What I Learned From Curious George
My son was just shy of 18 months old when he left babyhood behind and arrived at the place where boundless energy and mobility intersect. I was grossly unprepared for this phase of his childhood, and felt the judgment keenly from the old women who always sat behind us at church. One particular relative was less than kind, his unvarnished words still stuck in my head almost 30 years later: There’s something wrong with that kid.
My son was faster than any child I had ever seen and determined to get where he wanted to go. I was a decade older than most of the mothers I knew with young children, and my lack of speed was a clear impediment. There was no predicting what thing would catch his interest, or how quickly he could get to it. He was lightning seeking the shortest path to his destination.
The partially open doorway to his sister’s preschool classroom practically dared him to step over the line and into a fascinating world of shapes and colors and sounds. It was the middle of winter, and the wide hallway of the small Catholic school was filled with several mothers and their content, compliant toddlers. Small patches of melting slush pooled around our collective feet. I was careful to step around the gravel-laced slop. He tugged in every direction to get away from me, but the teacher was still teaching and it was simply not acceptable to me that he be allowed to disrupt this hallowed place of learning.
In what I can see now as a calculated, stellar move, he lurched left and then darted right, my upper body still following his left lurch. His powder blue snowsuit flew past me in a blur. I should have just let him go in, but children get their genetic predispositions from somewhere and I reached out with a death grip for the powder blue hood. In just seven steps, he had gained a momentum that I had not anticipated. I had latched onto a speeding train. He was like a distracted dog that had hit the end of its leash, and I was airborne behind him. I landed with a full-body splat in the slush, arm outstretched with his powder blue hood still clutched in my hand.
Even with him howling at the top of his lungs, I could hear the snickering from above. I was surrounded by twice as many boots as I had been faces. Mortification multiplied. Any disruption my son might have caused in the classroom was nothing compared to this sideshow. A woman in purple cowboy boots kept smirking until the woman next to her in sensible, fur-lined boots lowered a hand and said, “Are you okay?” My son continued to scream as she dragged us both upward, my face now the same shade of red as the Valentine hearts plastered on the wall behind us. It would be another four minutes before the bell would mercifully ring. I clenched my back teeth, fake smiling at my whimpering son and feeling like an absolute failure.
For months, a single word kept surfacing around me. Naughty. I hated the word, and I still do, but I had no other language in the moment to describe the behavior of a child who simply could not experience everything in this big, incredible world fast enough.
For two full years, from 18 months to three-and-a-half, he moved through life like a cartoon reel of erratic motion. He was a doer first, a thinker second. He was adamant that he be allowed to climb the ladder to the top of the slide all by himself. A single finger on his back would produce epic howls, and he would climb back down so he could start the climb again. ALL BY HIMSELF. He insisted on knowing what sandbox sand tasted like. He seemed to be fascinated by the sound that it made as he ground it between his baby teeth. This scene repeated itself over and over until his frustration at finally being removed from the sandbox led him right to the refrigerator where a full gallon of milk waited to be furiously shaken all over the living room carpet and sofa in less than two minutes. It was 9:30 in the morning and already 85 degrees outside. I was not in the mood to look deeper at what was going on. That milk was going to make our whole house reek. He was just plain naughty. That was all there was to it.
I was the mother of two children under the age of four and was quickly realizing that the temperament necessary for this job was something I did not possess. But I knew one thing. If any of us were to survive, I would first need to preserve my own sanity, so I did the only thing I could think of at the time – I bought a double stroller. In a car that worked about 70% of the time, we headed out for the mall. My highly sensitive passengers were continually enlisted to watch and listen for signs that we might not make it to our destination. Their young noses were bloodhound-level reliable, always smelling smoke long before I did. They were also the first ones to spot the man waving his arms wildly and screaming at me to back my overheating car away from the crisp, brown bushes that I had pulled up next to in the Long John Silver’s parking lot. In retrospect, he probably should have screamed GET OUT OF THE CAR! Different priorities, I suppose. We were an hour from home and I was close to a full breakdown when I noticed that the business next door was an auto repair shop. Two fighting toddlers, desperate tears, and a Mastercard will get you moved to the front of the line. We spent the next hour-and-a-half coloring our pirate placemats and eating hush puppies until I was eventually told that our Mercury Sable was roadworthy again. When we finally arrived at the mall, I wrangled them both into the stroller and life was as blissful as it would ever be at this stage. I didn’t even care that I did not have the luxury to look at anything that I was interested in. They were both quiet, and contained, and we rolled along as if we had it all together.
I credit a huge display in the children’s section of Barnes and Noble for allowing me to see my youngest child through different eyes. It was beautifully done, and I parked the double stroller in front of it while I looked in my bag for goldfish crackers. It took a little monkey and a man in a yellow hat to make me see all of this chaos as something different. Both of my kids were looking at the happy little monkey on the cover of the book, but the monkey – he was looking at me. The spark in his eyes was so familiar. It was the same spark that was a constant in my son’s eyes. But on the cover of a book, the spark looked different. It was filled with energy and enthusiasm, and curiosity.
Curiosity. There it was. The word that I had not been able to find until this moment. I picked up the book and added it to the growing pile on the stroller canopy. We brought George home with us and spent the better part of our summer afternoons camped out on a cedar lawn swing, laughing at his antics. My son related to this high-spirited creature who wanted to know everything about the world, and giggled with delight at both his adventures and misadventures. George made him feel accepted in a way that no one else could, and he made all of us feel like it was okay to run full speed toward all of the bright and shiny things. And that curious little monkey gave me permission to step back and look differently at the little boy in front of me who just wanted to see everything there was to see, all at once.
It is not lost on me that I write this from the vantage point of almost 30 years later, now having the luxury of having sat through the entire film of my son’s childhood and knowing there is a happy ending. He is intelligent and creative in ways that continually surprise me, successful both personally and professionally. It was a tightrope walk of sorts back then, and I fell short many times in my attempts to find the balance between keeping him safe from his impulses and allowing him to follow his imagination wherever it wanted to take him. I have not forgotten those days or how hard they were in the moment.
I don’t know if authors H.A. Rey and Margret Rey intended to teach me about patience and reframing behavior, but they did. And they taught me that curiosity is the birthplace of the best and brightest ideas. We just have to wait for it.