Close Your Eyes and Let Him Go

The last big snow of the season dawned early one weekday morning, and a school day became a snow day.

My first-grader played happily on the living room floor setting up a miniature airport, until he got bored and turned to watching videos, until boredom overtook him yet again and he return to his planes, passengers and runways. All the while, I tried to tempt him outdoors with the prospect of building something (or someone) out of the steadily falling snow, but he balked repeatedly at the prospect of exposing himself to the elements.

I don’t blame him. As I shoveled off and on all day, I experienced the snow first-hand--heavy, wet and nonstop, the kind of snow that sticks to the ground but finds its way down the back of your neck or creeps into your shoes, making your socks as soggy as if you’d just taken them out of the washer. The sky was an ugly, uncompromising gray. When the precipitation turned to tiny but stinging pellets of ice, alternating with rain, I knew he was a no-show on the front lawn. It was a snow day, but not a good snow day.

But 48 hours later, after the grey skies gave way to blue and fresh flurries white-washed the dirty curbside slush, the conditions were perfect—for sledding. This was not a winter sport we’d done much of, I admit, in part because I’m still at heart a Texan and don’t know what to make of snow (even after 25 years of living with it), and in part because my husband and I are “older” parents who live in fear of blowing out a knee while playing Frisbee tag with our child. But the fact is, we can’t and don’t deny a boy the pleasures of bike-riding and baseball, so we get out there and play with him regularly—but…sledding? What if I threw out my back pulling the sled back up the hill? What if I sledded with him and steered us into a tree trunk? What if I ran over a toddler and got sued? Risks be damned, the slopes were beckoning, and my inner Bode Miller was clamoring for release.

Our town’s local sledding spot was jam-packed with stir-crazy kids and their cabin-feverish parents, all jostling for position at the top of an increasingly slushy hill. We approached from the bottom and began our slippery upward trek to the top.

“I don’t know about this mommy,” said my son, who I’d finally pried off the living room floor and pushed into his winter outdoor gear. “It’s really steep. And look, there are a lot of middle-schoolers.”

Ahhh, middle-schoolers, the bogey-men of my child’s dreams. For some reason, he has decided that middle schoolers are the ones to blame whenever he espies a piece of litter on the ground, a bit of graffiti on a park bench, or a stray shopping cart blocks from the market. “Middle-schoolers did this!” he gasps.

Now, here we were with hordes of littering, graffiti-writing, shopping cart-thieving middle-schoolers, hurtling toward us. We hiked through the mass of prepubescent vandals and found a spot from which to sally forth. I helped my son on to his “saucer” (a $15 over-sized plastic garbage can lid) and asked him if he was ready.

“Yes, I think so, mommy!”

And it was then, just as I gave him a big, happy, fearless motherly shove out of the nest and watched him slide away, a bright green jacket sitting atop a circle of red plastic, that I looked down. Way down. Way down to the bottom of a treacherously icy, hideously, neck-breakingly steep, steep hill. What the hell had I just done?

I watched his little body catapulting to the bottom of the incline as he hunkered down on his saucer, clutching the handles on either side and doing now doing a series of 360s. I heard screaming—all I heard was screaming all around me—“Mommy! Mom! Mommy!”

And then I couldn’t see him.

Desperately I squinted and searched and simply could not see him. No sign of green! No sign of red! He was lost among the masses of children at the bottom of the hill and couldn’t find his way back to me. He’d sledded into the brush and trees on the edge of the run and was out cold. He’d broken something unspeakable and the ambulance was on the way. He’d been lured away by a bad person in a plain white sled with out-of-state plates. I was frozen to my spot on the slushy hill, trying to figure out how to get to the bottom as fast as possible without breaking my own unspeakable. I considered commandeering the saucer of the nearest middle-schooler until I heard the screaming again.

“Mommy! MOM!!!”

And there he was, standing right next to me, grinning like a devil.

“Mommy, didn’t you see me? I was calling you! That was cool! I’m going down again—give me a big push again!”

My heart resumed normal activity and I gave him a huge hug, pretending to congratulate him. In reality, I was flooded with relief, joy and pride.

“Come on, mom! Push me, I want to go again!”

And so it went.

I gave him a push and he flew away, over and over and over again. And each time, he came back to me. And each time, I was so happy to see him.

Someday, perhaps he won’t come back quite so quickly. He’ll want to stay out on the hill and chart some new territory, veer off to the sides, see what happens if he slides into the bushes, zig-zag toward the bottom, take the long way back.

But I’m hoping that won’t happen for a while—at least until middle school.