My Date
with Danny
Written By Jacquelyn Mitchard
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Dinner with Danny beats a dream date
There are five children in my family, and we have a tradition of solo outings. One half of the couple is whatever child shows up in the rotation. The other half is me.
It started this way: One night, my son Danny asked me out.
He was 8 1/2.
It was a great date.
He wore his only-for-school-pictures shirt and I wore my speech-making coat. We went out for crab legs at a restaurant distinguished for its kiddie cocktails, and dawdled over dessert. We talked about Danny's plan to gather a team of second-grade detectives to prove that the small green footprint outside the girl's washroom at Leopold School was indeed left by a leprechaun. We talked about critical issues of lift and drag in the construction of paper hang-gliders.
"Technically, a straw should work for the base," Danny said. "But it's too slippery."
But mostly, we just gazed into one another's eyes like honeymooners.
"We're the quiet ones," Danny told me as we left. "I'm glad we had some private time together."
Now, Danny rightly self-identifies as "the quiet one," though in a family less loud than ours, his reticence probably wouldn't stand out so much. I'm not quiet by anyone's standards, except, probably when I'm with Danny.
His peace modifies me in magical ways. That was one of the things I remembered that night. And one of the things I often forget.
A few evenings before, when Danny came to kiss me good-night, he said, without preamble, "I want us to go out alone. How about Wednesday."
Without thinking, I asked him, "Do you want to go with Max and Ann? How about Susan and Margot?"
Danny fixed me with a look: "Do you know what alone' means?" he asked.
And I had to reflect: Sometimes I wonder whether I do know.
By '90s standards, I have a lot of children: five. And I've always believed that, if you have more than one child, that it's important to make each sibling feel like an "only child," at least once in a while.
But belief doesn't always translate into practice.
For a single parent, a widow at that, squeezed by the urgencies of making a living and making a life, the hours between sunrise and sunset flip past like those calendar pages in old movies. I'm pouring milk over the cereal at breakfast, and, a minute later, no more, I'm pouring milk over cereal for a bedtime snack. In fact, to my shame, when Danny suggested our Wednesday date, I nearly demurred.
Wednesday's the only night I have a regular sitter. It's Mom's night out or alternatively, Mom's night to work in my basement office, on everything I haven't been able to get finished during school hours.
"You know that I keep Wednesday nights for me," I told Danny.
"Well," he said. "I thought of that. But I go to bed at eight o'clock. So you'd still have plenty of time left."
Later, over dinner, I felt a rush of guilty concern for this little boy so determined to get on his mother's calendar that he'd already penciled in her objections. But Danny, a half-full kind of guy, had already gone on to explain a family plan: He'd decided that what I should do was make every other Wednesday night a kid-date night.
"I don't just mean for me," Danny pointed out. "We could take turns."
That statement replaced my guilty concern with admiration. Was this generous plan a function of natural selection, evolutionary skills adapted for survival in our family? His basic constitution?
Was it, dared I hope, partly based on example? On my example, sometimes frayed around the edges, of always trying to make time for what really counts a friend's need or a child's even in the midst of demands and chaos?
What I had to finally recognize was that, for whatever reason, Danny knows, at 8, something people often spend 40 years and thousands of dollars in counseling to learn.
He asks for what he needs.
p>He doesn't demand attention through anger or guilt trips or tantrums (unlike plenty of adults I know). He asks for what he needs. Firmly. Precisely. Politely. And this is why he gets it.Even if he never develops a degree beyond today, he already has most of the personality skills he'll need. This embryonic man of the 21st century already has a running start on growing up without a lot of the emotional hangnails that boys even of his father's generation had to accept as part of the package of being male.
And by asking me for a date, he also reminded me that this raising-children business isn't just a teaching process. It's a learning process, too.
As Danny says, we take turns. If we really listen when they teach us (as we expect them to do) it somehow has the effect of evaporating the guilt that always seems to attach when our children remind us of our shortcomings. Something else takes its place.
Pride.
I hate to brag, I also have to think this boy of mine will make a catch for all those 21st-century Caitlins and Julias growing up out there. In the year 2005 or so, the line will form on the left.
But I hope Danny sets aside a Wednesday night, every once in a while, for me. So that we can remember that on alternating Wednesday nights, he was my only child. And I his only mother.
©Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
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