To Be

This past weekend Lily was making a To-Do List, a habit she has picked up from Ben. These lists are hilarious--both sets, actually--and I should be saving them as documents of their shared ambition and perception of a weekend as about eighteen days long. I happened to notice an item on Lily's most recent list that caught my attention: Ressle with dogs. "Ressle" is "wrestle," for those of you out of the habit of deciphering semi-phonetic spelling, and I loved that she had added this item, in spite of the fact that it is nearly impossible for her to avoid wrestling with the dogs, intentionally and inadvertently.

It made me remember, when asked for my inevitable childhood story that day, of a game I used to play with our childhood dog, Grapes. We had a large, square garden in the center of our lawn, and sometimes, when Grapes and I were in the mood, I would play a sort of modified game of tag with him around its outskirts. I would bend at the knees in a dog-like play stance and then take off in one direction or the other; Grapes would follow. Suddenly, with no warning, I would pivot and run in the opposite direction; he would sort himself out and chase me that way. The funny thing was that he would never run through the garden, even if I got sufficiently ahead of him so as to be on the other side. Somehow, although there was obviously no rule book, no terms of the game, he understood the rules.

But the point here is not Grapes' intelligence, or our relationship, or the parallel dog/girl relationships. Again, what struck me about Lily's list was the redundancy of the dog wrestling item; what I am interested in is the fact that I had--and Lily has--the time and space to run around in a yard with a dog at all. Lily has developed her dog wrestling games, and there are infinite variations, on her own. Grapes and I were able to devise our version of tag because we had hours of each day available to do nothing but run around. And in both cases, parents--adults of any kind--had nothing whatsoever to do with the games.

I so often find that my best advice to myself as a parent is to back off. Lily--and Annika, already--discovers so much more when I do so, when I resist the temptation to intervene, to explain, to elaborate, even to comment. I owe my parents so much, I see now, for the gift of the time and space in which to create my world as a child.

Lily's To-Do Lists are not indicative of an encroaching, modern, oppressive, goal-oriented society; rather they reflect her honest, heartfelt, healthy desire to be like, to form a bond with, her dad. But we must be careful that they remain so, or--preferably soon, and for the next decade or more--fade away altogether. I am ever more convinced, watching my own children grow, that To-Do should be To-Be.