Mom Stands In

So we got back from the Franklin Institute about an hour and half ago. For the record, it’s 11:15 Sunday morning.

Nic just started cub scouts in September, with a pack that is accepting of special needs kids. I’d say about half the kids in the pack have something going on, and the other half don’t. This weekend, our pack, and maybe a dozen others from the looks of it, camped out at the Franklin Institute.

I told dad that Scouts was his activity—he wanted Nic in the scouts, so I told him he needed to take Nic to the meetings and do whatever needed to get done to make Nic’s scouting experience successful.

So dad had pneumonia this week. Mom ended up chaperoning. When I saw that I was the only mom in testosterone central, I was not happy.

Neither were the guys, but that’s another post.

So after I got over my initial disgruntlement, and the fact that Nic had NO interest in running with his pack, I decided to sit back and let him lead. And guess what—we had fun.

Without the constraints of crowds, he was free to explore all the exhibits in his own time without waiting, without fighting for a turn. He particularly liked the amazing machines, which we missed when we went with his class last May—he spent a good hour running a crane, working a hydraulic maze, and building his own gears.

We also had a number of firsts—he liked the Liquid Air Show, which demonstrated the differences in solids, liquids and gases in a very real, immediate and fun way. Not too long ago, he would have elected to skip such an activity. And the IMAX? He did it—and loved it. Again, dad had to leave an IMAX after the first couple of minutes with Nic about 3 years ago. Nic sat through the whole thing and enjoyed it—despite the lateness of the hour.

(My big quibble with this Camp is the hours it keeps—lights out didn’t happen til 12:30 am. I am usually out by 9:30. PM.)

This morning, after years of sitting out of his school’s planetarium assemblies at our middle school, he elected to come into the planetarium because I wanted to do it. And he loved it.

From a social standpoint (if you are using that yardstick), it was less successful. Nic wanted to do what Nic wanted to do and was less interested in sharing this with his peers than experiencing things for himself. It wasn’t a disaster, but he simply didn’t care.

And I think this is where I need the wisdom to get that this is okay. That this is a conscious choice that Nic is making—to be alone, or at least be alone with me or dad. That’s always been okay for him. On one hand, I want to push him to socialize—but on the other, he does just FINE at school, thanks very much.

Interestingly, he does not want to hang out with the other identified kids in the pack—I guess he feels like he gets enough time with them during the week. There’s one (unidentified) kid who dad said has been a jerk to Nic and that we should have tried to avoid. I answered that no one else seemed to want to hang with that kid and that he probably has issues himself.

But labels or not, don’t we all have issues?

I’m sitting here writing after an outing that could have gone either way. And I’m not saying it was an unmitigated success—after all, we had a number of times this am when he screamed “I WANT TO PUSH MY OWN BUTTONS!” and forced us to wait for the next elevator. And people averted their eyes, went around us, and left me feeling embarrassed to be with this kid, then ashamed of my own embarrassment. Yeah, we had about a dozen of those moments. But those moments become insignificant when measured against these very simple things he did—going to the demonstration, sitting and experiencing IMAX, and—wonder of wonders—doing the show in the planetarium.

I have made my peace with the things my son is not. But everything he is? It’s simply amazing.

I had a lot of misgivings about this outing—not the least of which was the price tag. But I drove out of that dark parking garage in the bright sunlight of a Sunday morning thinking that this experience—for so many reasons—is priceless.