“But at least you aren’t trying to squash him down,” Mrs. Whatsit nodded her head vigorously. “You’re letting him be himself.”
(A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle)
I have what we’ll call a “spirited” child.
At his preschool conference this fall, his teacher greeted my husband and me and asked, as we took a seat, “So how do you think the school year is going?”
I burst out laughing, “You tell me!” I said, “With my other two kids, I know exactly what the teacher is going to say. But not with this one. It’s either going to be one extreme or the other!”
It was the teacher’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, we never know which version we’re going to get each day,” she said. “Nolan is either a perfect angel or bursting with energy!”
It reminded me of a time a friend watched my kids for an afternoon. Her own were the same age as mine — almost four and almost two at the time. When I picked them up I asked, “So how did it go?”
“Oh, he was good,” she said in reference to Nolan, “I mean, he wasn’t bad at all.” She fumbled for words. “He just has so much energy! I couldn’t stop for a second. You must be exhausted at the end of the day!”
I was. I am. Every day. Even once the sleepless nights of infancy abated we entered the toddler years and I felt more exhausted than ever. The amount of energy it took to follow him around the playground, to make sure he didn’t dash out into the street, to ensure he stayed in the children’s area at the library and that he didn’t intentionally knock over anyone’s block tower took every ounce of energy I had.
I collapsed at night, never fully able to recoup all the energy I’d put out that day, the energy I needed to get through the next one full of his need for stimulation and excitement and movement and discovery.
I could have wept at my friend’s words. I’d wondered before if I was crazy. Maybe I was just burned out from raising his older brother and sister. Maybe everyone else felt this way. Maybe he wasn’t as energetic as I thought he was. Maybe I only thought I was the only one chasing after my toddler at the park, at the library, at the mall. But my friend had seen it, too, his unrelenting energy. I wasn’t crazy.
He is just, by nature, a lot.
Photography Credit: Prall Photography
While other parents were holding their toddlers’ hands at the park to help them walk over the uneven surface, I chased mine up the slide. When other parents helped their kids around puddles, Nolan splashed on through and painted his face with the mud. While our friends were confined home for nap-time, I tried to figure out what to do with an energetic toddler who dropped his nap far earlier than I’d planned. While other parents helped their children scramble up the playground steps I followed him up, up, and up as he climbed the tallest ladder on the entire play structure.
He could climb that tallest ladder at fifteen months old. He learned how to go down the fire pole the same day as his (two years older) big brother and sister, and showed kids twice his age how to climb on top of the playground equipment.
That last one was this past summer. I sat on a park bench and watched my three-year-old show a group of six and seven-year-olds how to climb on top of the tunnels.
“He’s not really three!” the group of neighborhood girls insisted to me.
“Yes,” I assured them, “he is.”
By this point, I’m used to it. I’m delighted really, at the chance to sit on the sidelines after so many years of chasing after him. Because my days with him, and two other active children, are lived at a faster speed (and higher volume) than I ever imagined. Sometimes, they seem endless.
Sometimes other parents alert me to his antics. I just smile and tell them I know.
“He could fall and break his arm,” a concerned parent told me at the park last summer. As though that weren’t a scenario I’d envisioned myself several times a day for the past few years.
“Yes,” I agreed, “but I can’t stop him.”
He’s been doing these daredevil feats almost as long as I can remember. There’s something in him – this drive, this energy – it just needs to get out. My heart skips a beat several times a day, even while I’m resigned to his fearlessness.
In a perfect world, one filled with money trees and without chores, I’d be able to indulge Nolan’s mind and body with the constant stimulation he requires. We’d sign up for every gymnastics class, go to every park in a 10-mile radius, and tackle every ride at the Mall of America.
In reality, there are bills to pay and dishes to wash. We can’t be on the go all the time. I once carried a load of laundry upstairs only to come right back down, fifteen seconds later, to find that in that time my spirited child had pushed a stool over to the counter, and was eating fistfuls of sugar out of the canister. Nolan was barely two, then.
I can focus his attention sometimes. Puzzles are good; his mind is just as active as his body. So are LEGO sets. He’s recently come into an affinity for slime. The squishy, oozy sensation is the perfect stimulation for him. But usually, all too soon, he’s off again. Ready to jump and run and spin around and around and around.
+++++
“Mommy,” Nolan said, snuggled up against me one recent afternoon. He’d just woken up from a rare nap and came to find me sitting at my desk. He crawled on my lap and cuddled in while music gently played from my computer.
“What?” I asked. We sat and listened to the music a moment before he answered.
“God made me like this,” he said.
I don’t know what he was referring to. (“What’s ‘this’?” I tried, only for him to slither off my lap and flop onto the floor. *sigh* Three-year-olds.) I like to think he was talking about his body, his energy, his restless spirit, and his active mind.
Whether that’s what he was talking about or not, he was made like this. He practically came out of the womb this way. He was made to crave speed and movement, mud puddles and water slides. He’s the one I butt heads with the most and the one I fight for the fiercest so that others can see him for who he is, beyond his impulses and his energy and the chaos he brings.
But while his energy is endless, my own has its limits. If nothing else, my spirited child ensures I drink my weight in coffee each morning, so I have at least half a chance of keeping up with him.
