One foot up: musings on parental speculations

Today at daycare Otter was standing looking out the glass door at a helium balloon saying "Boston Red Sox" tied to the daycare playground fence. It was quite windy out and Otter was fascinated by the balloon's bobbing and weaving. Just in case I hadn't seen, he came and grabbed my hand and led me over to see, saying "boooo," his word for balloon.

Then, as I was walked away, he stayed by the door, and began doing some Otter-designed version of acrobatic exercise, while keeping his eyes on the balloon at all times. He would stand on one leg and stretch the other out at waist length, bending to be somewhat T shaped... then pivot around, and switch positions, experimenting with his balancing, never falling down.

I can't believe he can stand on one leg.

(Anyone encountering this blog without any inherent interest in Otter must be massively bewildered that it's here...)

It's bizarre that as he did so, I found myself wondering what it meant for the adult Otter who doesn't exist yet, as I so often do I look for clues in his behavior, hints, signs of what a grown-up Otter will be like. Will he do yoga? Will he dance? Will he always be able to stay focused on what interests him regardless of distractions?

When he dances, when he loves to read, when he eagerly grabs the seat in front of us riding the park's train, when he comes over to another crying child at daycare and touches her shoulder in apparent sympathy, I speculate about each pattern, each tiny piece of evidence as to who he is and who he might become.

Last night, he helped me push the vaccuum around; my parents will be relieved if that means he's a neat housekeeper and a motivated vaccuumer (both things G and I both are not so much, ourselves).

Why do we do this (or why do I do this, if in fact others don't)? Is it because parenting requires that you manage both to make long-term plans and to stay in the moment, to be present for the things your kid is doing right that second, focusing in on the cat's whiskers or the letter O, while also noticing that...

he needs new shoes soon, and in a few months it'll time to put him on a waiting list for a preschool, and we should add more money to his savings account, and next summer we'd like to take him on a real train, and when can we give him peanut butter without much risk of allergies, and how can we help him eventually learn to pick up his toys and to have a work ethic and that women and men can both love to cook and that you should be kind to animals...

and all those other big and little things you want to help your child to do, to be, to learn.

Or is it that we have so many hopes for them (many of which are, if not mutually exclusive, at least not easily combined)? I want him to know as much about house repair as my brother, as much about bread-making as his great-grandmother, as much about movies as his dad--but I want him to pick his own interests. I want him to feel comfortable with himself, and not tie his own or others' worth to how much money they make--but I want him to always have financial security. I want him to know how to survive and learn from failure, know how to take risks--but I never want him to get seriously hurt.

I know he'll be fine; I know we'll make mistakes in parenting. I know he'll grow and surprise us, and yet at the same time we'll look back and say, "from the beginning he was like that; there were signs of that very early on."

I guess I see a lot of balancing going on here, and not just Otter's one-foot experimentations.