I Wish I Was a Dead End

My children are training for a mile run (race?) with Uncle Jonathan and Margaret.   On Tuesdays we head in their direction and meet at an elementary school field.   The children do warm up exercises and run a few laps around the grass perimeter of the soccer field.   This week after everyone was warmed up, we all headed into the woods on a narrow, overgrown path which opened out into a  minimally maintained gravel path.

After receiving instructions from the coaches, the children, some with parents beside them, ran two half-mile laps through the wooded path.  Margaret and I headed off to a wooden bridge to direct runners as they approached the end of the first lap.

While Margaret and I waited for the runners, we talked about bug and spider bites, running and what we were going to do for dinner afterwards.   Since sushi was a favorite of our entire group, we picked a restaurant, having covered Mexican food as the last practice.

My son was intent on not running or even participating based on his comments on the ride over, but once he got warmed up and had met some other boys to play with he was more apt to be disappointed in the practice being over than he initially was about running.   My son is fast when he starts running. He doesn’t pace at all though, so he’s only fast in spurts.   But he doesn’t give up.   He had so much energy from earlier in the day he ran a third lap, making for a mile-and-a-half total run.

My husband ran with my daughter, holding her hand.   She had wanted only Margaret at the beginning of the session but when Margaret and I went off to guide runners, she took her father as a happy second option.

Once practice was over we went to the restaurant only to find the entrance partially blocked by what appeared to be a crime scene at a convenience store with yellow tape roping off a large area and police cars covering entrances and exits.   My son saw the action and determined someone must have been murdered and the police hadn’t been able to find the murderer.   When we found Margaret and Uncle Jonathan it turned out someone had been shot earlier.   But since my son didn’t bring it back up, we neglected to tell him about the confirmed violence.

The entrance to the restaurant was preceded with a spouting fountain.   My daughter, who never tires of throwing coins into small, manmade bodies of water, asked for some pennies.   I handed her a few coins and asked my son if he wanted to make a wish too.

As I saw my daughter throw her penny in, I heard her say, “I wish I was a dead end.”   I asked her to repeat what she’d said, “I said I wished I was a genii”.   My son’s wish was somewhat less positive, although in thinking about it, far more profound.   He had had a very difficult day at school followed by an hour with his integrative therapist and me working with him on creating a contract, which for his teachers and us would hopefully help him work better at school and get some freedoms (or rewards) he wanted at home.  As I saw him flip the coin into the water I heard him say, “I wish I was happy.”

Hearing him say that made me sad.   I asked him if he wanted to throw another coin in, handing him a nickel and telling him this coin was worth five wishes.   I asked him if he was unhappy and he nodded yes.   I said maybe he could wish for some happier things with the five wishes.   As he threw the coin over the top of the fountain he started listing off his wishes.  Some of them were super hero related, but the last one was the most interesting.  He said, “and I’d like to have a great education.”

The Big Boy Update:  After dinner my son and I rode home together while my daughter and husband rode in the other car.   I needed to stop at the drug store to pick up a prescription for my daughter.  As we got back in the car to head home, my son told me, “when I was little, I thought you you called this the ‘rug store’”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has another UTI.   This is the fifth since April, so now we’re going to a pediatric urologist to see if there’s more going on that we should know about or can address.  She’s not overly upset about the bladder infection, but she was very firm about no one knowing about it.   I told her it was okay, that girls got bladder infections sometimes.   She asked if boys did too and I told her it was much less common.   “So what do boys get then?” she asked.   I said boys sometimes had prostate problems when they got older.   That was a fun one to explain.