Peek-boo

This week Teo finally decided to talk. He and Luke were playing peekaboo in the car, and Teo started mimicking Luke and saying "peek-boo" in this little voice that is just the cutest damn thing you ever heard in your life. Since then he has delighted in mimicking Luke and in our reaction to it. He has said "beep beep beep,", "honk honk" and "peek-boo" about a thousand times. It is the strangest thing to hear words coming out of this child we feel like we know every inch of. It is a powerful reminder that we don't know Teo at all, that over the next year he is going to unfold into his real self, a self we can only imagine.

Really, I should say, over the next 100 years. Luke and Teo are both doing it, and I suppose Teen and I are too. Trying to unfold into who we really are. It is one of the hardest things about being a parent, I think, trying to shape but also honor the selves they are becoming. Adjusting so that you keep loving them as they are, through all their changes, instead of trying to make them into who you want them to be or who you think they are. Walking the fine line between accepting them as they are and accepting your responsibility as a parent to help guide and shape who they become. How fitting that it starts, like language, with this mimicry of our own selves, reminding me yet again that the best thing I can do as a parent is to live my own life with integrity and to make the "model" they will copy the best that I can. Damn.

I can see why it's so tempting for parents to just hide the parts of themselves they don't like from their children, like the people who smoke, but never in front of their children, or who swear, smoke pot, eat junk food, all after the kids are in bed. But how can a real, balanced, genuine human being develop from such deception? The kids I know who are raised this way are completely intolerant of others' mistakes, and ultimately how can they not hate their own imperfections? Aren't they being set up for a million neuroses that will make others hate them, and ultimately make them hate themselves, or parts of themselves. I have a client right now who hates a part of herself, and I talked with her about the things that people do when they hate a part of themselves, numbing themselves with drugs and alcohol, abusing their own bodies with knives, food, letting others abuse them, all because they believe they deserve it. It's a gift to our children when we let them see our own foibles and hypocrisies, our weaknesses, and we own up to them, and love them as part of our human selves.

The boys are up now, and Teo is playing with the new power of his words. My aunt Jeanne and uncle Gil gave Luke this awesome toy for his birthday. It's a dragon and rider, and the rider has wings, and the dragon has a pull-cord, and when you pull the pull-cord, the rider flies up off the dragon's back and soars, helicopter-like, across the room. Teo keeps bringing the rider back to me and then, when I have it ready, saying "Go!" Every time he says it I send the rider flying across the room to him, and then he picks it up and brings it back to me, and we start over again. It's making it hard to blog, to be honest, but I'm loving every minute of it.