The Unhurried Child
Written By Catherine Newman
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"Do you feel like I rush you?" I ask Ben, and for an answer he offers a jokey imitation of me: "C'mon, Ben, c'mon. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon. Come on!" When? I want to know. "Always." Always? "When we're leaving for somewhere or just doing something. Like birthday cards." Birthday cards? He explains how we always leave them until the last minute, so he's stuck painting his complicated imaginary-flag watercolors and writing his painstaking messages ("Hav fun terning 6!") with me ticking nearby like a coffee-drinking time bomb. "C'mon, c'mon," he says again. "Finish your painting." I picture Picasso trying to complete Guernica while his mom hovers with a glass of sangria ("C'mon, c'mon, we'll be late for the party!"); I picture Tolstoy writing War and Peace while his mother holds a stopwatch and a plate of blini. Oy vey.
"You didn't rush me yesterday," Ben consoles, and that's true. He and his younger sister, Birdy, stood at our two-sided easel, slathering tempera into drippy and expansive works of great art. After she'd stood there dabbing and daubing for more than an hour, with her little smock hanging down to the floor and her fingers and cheeks covered in paint, Birdy took one step back from her thickly purple-and-brown painting, squinted at it like it was a Rorschach inkblot, and announced, "A hippo." Then she went back to work.
How joyful it was to be in such relaxed company, the children's creativity rising into the afternoon like bread dough. Later, the two of them sat together on the couch, Ben leafing through his dictionary and Birdy simply, well, sitting. "Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled," wrote Harvard Dean of Students Harry R. Lewis in a famous letter urging students to slow down, a letter Honoré cites. "It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4 x 4 puzzle which makes it possible to move the other 15 pieces around."
But then there are the times you simply must rush, when you're late for a birthday party, shopping for the gift on the way, and your child would rather stand in Target's animatronic holiday display aisle, pushing every button on every "Jingle Bell Rock"-singing crocodile, than choose between Mousetrap and Mancala. Or maybe you'd love to let your kids watch for untold hours while the weary bakers at Stop & Shop add white frosting roses to a tiered wedding cake. But the chicken sitting in your cart really isn't about to roast spontaneously and offer itself up to the dinner guests who are arriving in — yikes! — 10 minutes.
Yet other times we fill our children's lives with senseless or selfish haste. We rush them into the café because we need a latte or out of the zoo because we're bored of the monkeys. Or we rush them simply because we forget not to, like the summer evening we're climbing up the hill from the pond, and when I look back at Birdy, chubbying her toddler self along, I see such a troubled look on her face it breaks my heart. She's sandy and tired, her flip-flops are coming off, and she's struggling to keep up with us. How have I become the parent who forgets what it's like to have short legs? "Take your time, sweetie," I tell her. "Here. I'll slow down with you." And this simple offer is received as a gift: She smiles, reaches up for my hand, and exclaims, like a caricature of relief, "Phew!"
But how does going for a swim turn into an occasion for anxiety in the first place? I think of the German word Honoré taught me: freizeitstress, which translates as "free-time stress." Hurrying your kids through the playground, the weekend, the family vacation. We know this phenomenon all too well.
In leisurely contrast, I can remember standing barefoot on a dark lawn in my nightie, a lit sparkler in my hands, fireflies answering its light with their own. I do not remember grown-ups coming out to nag me about bedtime or bug repellent or fire hazards. I'm not sure anyone even knew where I was — and I mean that in a good way.
In "Fall from Grace," a piece she wrote for The New Yorker in 1997, Noelle Oxenhandler mourns the loss of time that is "completely free of usefulness": "To lie in the backseat of the car, listening to the grown-ups' voices, while a parent's hands steer through the night. To play in the vacant lot at dusk, while through the lighted kitchen window a mother stands at the stove cooking dinner. The childhood experience of errands, the dreamy, slightly edgy boredom of waiting while the grown-ups dropped off mail, picked up the freshly pressed clothes, filled the car with gas. Wasn't this, too, a kind of luxury?"
For Ben, now, the luxury lies in row after row of colored wrappers. He's finally reached his candy decision, as if on his belly through the sand of a desert, but here it is. "These." He pays, triumphantly clutches his package of Bottle Caps, and skips to the door. But then he turns to me with a doubtful expression: "Can I just check one last thing?" And when I say, "Sure, sweetheart, take your time," a slow smile spreads across his face.
Plus: Need something to read while you're unhurrying your kids? See tips on getting them out the door when you absolutely must.
