Recently my husband went home to England for a visit, so Frankie and I flew solo for five days. Our routine was a thing of beauty and I was feeling quite self-congratulatory about the whole thing—until my misadventure with a dull knife.
In that this newsletter zeroes in on links made between teaching and learning beyond the classroom, here are a few of the educational takeaways I gleaned from this misadventure:
My son is eight (and not a tall eight) so I learned the hard way that we don’t keep Band-Aids (or water glasses) in height-appropriate locations.
A deep cut and the body’s ensuing experience of shock can cause a brief blackout.
(Albeit brief) blackouts are frightening for all involved, but especially a kid.
Fear changes a person.
My little hero found the Band-Aids, managed to get me water (why are our cupboards so damn high?!?!), located my phone “just in case” and then settled on the floor next to me to keep watch after my brief blackout on the couch.
“Should I call Auntie Becca? When are we going to tell Daddy about this?”
“I don’t think we should tell Daddy about the blackout buddy. He can’t do anything from where he is,” I say, eyes closed, holding my hand tightly.
As I lay there recovering, Frankie reached for some nearby Lego and started to build. I think he was keeping his hands busy to slow his racing mind. Silently, placing piece upon piece. It turns out my son spent the rest of the evening constructing a story of our impending familial breakdown. The destructive cause: our lie of omission. If we didn’t tell Daddy about the blackout right then and there, as it happened, that was it. And IT was big.
The next day I continued to nurse my wound, and so did he. In the midst of brushing his teeth Frankie looked at me in the bathroom mirror and asked in all seriousness when I would need to call a judge. How his mind landed on a judge remains a mystery (eight-year-old translation of judge = divorce court)! But, after some unpacking, I found out that for my son truth telling must happen in real time for it to count. When it didn’t—when we omitted the blackout details from the Facetime call with his dad—the inevitable end of his perfect family life loomed large. It took another video call to England to soothe his storytelling beast.
Fast forward a week or two and the finger has healed. The marriage remains intact. The boy is more educated about the realities of place and time; harmony seems restored. Sort of. I learned something from that experience too. Like the toughened skin on my wounded finger, I can see a new sort of world weariness presenting in the posture of my little boy. I probably sound dramatic but I swear it’s there. He knows now that even dull knives are sharp and adults don’t always follow the rules. Frankie will now weigh more carefully telling the truth with reading the room to figure out when and where to spill the beans. It’s a nuanced and complicated lifelong education. A death by a thousand little cuts, shaping a young person into someone slightly older, though not necessarily wiser. Just more world aware. Thank God for lego and stepstools.
PS: There’s book learning and then there’s life learning. Sometimes one informs the other quite clearly, while at other times the instructions are more difficult to translate. (For those with older kids who are also navigating the world’s complexities I discovered this book thanks to
-- it offers inroads to important truth telling and world changing conversations.)PPS: This week on Observables Becca tells of a more gentle learning shared by Frankie and her Violet, two peas in a pod who continue to teach the adults in their lives a lot about living.