Monday, June 27, 2011

The Cliché Parade: Daddy's Little Girl, Grown


I had a real moment last night. A painful, paradigm-wrenching, eyes still swelled shut in the morning from crying the night before one.

When our son was two, my dad gave him an electric motorcycle on Christmas eve morning, the kind little kids motor around on at like 1.5 mph. I felt irritated by it, I thought, because it has several types of loud, working sirens, it's made in China, there's nothing creative or open-ended about it, you get the idea. I buy sort of Waldorf-inspired things for the kids, and books. Nothing even remotely like this. He didn't even mention he was thinking about getting it, because he didn't think about getting it - he bid on it at a charity auction.

When my son opened it, he lit up like the 4th of July. Within 5 minutes he was steering around the furniture way beyond what I knew him to be capable of, with a look of pleasure so deep he couldn't even crack a smile. I've only seen that expression a handful of times. That's a really special one, one I want tattooed on my brain. And so after that, I accommodated the motorcycle, because I thought it would be Grinch-y of me not to.

So.

Last night, I realized that wasn't really the problem. The motorcycle, per se.