Slouching toward Achievement

This has been a good learning curve for me. I speak, of course, of swimming with Matteo.

He swam effortlessly last winter, though the toddler swim lessons I signed us up for in the spring weren’t so great. Marin and I would ponder this on a weekly basis, and from this distance I think it’s that Teo just has a built in skepticism (or self-doubt) which requires him to resist trying something he has just learned so that he can do it on his own when nobody’s watching, and then come back to do it when nobody’s expecting it.

This happens in singing – he demands that I not sing “his” songs in the car – and then later, in the silence, he’s singing them. Well, I might add. I inwardly rejoice, and sometimes try to join him, but he erupts again in fury. “NO. STOP.”

It happens in yoga moves that we do at “Sing and Dance” class. He refuses to do the frog, instead does the down-dog, and when everyone is doing the down-dog, he’s curled up in the rabbit. Cat? Yup, he’s doing the frog. If it’s a song when all the kids are siting in laps to get a bouncy horsey ride, he’s sitting beside me and won’t let me touch him. If it’s holding hands in a circle, he’s leading the boy-break-out, running highly “illegal” circles around the room.

I’ve recently taken to simply picking him up out of sleep at the waking hour in the morning. He actually embraces me around the neck, warm and sweetly surfacing from sleep, and we talk softly back and forth as I carry him upstairs to the couch. By then Marin is getting his first sippy cup of dilute juice-n-nurse (big deal is whether the added water is warm or cold, he’ll reject either if it arrives without consultation – he wears gloves to handle the stainless container if it’s a cold variety). There, recently, an instant transformation happens. He becomes almost violent, demanding that I go away. In the past two weeks, he’s grown remarkably rude, he claws himself off me, if I try to continue our conversation, he’s all “NO!” and pushing me off the couch, descending into inconsolable tears.

After a particularly egregious encounter Monday morning, which resulted, predictably, in tears of fury, I realized I’d had it. Firmly, quietly, I took him back down to his crib.

Five minutes later when I went down to retrieve him, he was saying, “I’m better, Papa.” And, “I’m sorry, Papa.” Very affecting. The rest of the morning was pretty good, he was gentle and thoughtful.

Drawing a boundary seems to awaken a different part of him. The controlling, demanding, nonverbal or shouty part of him may be unsettling even to Matteo when he gets a pass on it. “Can I be mean and sassy to my parents, and get away with it? No? Whew, great! Though I’m not in charge, these people I can mostly trust are.”

Learning, learning.

Anyway, later in the morning, when we got to swimming, he was leading with “I DON’T want to swim without my noodle.” Despite the fact that Marin and I had celebrated his Friday swimming accomplishments all weekend. (Friday he’d had significant jaunts off the noodle, though in the middle of the time there was a lot of unhappy clinging to me who had appropriated the noodle.)

We got into the water, Matteo scoping out and claiming the pink noodle. But I was determined that the noodle no longer be a symbol of “independence.” Want noodle? Get Papa. So I hung him around my neck and put my arms over his noodle, and that was the way I stayed the rest of the forty five minute swim.

And Teo swam away again and again, sometimes to the wall for a rest. But generally all over the place. It was clear he was beginning to realize that he floats whether he’s motivating or not, due to his fatty fanny pack of styrofoam.

The one time I tried to get off the noodle, since I really didn’t need it, depositing it on the side of the pool when he was looking the other direction, he immediately noticed my incipient deception, and went back into weepy mode. “My NOODLE. I WANT it.” So I had to go back on. I discovered that, with a noodle under my arms and a floaty ball between my knees, I tend to roll over on my face. I had to learn to do “kayak” rolls, by... oh who cares?

Anyway, there was the one time, like a ref, I decided he’d had enough time in the “penalty box” (i.e. hanging off the side watching other kids, doing nothing), and I invented the tickle fish. This creature of the deep hangs on a pink noodle and approaches prey with finger-like protrusions just visible above the water line. Once we got our interactive narrative worked out, instead of protesting and crying that I was invading his sacred personal space whenever I touched him, he started laughing hysterically and protesting dramatically, all in the frame of the story we were working on.

We spent most of the last 20 minutes playing out this story of tickle fish and Teo, laughing hysterically. We didn’t want to get out when the time was up.

Who knows if it’s a breakthrough for Teo. It was for me.