Unmoored

Anytime I get a glimpse of something I'm doing inadequately as a parent, I worry that the proverbial ship has sailed—the ship that carries a precious thing that influences my son's ability to succeed in life. Like his attention span. His ability to form friendships. His desire for learning. Maybe his entire propensity for good behavior. This is the curse of what might be called magnification, catastrophizing, or black and white thinking: a cognitive distortion however you put it.

If I lose my cool and yell at him to put on his pajamas, after having told him five times in a regular speaking voice, there goes whatever ability he has to self-regulate. (Why should he avoid yelling when mom does it?) If he cops an attitude when asked to stop video gaming for the night, there goes his ability to cope without a screen in front of his face. He gets a middling "report card" at the end of first grade, so obviously he is losing whatever capacity he may have had for staying on task. When he makes an inappropriate joke or comment, or says he doesn't care about something (dismissively, like a bored teenager), it feels like we've lost him to the cynicism of the world already. My parental shortcomings only serve to put wind in the sails of those ships I wanted desperately to keep sight of.

He eats scarcely anything that is not bread- or cracker-based, so there goes his nourishment and growth. We have stopped enforcing a time for going to bed or at least turning the lights out, thanks to odd summer schedules and unexpected camp closures, so the ship of getting sufficient sleep has definitely sailed. We have seen some of his young friends reject him because his hyperfocused attention can be suffocating. He has lamented that everyone hates him. There goes his opportunity for lasting friendships.

I know in my rational mind that he's only seven and the ships are probably still in the harbor, just drifting away slowly and coming back in cyclically, with the tides. I am not sure if the wane of these tides is truly more extensive than the wax, or if my mind exaggerates the distance. Maybe the boats themselves are a mirage, a fleet of machines I conjured up so I could lash them to the docks and make believe that I control them. But they have grown larger and more powerful than I ever expected. I tremble in their shadows as I stand dockside, using my puny mother-arms to pull at the mooring ropes in a desperate attempt to keep the ships close to me. I can't compete with the forces of wind, waves, and my headstrong boy at the wheel.