They say that once you have kids, you forgive your parents. I don’t know that I am ready to give up my excuse for all my neuroses just yet, but I have had two experiences recently that have me rethinking Mom and Dad’s choices and my choices as a parent. When I was little, we had to meet with Dad every few months to review our goals and set new ones for the next few months. At some point while in college, I looked at my goals and found one from when I was three which was to wear my shoes. The thing about this goal is I am having a hard time imagining that I was the one who made the goal to wear my shoes. I can’t see myself doing such a thing. This goal has all the marks of a suggestion from Dad, and I’ve always gotten a snarky pleasure out of telling people at cocktail parties that my parents once made me make a goal to wear my shoe when I was three and rolling my eyes in that way we all do when we reflect on all the ridiculous things our parents did to us.
Enter Beckett. And I am revisiting the those self-satisfied smirks. Beckett doesn’t like to wear his shoes, and in theory I would like to be in favor of this just to demonstrate how far I have advanced from my parents’ benighted behavior, but it turns out that there is a reason why everyone but Australian bush people wear shoes: slivers. One really has four options in the shoe wearing department. One is to fly. The second is to not wear shoes for long enough that the soles of your feet get hard enough to repel thorns, nails, sticks, tacks, glass shards, and other on-ground detritus (this is what bush people do). The third one is to not wear them occasionally, and get slivers. The last is to bite the bullet and wear shoes. In the case, of Beckett, we haven’t been successful at options one or two, which means we are mainly doing three, but beginning to think that maybe four is not such a bad idea.
While traveling to grandma and grandpa’s recently, Beckett ran around on the back patio in his bare feet and used his heel to separate a little sliver of wood from the deck, which he subsequently took with him. Jeanne and grandpa got out the tweezers and the sterilized needles and began digging around in Beckett’s heel to try to get the sliver back out. They had the easy job. Digging around. I had the hard job: holding him still so they wouldn’t run their needles all the way to bone, and being close to his head. It didn’t take but one second of digging around for Beckett to decide that he didn’t like slivers but he hated getting them out even more. By now, he has plenty of language tools at his disposal. He cried and yelled and screamed, but what was worse is when he stopped screaming and started talking. He pled with us to stop. “No, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” I was holding him from wiggling and tearing up myself. I wrote an blog recently about me enjoying Beckett’s joys, but the obverse is me feeling pain at his pain, and my capacities to do both seem equally matched. Call it the curse and blessing of empathy.
Beckett is now minus one sliver, and since then gotten another, but the pain of slivers seems not to last as long as his desire to be free of his shoes. So maybe Dad had encouraged me to make the goal to wear my shoes, not because he cared about shoes per se, but because he didn’t want to see me get slivers, and he didn’t want to have to be the person holding me still and listening to me plead with him to stop digging my slivers out. Maybe he was half looking out for me and half trying not to break his own heart.
There is one more facet to the story. When I was little, I also remember filling my pockets full of rocks. And I do mean full. I would stuff my pockets full up to the brim with rocks. So many rocks into my pockets that I could not quite properly take my pants on and off, because the rocks had my pants bulged out taut so even though I didn’t have any hips or waste to speak of, my jeans were tighter on me than any 80’s girl. Now, I don’t recall that my Dad and Mom ever had me make a goal to put fewer rocks in my pocket, so I can’t be smug about my parenting, but ever since Beckett made the transition to toddler, I have been looking forward to the day when he would stuff so many rocks in his pockets that he couldn’t get his pants on and off, and feeling some strange proleptic pride at the thought that he was certain to do so.
[Beckett picking up a rock (meteor) to put in his pocket at the Natural History Museum]
Today, was not that day. Not yet, that is. We came home from school, and went up stairs to play in his bedroom, and he wanted to lie down on his bed with his stuffed dogs, bears, and monkey. Then I felt something strange like crumbs all over his bed. After a little searching, I realized that he while at school, he had stuffed a quarter inch layer of pebbles and sand into shirt pocket, which now that he was horizontal was spilling out on his bed. I began to realize that maybe its not such a great idea to wait anxiously for the day when Beckett fills his pants pockets with rocks, because those rocks will have to come out somewhere and it seems likely that they will come out in his (or worse, my) bed, or in the laundry, or on the living room carpet, or in the bathtub, or on our hardwood floor. And none of those places seems like such a great place for a pocket full of rocks. Again, in theory, I would like to be pro-rocks, but in practice, I am afraid that I’ll not enjoy the rocks nearly as much as I thought I would a week ago. Next thing you know, I’ll be setting goals with him not to put rocks in his pockets.
[Beckett dumping dirt in the hair of cousin Mina]
Its now been several months since I uploaded these pictures, and
Recently, in quick succession, we hosted Linda, Devin, Loren and Adelle, cousin John, Nettie, and Mina, and then Ken, Debbie, Chris, 
and Kyle. We enjoyed them all, and I should really give each visit its own post, but in the meantime, here are photos.
[Beckett making his father proud by demonstrating wrestling prowess, and Ken making Beckett's mother retroactively nervous now that she can see how we play with Beckett when she is away.]
[Beckett dumping dirt in the hair of cousin Mina]
We went to Utah, Wyoming, and Arizona, but somehow hardly ever got out our camera. But here is Beckett hearing a story from Grandpa Al, and Beckett on his first horse ride with Grandpa Jim (with a shout out to Ashley for being such a great co-rider)
