practice, Ashton talks to me about the world's strongest men, his social studies test, how far he has gotten in The Hobbit. He is older than himself. He talks to me as a peer, not as a parent to child. Sometimes I don't know what to make of this. He walks such a fine line. Sometimes he fits into the adult world so seamlessly, that I have to remind him he is not one of us. When schisms happen in the house and he tries to stand on my side, against his sisters, I have to remind him- while I am always on his team, he is not always on mine. It is not us against them. He is on their side. Their rules are his rules, their rewards are his. One time he tried to convince me he was "third in charge", that he was "kind of a parent". Since he was older than the girls, since he is next oldest after me, that made him "a little bit of a parent". It took me thirty minutes to make him understand that this was not the case. This is not how we work. I'm still not completely sure I convinced him.
As we get out of the car to walk to the gym, I string my arm along his shoulders, and wonder when he got so tall that my arm doesn't have to reach down anymore. He comes up almost to my chin now, and in a few more years, may outstretch me completely. I'm not ready for this. I'm not ready for him to not be my little blond haired boy anymore. I'm not ready for him to think he hates me, that he knows more than me, that I am old and uncool. I hope and pray that it won't come to that, but Ashton and I are so alike that it seems impossible for us to not butt heads. Last week, while we were lying on his bed reading, a bag of popcorn between us, I said to him that there might come a day in a few years where he thinks he can't stand me. I told him that in those moments, to remember how we are now, and to remind himself that we will be that way again. To just push through and know that one day, we'll be friends, and it will be even better than it is now. We'll understand each other more, we'll have whittled away some of our weaknesses, and built up our strengths. I love that I can talk to him like this, and that he understands me. I never have to dumb down what I say to him.

These car ride conversations... they take place in short spaces, little cracks in time that weave a web through our everyday life. They forge stepping stones for us to cross on, cross over from one phase of our life into another. I'd like to think that they're teaching moments for my kids, but more often than not, it's the other way around. Chloe's sweet selflessness, Atleigh's bravery, Ashton's stories of his day, they're all moments that I absorb and think of long after they've forgotten them. They don't even realize the weight their words have, and therefore they do not have to be careful with them. They toss them around confidently, never having to doubt themselves, their place in their world. I want to keep them that way. I want to drive forever, to let them keep talking, to let them keep changing me.

-M

{{Weekly Photo Dump}}

(Unfortunately, in no particular order- Blogger photo uploader leaves much to be desired: Birthdays and sleepovers, basketball and library time, plus a good bit of Neville)