I Still Second-Guess Every Big Choice I Make For My Kid
Last Tuesday I stood in my 8-year-old son’s elementary school lobby, holding a crumpled permission slip with a big oat latte stain bleeding through the lower right corner, trying to decide what was best for him. The school’s offering this new gifted pull-out math program for third graders, it meets Wednesday afternoons. Wednesday afternoons are also when the after-school art club meets. It’s not a fancy high-stakes choice, not like picking a high school or sorting out big medical stuff that makes the news. But I stood there for 10 minutes leaning on the office copier, going back and forth so long the secretary gave me a polite little smile and went back to her computer.
I’ve been here before, that twist of not knowing. When he was 4, all the parents in our playgroup were signing their kids up for rec soccer. I did too, because that’s what you do, right? All the casual parent reels I scroll said getting them into team sports young builds confidence. Showed up to the first practice, he sat on the sidelines the entire time, pulling dandelion heads off one by one and crying when I told him to go run with the other kids. I dragged him back the next week, same thing. The coach pulled me aside and said he’s just not into it, and I felt so stupid, like I’d forced him into something terrible just to keep up with the other moms. I pulled him out after week three, and that was that. But I still thought about it for months, wondering if I was raising a quitter, or if I’d messed up his social skills by letting him skip team stuff that young.
A year later, I messed up the other way. He stutters a little when he’s nervous, especially when he has to read or talk out loud in front of people. His teacher asked if he wanted to do the school spelling bee, said he was a great speller, he’d have fun. He immediately shook his head and said no. I told him he should try it, that it would be good for him, that stepping out of his comfort zone is how you grow. I talked him into it. Got him a little cheap spelling bee t-shirt, everything. He got up on the stage for the first round, got the word “pineapple,” opened his mouth, and couldn’t get the first sound out. Just stood there red-faced, stuttering over and over, before he turned and ran off the stage straight into my arms in the audience. I still get a tight chest thinking about it. I thought I was helping him build resilience. All I did was make him hate speaking in front of people even more for a whole year after that.
I grew up really poor, my mom worked two cleaning jobs, we never had extra money for extracurriculars or any of that. If a program cost more than five dollars, I couldn’t do it. I worked my ass off to get where I am, so I could give him choices. But that’s the problem, right? Having choices means you have to pick, and you might pick wrong. Last month at the playground, a mom I know asked what extracurriculars my son does, and when I said just art, she made this soft, pitying little face and started talking about her 8-year-old’s robotics league. I got this little pit in my stomach that lasted all afternoon. What if I let him just draw all the time and he ends up with no options when he’s older? What if my desire to let him be a kid right now means he can’t have the future he wants later?
Last night I went in to tuck him in, and he’d covered half his ceiling with sticky notes covered in little lopsided dinosaurs, each one with a different kind of hat. Cowboy hats, top hats, tiny construction hard hats. He’d stayed up 45 minutes past his bedtime drawing them, instead of doing the extra math worksheets I’d bought on a whim after that playground conversation. The worksheets were sitting in the pantry, unopened. I bought them, even though I said I was going to let him choose art. Contradiction, right? I can’t even stick to my own choices.
I left the office that day, walked out to the parking lot, and he was leaning against our car holding a rock that looked exactly like a lumpy orange carrot. He’d been collecting weird shaped rocks for two months, has a whole shoebox full of them on his windowsill. He ran up to me, so excited to show me his new find, and I asked him again, “Buddy, you’re sure you don’t want to try the math thing? It’s okay if you change your mind.” He said, “Mom, I already promised Ms. Lee I’d paint the dragon on the library mural. I can’t miss that. Dragons are way cooler than math problems.” So I checked the box that said he stays in art, turned the form in the next day.
Last night I lay awake at 2 a.m., anyway, thinking about it. What if he’s actually really good at math, and he just doesn’t know it, because I let him opt out when he was 8? What if when he’s 16 he wants to be an engineer or an architect and he’s behind because I prioritized a dragon mural in third grade? I don’t have the answer. I see all these people talking about trusting your gut, following your kid’s lead, all that, and I think, yeah, but my gut changes every 10 minutes. Sometimes my gut says let him draw, sometimes my gut says what are you doing, get him into more math.
I don’t think anyone actually knows what’s best, not really. We just all go off what we know, what we’re scared of, what we loved when we were kids. My mom wouldn’t let me drop chemistry for pottery when I was 16, and I resented her for it for years, but now I get it. She was just scared I’d end up with no options, same as I’m scared. She was wrong, but she wasn’t bad for it.
This morning I found the unopened math worksheets tucked under his sketchbook, and he’d drawn a little dinosaur eating the corner of the cover. I threw them in the recycling. Then I put a reminder in my phone to check the deadline for the middle school advanced math lottery next fall. I don’t have it figured out. I probably never will. That’s just how it is, I guess. (Word count: 1187)
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