Parenting lessons can happen anywhere.
This one took place as my son are I were at the back of the store at PetSmart where ten to fifteen dogs were chilling in Doggy Day Care.
There were large dogs, small dogs, white dogs, black dogs, black and white dogs, playful dogs, aggressive dogs, dogs of all shades, sizes and breeds, and dogs chasing and sniffing each other in the butt and one dog got sprayed with water for being too friendly with the other dogs.
A man in a blue polo shirt and a bulldog played tug of war with a latticed ball. They yanked it back and forth, and when the man loosened his grip on the ball, the bulldog jerked it away, and my son broke out into peals of laughter.
The Pet Store and Toy Store
PetSmart and ToysRus are two of his favorite places. He calls them The Pet Store and The Toy Store. We don’t have a pet and, fortunately, he is content to look at all of the animals and toys without asking me to buy him anything.
We go for the simple pleasures that a pet store and a toy store can bring to a four-year-old, and I like to give him the freedom to roam through the aisles and to linger as long as he likes at whatever attracts his attention in the store.
The freedom I grant is my gift to him: the chance to be free without a teacher giving him commands. So much of his life already is someone else telling him what to do. I believe he needs time to follow his impulses.
His curiosity reminds me of a line I read in William Butler Yeats’s poem (“An aimless joy is a pure joy”), and this is what I see in our trip to the Pet Store:
Aimless joys
He pokes his fingers at a fish tank. The fish dart away. This is an impulse his mom would want him to get rid of if she knew about it, but it seems harmless enough to me.
He lifts the handle to the crickets’ cage. An unpleasant odor drifts into my nostrils. He picks up decorations in the fish tank aisle, a taco truck, a battleship with a giant hole, a sunken plane. I hold my breath, hoping he doesn’t break anything.
“Hey, Blackie,” I say to a black cat resembling one from our neighborhood.
“Blackie, what are you doing here?” he says.
We look at cats in enclosures behind plexiglass. I read him the names and information on white index cards about the cats and then he jabbers with a parakeet in the next aisle, flicks a cat toy dangling from a scratching post and crawls inside a dog kennel, moving seamlessly from aisle to aisle like a symphony orchestra.
He flaps his hands in front of the parakeets to make them fly around like crazy. This is another impulse that his mother would want him to eliminate, but I let my son indulge in this “aimless joy,” before telling him he must stop.
“You are going to give the birds a heart attack,” I tell him while scanning the middle aisle for blue polo shirts of PetSmart employees.
Our ritual
I stand between my son and the birds and spread my arms out wide to prevent his series of attacks as he attempts to wedge his body around me to scare the birds. I stop his assaults with my forearms, shielding him away from the birds, and he bursts into a spasm of giggles.
This is a game we play on every trip to the Pet Store, me allowing my son to frighten the birds and then blocking him from getting close to them, and it is the way I am forming a bond with my son who is on the autism spectrum.
We look at turtles, hamsters, bearded dragons, guinea pigs, tarantulas, rabbits, chinchillas and pet toys and other paraphernalia. As he peers into a cage with a white hamster, I realize something: how seldom I enjoy an aimless joy, and how I need to follow my impulses to go on a hike, to get lost in the pages of a novel or to recalibrate my mind on a long train trip.
Henry David Thoreau once said, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” This is what it feels like my son has been doing at the Pet Store. He is not merely “looking” at the animals like I’ve been doing, but he is “seeing” their attributes and interacting with them.
Parenting lesson
Watching my son, I see the joy he finds in looking at the animals in the Pet Store, and I recognize something else about my own life: how my life is ruled by busyness and work.
No time for fun.
He picks up a dog biscuit in a red bowl on a counter and takes a whiff and I remember another one of Yeats’s lines, “Wisdom is a butterfly, not a gloomy bird of prey.”
I follow him down a dog toy aisle. He picks up dog toys and squeezes a rubber chicken in a pink bikini, and we both laugh at the squeaky sound. Yes, indeed, I think, Wisdom is a butterfly, not a gloomy bird of prey.
My dad lesson is: to cultivate a carefree spirit like a butterfly, even as the world constantly beckons me to strive to achieve something.
The teacher is my son.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Hannah Lim on Unsplash
