On growing wild things

And letting our kids surprise us.

At the American Museum of Natural History. Photos by Yoon S. Byun

Last week, my husband and I took our children to dinner in Koreatown, in Manhattan. Then we all got on the subway and returned to our hotel room.

This was a triumph.

It was the last outing of our first visit to New York with the boys—less than 48 hours in all—and it was a trip I couldn’t have imagined making even just a few months earlier.

Our kids are rambunctious. They have taught us many things, including that compliance doesn’t have to be a core principle of our parenting. One skips and romps and rarely comes when called. The other is propelled by curiosity and imagination that supercedes almost all other things.

Much of our free time in Maine, where we live, is spent on beaches and in parks that we choose for their sight lines, places where the kids can roam and climb and launch themselves off of rocks, within view.

They are, in turns, homebodies, unwilling to go out when they want to be in. On our “home days” they are no less wild but now in pajamas and launching themselves off the furniture.

I love these qualities in them. And I have felt, at times, that they have made certain things seem impossible. Restaurants, for example. Or public transportation. Or most activities that require sitting for any length of time.

How would we ever navigate a busy city street or a subway station? How would they handle the newness of everything and everyone, plus an entirely new set of social norms?

And then, we did it.

“Liberty and freedom from oppression are not things you get or grant by standing around like some kind of statue. No! These are things that require action. Courage. An unwillingness to rest.” ~Dave Eggars, Her Right Foot

We joined the masses boarding a ferry to see the Statue of Liberty, the boys in search of the lifted foot and broken chains they learned about in Her Right Foot, by Dave Eggers and Shawn Harris. Yoon taught them how to eat a New York slice, and we chatted with a man who sat with a canvas on a street corner across from Chelsea Papaya, painting a scene with the bright yellow and red sign at its center, our youngest peppering him with questions about which details he would add and which he would leave out.

We explored the American Museum of Natural History in the morning and touched 65-million-year old fossils. Then the boys got sweaty at a playground in Central Park. We took a break to cool off in the hotel room and let them watch their favorite “let’s play” series by Stampylonghead (bless him), something that would have made me feel bad about my parenting before I learned from Ash Brandin, the @gamereducator, about how the familiarity of the things kids do on a screen can be a regulating influence during vacations, when so much else is new. I took it as proof when, as we walked out the hotel doors that afternoon, our oldest took a deep breath and said, “It feels like a new day.”

Then, soon enough—after a walk through Rockefeller Center and some banchan—it was over. We were on our way back to Maine and no one had been hurt or lost or had a meltdown (moments of heavy whining, yes, but that’s to be expected). And I thought about the idea I first remember reading in Hunter Clarke-Fields’s book Raising Good Humans, about the dangers of “always” and “never” in parenting.

Kids are constantly changing, of course. Yet, it can be easy to slip into “‘always’ thinking”—that our kids will always be as they are, that our family’s current challenges might never change.

That’s especially true—for me, certainly—in the day-to-day routines of parenting. Clarke-Fields writes that routines are necessary and important. They “helps us get through life with more ease,” she says. “The downside is that we can lose our ability to see things with freshness.”

I can’t say exactly when my kids grew into two boys who could manage the city with awe and relative patience. It certainly happened well before my worry that they couldn’t do it subsided, on our way home.

It was nice to take a trip, something I recognize as a real privilege. But more than the snapshots I keep revisiting in my phone, even more than the wonder on the boys faces as they rode the A train, I’m grateful for this reminder that they are always changing and growing into possibility. And so am I.

Look at us looking so calm.