Story of the Day
"Sunglasses"
We
have a picture of him somewhere, a brokenhearted five-year-old, slumped on a
bench at Disney World, eyes fighting back tears, lips so tense you can almost
see them quivering, his felt Mickey Mouse ears cocked to one side.
Or maybe we don't
have a picture, except in our minds. And yet it's the same image my
husband and I share: A sunny day, white light glinting off the windows on Main
Street, reflecting off dozens of chrome carriages with chrome wheels, light and
heat shimmering everywhere and our two children, clamoring for sunglasses,
"Please, Mommy? Please, Daddy? Pleeeze!"
We ducked into a
shop and Rob picked out Donald Duck glasses, blue and white plastic things that
slid down his nose and made him look far more like Scrooge McDuck than Donald
Duck. But we didn't tell him this. He loved those glasses.
Lauren, three and already into fashion, chose pink Minnie Mouse glasses because
she was dressed in pink that day.
They wore them out
of the dark store into the day, up Main Street, through the castle and into
Fantasyland. During "Peter Pan's flight" they took them off and
clutched them in their hands, and they did the same in "Pirates of the
Caribbean." On "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" they had them on, I
know, because we have a picture of them smiling and waving.
Somehow, somewhere,
after that, maybe when he was getting off that ride, maybe when he stopped to
tie his sneaker or fix his Mickey ears, or maybe when we were having lunch, the
Donald Duck glasses disappeared. And Robbie, who was five and loved those
glasses, cried.
"If you had
loved them you would have taken better care of them," is what we said to
him. Or something like that. But we were young and new at this
parenting thing, and weren't we supposed to teach him to take care of what was
his? Wasn't it our duty to make sure that he knew that money didn't grow
on trees?
What did those
sunglasses cost? A dollar? Two dollars? What harm would it
have done to wipe his tears and say, "Come on, we'll get you another pair.
I know you didn't mean to lose them." Would he have grown up to be a
bad person? Would he have been corrupted in some unforeseeable way?
Lauren said,
"You can have mine, Robbie." But he didn't want hers. They
were pink and for girls. And his were blue and for boys. And they
were gone, and he had loved them and he was miserable.
If I had it to do
over, I'd have marched back down Main Street and bought a brand-new pair of
Donald Duck glasses and pretended that I found them on the ground. I would
have yelled, "Hey, look what I have!" And he would have leaped
up and come running and laughed and thrown his arms around me and put on those
glasses and this would be the memory of that day.
You live and you
learn.
A few months ago we
were in Orlando, not exactly at the scene of the crime, but close enough.
Our son, long an adult, was there on business and we flew down to meet him, and
in the flurry of rental cars and restaurants and going here and there, guess
what? He lost his sunglasses.
We didn't scold
him, didn't even think about saying, if you really liked them you would have
taken better care of them, because people lose things all the time.
Instead we did what most adults do for other adults. We helped him figure
out where he could have lost them and – what do you know – he found them in
a meeting room he'd been in the day before.
He was grinning
when he walked to the car, his steps light and quick, his sunglasses hiding his
eyes, nothing of the five-year-old left in him to see.
Except I saw.
He was my first
child, and the first has it the hardest, because you're new at this and you go
by the book and you don't want to mess up and be too soft, but you mess up
anyway, because what do you know?
I know that as
parents we have an obligation to teach our children. But I also know that
everything doesn't have to be a lesson. That sometimes, lost sunglasses
are just what they are: lost sunglasses and nothing more.