“When are you going to stop watching him like that?” my friend Jen asked once during an afternoon at the indoor bouncy house place. I hadn’t made eye-contact with her for an hour, watching Kai like a hawk.
“Um, never?” I answered. “When I can trust him not to disappear and to come when I call him?” (Um, never?) And I got up at that moment, because he’d disappeared behind one of the bouncy house things, or went out the door, or was throwing balls at some girl’s head or whatever. The thing is, Kai doesn’t come when I call him, he doesn’t follow directions like, “Stay where I can see you.” He gets distracted, intrigued by whatever’s behind Door #3. You know—where they keep the guns and the child molesters.
But sometimes you do have to let go. Not because of any special moment in time, but because your other kid is at the top of a slide and even though she’s not the one you worry about, it’s still several feet off the ground and she’s only 16 months old.
And so I had to take my eye off of him. For like three minutes.
Poor Ryan is forever being dragged to this appointment and that therapy, pulled from the depths of a peaceful afternoon nap to pick Kai up at school, hoisted up on my hip to (yet again) rescue Kai from imminent danger or to inform him loudly that we TAKE TURNS, SWEETHEART. So in the relatively safe confines of this particular play area, I was giving Ryan the chance to have a little fun and get her slide on. For once. And as I was helping Ryan up the ladder for another turn, I scanned the room for Kai, just to lay eyes on him, just to satisfy that need to reassure myself, just to make sure.
What I saw, across a crowded playroom, was his little white fanny—his actual butt, naked of jeans and underpants, standing in front of a plastic playhouse. And so, there I am, with one kid who looks like he’s about to pee on the carpet next to a playhouse, and one kid at the top of the slide. I lunged for Ryan, who did an impressive evasive maneuver. I lunged again, and when I finally got a hand around a limb and pulled her from the top of the slide, slinging her onto my hip for (yet another) mad dash to forestall disaster, the peeing was finished and the underpants were back up.
“Pants?” Kai said, indicating that he needed my help with the snap.
A grandmother was grimly leading two chalk-white little girls out of the playhouse.
“Kai, that’s not where we go potty,” I say in a carrying voice, so that the grandmother knows I’m not that kind of mom. You know. The kind of mom whose kid pees in playhouses. Which, as it happens, I totally am.
“Potty!” Kai said, as I snapped up his jeans, unsure whether to laugh or cry. He pointed to the playhouse. “It’s right there!”
And so it was.
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