Backing off

Drove Luke to school the other day.


Nothing unusual about that, I drive him, his brother, and two other children to school just about every day. The unusual part was how I managed to suck up my need to force my view on the world.

Luke got into the car with a comic strip annual and proceeded to read it all the way to school. This from a kid who suffers from motion sickness and finds himself nauseous on any long car trip. The normal me would have lectured him on the link between reading in the car and the resulting motion sickness. But not the me in the car that morning. That me kept silent.

It drove me mad! My sense of order was profoundly out of balance. Here was something I knew for sure; reading in the car would make him nauseous. Somehow I managed to ignore this potential threat to my son’s wellbeing. I had hoped that there would be a lesson to be leant as the repeated discussions about reading in the car had obviously fallen on deaf ears. Now was his time to learn the lesson the hard way!

We got all the way to school without an inkling of nausea.

No hard lessons either.

It struck me that the problem could possibly be me. Trying to make my son see the world in the same way I see it, has been frustrating for both of us. It was insightful to see him do something his own way, which to all manner of my logic could not work and yet it did.

Perhaps all my son needs is a little more room. I just cannot believe that it could be this hard to provide it!

And he read all the way to school again today...