Skipping the Lesson

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We take the dog for a walk and my son tells me about echolocation.

“I think it’s amazing the things animals can do that humans can’t,” he says.

I tell him I once read that dogs communicate with each other through their pee, and for the rest of the walk, each time our dog stops and lifts his leg, we joke about what message he’s leaving behind for his canine friends.

“Oh hey, I love biscuits,” my son says in a goofy voice as the dog pees, and we both laugh harder than is warranted. We do not grant our poor dog a high degree of intelligence. If you knew him, you would understand.

That my son is with me on this dog walk is a small miracle. It is twilight, and it is chilly out. Neither of us is dressed warmly enough. But he bounces around the sidewalk dribbling an imaginary basketball, or catching an imaginary baseball and then throwing his arms up triumphantly as if he’s made the final out. He tells me how he’s reading Night of the Twisters in school and informs me that I wouldn’t like it because I am “terrified of tornadoes.”

I don’t know where this impression came from. Perhaps from my retelling of the tornadoes that I lived through as a child. My stories of crouching in the hall of my elementary school, my face against my knees, and my hands over my head as the doors blew open and shut with the wind, while rain and small branches ripped from the nearby trees scattered across the floor and pelted my back. Or of sitting in the front seat beside my mother as we drove through the green-black night along some road in Alabama looking for a place to pull over as the sky raged around our car. “Not here, not here,” I kept saying because we were driving over a river. I could just make out the flash of the guardrail through the curtain of rain, the empty black space beyond. “We can’t stop over water,” I told her. “We can’t stop on a bridge.” I was surprisingly calm. Or there was the time so far back that it is only a vague, disjointed memory, a series of images in my mind: a big cardboard box in the basement that my siblings and I pretended was a house or a rocket ship. My mother going up and down the basement stairs bringing toys, bringing food. My father gone, still at work, or coming back from work. My father somewhere that had my mother looking worried. The sound of something very loud coming from overhead, though perhaps I am only imagining this part.

“I am not terrified of tornadoes,” I want to tell him. Or perhaps, “Sometimes the things we experience are more frightening than what we imagined them to be.” But I don’t correct him or push back this time. “Tell me more about this book,” I say instead. “I think I’ve read it, but I don’t remember.” I have read it. I do remember. Lately, though, I am trying to say less. To give my son more space to lead our interactions and determine their direction. To navigate the full spectrum of his emotions and opinions (which at times rival a twister in their intensity) without me “turning everything into a lesson,” as he recently accused me.

With my two-year-old, we are in a stage of learning to say more. Instead of “That’s mine!” let’s say, “Can I please have that?” I tell him. Instead of “Move!” let’s say, “Excuse me.” He dutifully repeats me in a sweet little voice.

I am not good at saying less. As I go back and read through the initial draft of the novel I am working on, all of my comments for myself are along the lines of “This is more description than is needed.” “This scene drags on and on.” “Say less.” “Say less.” “Say less.”

Earlier this month, my son had his Pinewood Derby competition and came home brokenhearted. His car wasn’t the fastest, but he didn’t care about that. He had put a lot of thought into his car’s design. He had drawn a dragon’s head by hand, and we printed it out on a label and placed it on the hood of his car. He had carefully selected the car’s colors and helped to paint the racing stripes along the sides. He was very proud of his design and very determined to win the award for best design, but he didn’t. And though he held it together at the competition and acted like it was no big deal when he arrived home and told me all about the races, as the day went on his mood dipped and dipped until finally when I told him I thought maybe he was upset about the Derby, he let his disappointment come flooding out. He was angry because one of the judges had even complimented him on his car’s design, but then they picked someone else as the winner in the end. I squeezed in beside him on his twin bed and asked if I could tell him something. “What?” he said, rolling his eyes. “That everybody wants to win and that the most important thing is that I had fun?”

Well, yes, maybe in a perfect world. But that was not what I told him.

Instead, I told him about how much I hate losing things. I told him that whenever I enter a writing contest, I always think that I deserve to win. Most of the time, I think my poem or story is amazing and it should definitely earn first place. Why bother entering if I don’t go in with that mindset? But a lot of the time, I don’t even make it past the first round. “And do you know what I think when the winners are announced and I read the piece that won first place?”

He sighed obnoxiously and said, “That the winning story was better and deserved first place and that you should be happy for the person who won.”

I shook my head. “Nope,” I told him. “I always think, ‘This story sucks, mine was better, I should have won.’” Every single time. It doesn’t matter how amazing the winning piece is. My initial feeling is always, “Nope. Sucks. Should have been me.”

This delighted my son, this little peek at the dark underbelly of my jealousy, my unabashed inhumanity. My willingness to let the moment pass without trying to impart a lesson, to simply say, I get it.

My son laughed at this revelation, nodded his agreement, and said, “Yeah, sometimes you just really want to win.” He kissed me on the cheek, said, “I love you, Mom,” and then went about his day with his spirits lifted.

Halfway through our dog walk, my son stops to tie his shoe. He sits down on someone’s front step, and I let my gaze wander off, unfocused somewhere above his head.

“You look creepy,” he tells me and glances behind him, worried that he’ll see something strange or scary.

“Oh, sorry,” I say and then intentionally make a face as if something terrifying is standing right behind him.

He laughs, and I make the face again and hold it for as long as I can manage. He finishes tying his shoe and we set off to finish the walk when I notice there is a security camera in the window of the house pointed directly at where I was standing while I was making my ridiculous terrified faces. “Oh my god,” I say and point at the camera. My son and I collapse with laughter. We are standing in the middle of the sidewalk crying from laughing so hard while the dog pees out a message to his doggy friends on a nearby tree.

As soon as we arrive home, my son says, “You gotta tell Dad about the camera. That was so great.”

I want to say, “See! This is why you should always come with me when I ask you to join me on dog walks.” I want to say, “See! I’m not trying to punish you by making you spend time with me.” I want to say, “See! We’re making memories, dammit! Someday I’ll be dead and you’ll be terribly sad and maybe you’ll remember this moment and laugh and feel better.” I want to say, “See? Can’t you see how much I love you? How much I want you to be happy and kind and to grow up into a responsible, caring person who is part of what is good and beautiful and miraculous about the world?”

But I am trying to learn the lesson of letting a moment carry its own weight without drawing attention to it. So all I say is, “Thank you for walking with me. This was really fun.”

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.