Apr
21
After almost a year of guiltily avoiding extracurricular activities, we’ve become fully immersed in Soccer Parenting. I mean, not that there’s a lot TO it, exactly, other than making the initial gear investment then driving to and from various wet fields each week, but it feels milestone-y nonetheless. The first time JB and I were sitting on the side of a game in our folding chairs — water bottle, extra coat, and camera in hand — I found myself thinking that in that exact moment of time the whole “It all goes so fast!” thing didn’t ring true at all. The lanky big kid running around after a ball and high-fiving his teammates bore very little resemblance to the tiny blatting creature I used to ferry around in a bicep-destroying car seat. Right then, it felt like all seven years had passed in the exact amount of time they were supposed to: 365 days per, one after the other. It was strangely soothing.
Also soothing, maybe particularly after the sort of week that just happened, is looking around at all the other parents sitting in their own folding chairs. I don’t know, it reminds me of the sort of warm rush I’d get when I used to pick my boys up from daycare and I’d watch the other parents doing the same thing, how there was this big palpable whomp of pure love happening. Every game and practice, we adults huddle on the side of the action, alternately shivering and sweating in the capricious spring weather that thinks nothing of chasing an icy blast of rain-spattered wind with a beam of jeans-boiling sunshine, and you can practically see the heart-shaped dotted lines connecting parents’ eyes with their boy on the field. Even as the hour drags on and everyone secretly daydreams a bit about the forty billion things they’d rather be doing, we sit there and joyously yell mostly nonsensical supportive things (“Nice footwork!”) and break out into scattered, energetic applause. Like we’re watching a series of surprising and utterly delightful magic tricks.
Apr
4
I’m thirty-four years older than Dylan, but he’s the far better bike rider. He rides in a naturally athletic standing position most of the time, and at the nearby dirt track he looks like a miniature version of the big boys in their BMX suits, his legs easily adjusting to take the hills and jumps like a jockey on a galloping horse. Dylan can spend hours by himself on his bike, popping wheelies off the end of the driveway and practicing his ability to lay down a strip of black from his tire when he comes to a screeching, nerve-wracking, perfectly-timed halt millimeters in front of some immovable object.
In comparison, Riley rides with his butt glued to the seat, his entire body held rigid. He does not quite give off an air of grim concentration, but it’s close — he enjoys riding, but he never loses himself in the sheer joy of it like Dylan does. You can see the effort it takes him to steel up his nerves before the first little jump at the track, as though he’s flinching his way into it. “Oh crap, here it comes again,” Riley’s brain seems to be saying. Meanwhile, Dylan’s brain is clearly replaying every Red Bull video he’s ever begged to watch on YouTube.
Riley is more cautious where Dylan tends to barrel forward with total abandonment. But Dylan is enormously shy, so much so that he can’t respond if a stranger says hello to him. Riley chatters to anyone who’ll listen, to the point where he sometimes reminds me of that character on Kids in the Hall: “Onions is all I eat!”
Dylan likes jigsaw puzzles, while Riley’s never lost his Lego obsession. Riley would sit saucer-eyed in front of the television all day if you’d let him, Dylan gets bored and wanders away after fifteen minutes or so. Riley loves to draw, Dylan has exactly zero use for crayons and pens.
I sometimes worry about how Dylan will do in kindergarten next fall. His ridiculously short attention span, his utter disinterest in making friends … what will it be like for him to sit in a classroom for hours at a time? Then again, I sometimes worry about sensitive, inflexible Riley, and whether he’ll be bullied or picked on.
I remember when I first learned we were having another boy, and how I felt a helpless pang of sorrow over the fact that I would never have a daughter. Part of me thought, stupidly, But I DID this already! I wanted a *different* experience!
How foolish, right? And yet five years later, I’m still somehow amazed on a daily basis that two boys raised in the same house who are only two and a half years apart can be so wildly, magnificently different from each other.
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