From scrolling through life on my phone, it looks like there are an awful lot of mama bears out there who want shirts announcing them as such. These are parents that will rip your head off to protect their young. They will climb a tree and then, I’m just guessing here, eat the food out of your poorly secured cooler.
I am not a mama bear. I think I would be better likened to an animal that has to hold back tears following any slight directed toward my kids. Whatever animal needs some added time to process the event over and over while sitting on a couch, that’s me! Or the one that periodically returns to the memory while driving and then bursts into tears (again). I’m more like an anxious Bassett hound or maybe a panda that has chosen to roll down a hill and lay helplessly on their back. I suppose it is true that no one said what specific type of bear that mama was.
This month’s current mama-the-anxious-rolling-panda moment is brought to us courtesy of a single comment my son made about a book. Every other Thursday, his preschool class gets to visit the lower elementary library and choose a book to take home. The single book is put into a drawstring bag with their name on it – each letter printed inside the segment of a caterpillar that we stamped together on the first day of school. On library days, Jack always has to show me the book he chose before we can leave school. “You gotta see this!” “Look what I got!”
In spite of his developmental delays, Jack is in a mainstream, general education preschool. His late summer birthday has given him a little extra time to develop and mature, so as a delayed 4-year old, he has been holding his own for the most part in the 3-year-old room. We don’t know the trajectory of his development and delays, but for now we can make this setting work. While it’s easy to point to that sliver of extra material on his X-chromosome, what that material does isn’t known well enough to serve as a crystal ball. Our geneticist explained it by saying that delays like this can function as either a static gap or a percentage. A static gap means that the child is delayed a certain amount of years or months. If Jack is a year delayed, that means he is like a 3-year-old when he is 4, and he will be like a 5-year-old when he is 6. It makes for a rough early childhood, but by the time he is 17, no one would notice. When delays occur as a percentage, it means that if Jack is like a 3-year-old when he is 4, his delay is 25% of his age. So when he is 6-years-old he will function as a 4-and-a-half-year-old, and when he is 17, he will function as about a 13-year-old. These are two very different outcomes, and our geneticist said while there is no way to predict what will happen, most children fall somewhere between the two. The end result is that Jack is going to be younger than his chronological age.
So when Jack pulled out his latest library book, he proudly held it up and shouted “ta da!” It was 10 Busy Buzzy Bugs, a countdown book devoted to bugs flying away and the skill of counting backwards. This copy of the book was thick, with 3D bugs to touch on the cover and throughout the pages. One colorful, plump body disappearing with each page turn as you count down from ten to one. Jack rubbed his finger on one of the bugs and asked, “Is this book for babies?”
I was able to grab his artwork, collect his papers, and make it to the car before I cried. “Did someone say your book was for babies?” I asked I buckled him in. This question was probably tapping into a concept he can’t fully access, but he said “No” with some certainty.
See in my mind, Jack chose the book that he liked and wanted and that made him happy as a wonderful little 4-year-old boy. And then someone else called him a baby for it. For choosing a book with a decidedly board book feel, in spite of the giant 5 AND UP printed across the back.
First of all, this exact scenario probably didn’t happen in real life. Jack is still working on categorizing objects, and sorting out what items are good for babies vs. big kids is part of this heavy work. He’s also sorting animals into pets vs. wild. And food into healthy vs. unhealthy. As this schema develops in his brain and in his language, there are always questions about what belongs where. Asking if a book was for a baby is probably part of that.
But I know that in the future, if Jack’s interests don’t align with those of his chronologically aged peers, he may be made fun of. If he is still thrilled with light up shoes with Lightening McQueen on them at an age when other kids are eagerly awaiting Air Jordans (if those are still even a thing), someone may tease him. And the thought of anyone’s sweetness and joy being popped and deflated by some asshole makes me panda roll down a hill.
The things that our children do in these preschool years are adorable when done by children in their preschool years. We love a good “psghetthi” instead of “spaghetti.” A desire to pass out high fives in any waiting room is delightful. Seeing the same behavior in a fifth grader, or adult even, can be jarring. And because of that initial reaction, our world tends to react with either cruelty or raw distance.
One day someone will call Jack a baby. One day someone will call Jack the R-word, and it is going to be painful as shit. When I first had an abnormal genetics report in my hands, with a paltry two-item reference list at the bottom of it, I began my own dig into the world of developmental delays and intellectual disability. And you know what I found? The darkest corner of Reddit where moms who were seeking company in this journey had instead begun to reveal their plans for how to best kill their (older) delayed children and themselves. Because they are living in a world without enough kindness and space for them and their families. And this sort of society belongs to all of us.
Unless we all work very hard to ensure our neurotypical and typically developing children aren’t assholes. And I think the secret lies in all you mama bears.
Instead of going all claws out if someone comes for your offspring – take more time to ensure your offspring don’t go after someone else’s. How about some mama owls instead? You’ll still have talons, if that makes you feel better, but you can spend the rest of your time imparting wisdom and modeling how to soar gently and deliver Hogwarts letters. Wait, that got derailed.
I would enjoy seeing parenting become a bit less aggressive and defensive in order to make room for more lesson imparting and modeling of kindness, tolerance, and understanding. When Jack picks out whatever damn book he wants, I don’t want your kid saying anything to him about it. And my kids won’t say anything to yours when they do the same. We have enough room and love to accept each other.
It isn’t easy to teach children how to navigate a world where others have differences, but this is parenting and the whole damn thing isn’t easy so I don’t know why anyone would expect otherwise. But we have this big old wide expansive internet with hundreds of tips on how to slowly create a more inclusive world. So scroll on through that and leave the mama bear shirts behind.
Melissa Sharpe 