Angelfish

My husband and I do not consider ourselves helicopter parents. We're too lazy for that. If a reality show were to spontaneously appear in our home, my soundbite would be, "Get off your ass and get it yourself." 


And yes, I do speak to my 3 1/2-year old, the Juban Princeling, that way, and no, I don't care what you think about that.


Even if we wanted to be helicopter parents, he wouldn't let us. The Princeling is so independent-minded he would have gotten his own apartment when we brought him home from the hospital if he didn't absolutely need us to change his diapers and feed him. And even then we suspect he was just humoring us.


We're fine with that. We're not the type of parents to encourage our kids to depend on us because it's just so sweet and we need to be needed or something like that. We love our children, and we love them more when they do shit themselves and leave us alone.


So I signed the Princeling up for swim classes every Saturday this summer. Because knowing how to swim is important, especially for us, because we're from Florida and my parents have a pool and my mother-in-law's condo development has a pool and my husband and I would rather splash about than hold our children so they don't drown.


We had the choice of signing up for one of three levels of "Angelfish" classes: Angelfish Plus, for 3-5 year olds who can swim without an adult; Angelfish, for 3-5 year olds who can't swim but can go in the water without a parent or guardian (...I don't know, either, so don't ask me); and Angelfish with Caregiver, for 3-5 year olds with their parent or guardian. I let the Princeling choose which one he wanted, and to my utter shock he said he wanted me in the water with him. 


Oh, yay. Because if there's one thing a 36-year old mother of two, with hypothyroidism, who has had three major abdominal surgeries in the past three years, wants, it is to wear a bathing suit in public.


But I love my son. Angelfish with Caregiver it was.

Photo by Heinz Albers

(Note to the mom in the class after us: just because you have the body for it does not make it appropriate to wear a skimpy string bikini to your child's swim class. Save that shit for "MILFs Gone Wild" or whatever.)

For class, the kids have to wear a floatation device that sort of makes them look like tiny Transformers. I think this is because the instructors realize they are in Park Slope and probably most of us parents are too drunk at 11am on a Saturday morning to keep our kids' heads above water for half an hour.

Despite having part of Optimus Prime strapped to his back, at his first lesson the Princeling would bob under water every time I let him go, sputtering back up and grasping for me with this look on his face that can only be described as a combination of terror and amazement. (AKA "Roller Coaster Face.")

At his second lesson we did something called floating airplanes, and somehow the Princeling actually managed to hold still and be a kick-ass floating airplane. And I told him so. He was the best damn floating airplane in the 11am Saturday Angelfish with Caregiver class, y'all. I'm not saying he's the next Michael Phelps...but I bet Michael Phelps didn't suck at floating airplane, you know?

Then we played a game where the parents had to keep throwing little rubber duckies ahead of our kids and let the kids do their "reach and pulls" to "swim" to them. And I held tight to the Princeling while he did his reach and pulls and kicked me under water. Finally he turned around and said, "Mommy! Let! Me! Go!"


And I protested, because, sputtering and grasping. But he fought me and pushed at me until I had no choice but to let him go.


And he swam.


Not well, and not far. But he swam. My little angelfish. 


All I had to do was let go.

My Favorite Year(s)

:::NOTE: I'll be taking a sort of "writing maternity leave" starting after this post. While I have this baby removed and recover from that, a handful of my super awesome friends are taking over. I promise they are each and every one way cooler than I am. :::

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When I was a teenager I spent my summers working at the local JCC, first as a "CIT" (counselor-in-training, aka an unpaid babysitter) and then as a junior counselor. 

Every spring we were given the choice of any age group to work with, and while most of my peers fought for the older kids, I happily signed up for Chaverim, the 3-5 year olds.

These kids were my absolute favorite. They were still little and cute, and I could fit three of them on my lap at a time during Friday Shabbos singing. They thought I lived in the classroom. Most of them still needed help getting dressed for swimming class. They colored themselves with crayons and called going to the bathroom "making," as in, "Meri, I have to make."


Once, I heard giggling - from several voices - coming from our bathroom. There was no lock on the door to keep the kids from locking themselves in, so I peeked inside. There sat about four or five of my campers, perched around the rim of the toilet, little naked toushies in a row. I asked them what they were doing.

They were having a making party, of course. DUH.

How could you not love that, and I don't mean in a weird way?

Most of the kids I babysat, too, were 3-5 years old. I got 3-5 years old. I am expert at 3-5 years old. 

Kids that age still take everything at face value. They are absolutely unself-conscious. Their imaginations have kicked in, hard, and the crazier thoughts they have the more it all makes sense to them. If it enters their minds, it comes out their mouths. 

The 3-5 year old age range is just fine by me. I know it. I love it. Everything before, and everything after...I just try not to let them accidentally die, and maybe don't grow up to hate my guts. When they're teenagers I'm pretty sure, based on my own parents, all I have to do is pick from ignoring them, laughing at them, and telling embarrassing stories to their friends.

As I sit here waiting to go through the chaos, roller coaster, and exercise in sleep deprivation torture that is infanthood again, I keep reminding myself that before I blink, the Duke of Juban will be 3. My older son, the Juban Princeling, is 3, and although at times it felt like several decades passed during those first agonizing six months, here we are - he's 3 years old. He sits on the couch in his shiny blue scooter helmet, and Darth Vader costume, holding his blankie in one hand and his sippy cup in the other, with his dress-up knight doll resting happily by his side. His fingernails are painted blue because that's his favorite color, and what else would you do when you have a favorite color but paint it on your nails? (Liberal disclosure: blue is not his favorite color because we pushed it on him in some attempt at obeying gender rules. Blue is his favorite color because that's the color of my mother's car, and he is obsessed with her car.) His favorite word is "poop," and sometimes out of nowhere he'll stick out his butt and make a fake farting noise and then crack up. He insists his toys be friends with each other, and doesn't understand why Darth Vader has to be a bad guy. He comes into our room, sometimes, during the night and wants our attention but knows he's supposed to be quiet when people are sleeping, which is how I woke up last weekend to a fully extended, lit up light saber inches from my face.

Sometimes I am so overwhelmed with love and adoration I want to squeeze him and kiss him and hug him and never let him get older.

If this isn't the cutest, sweetest thing
you've seen all day, you are DEAD INSIDE.

And it's this, when I see him doing his "foot dance" (hopping around the living room on one foot) or when he tells me that the unborn baby's favorite color is purple, that I know will get me through those first months I'm so dreading, the months when we do nothing but give, give, give to this little sack of neediness and dependence. But some day the Duke of Juban will turn 3 and do things like call me his best friend, and run into my arms when he gets scared, and have entire conversations with me about the importance of proper vitamin color selection.


Eventually the Princeling, and, later, the Duke, will each turn 6 and I'll once again be utterly clueless as to how to deal with them. I assume I just throw food in their direction, hose them down once in a while, and hope they don't kill me in my sleep.