Parenting #5: benign neglect yea or nay

written at the tail end of a week home with a sick kid again

“Let’s do the science sack,” Olive said, dumping the materials from the black nylon bag out onto our couch. I read from the page of laminated instructions…

Materials:
One baby food jar
Two balloons
Two rubber bands

…I continued down the list while Olive confirmed we had each one. As I read I began to have that sinking feeling, the same one I had when I guiltily walked away from the two parents who dutifully refilled each sack with fresh materials for the next week outside her classroom on Monday. You can do this, I said to myself, while we looked at the objects and I flipped through the notebook of observations made by other kids about what promised to be a home-made barometer. In beautiful and phonetically written words alongside pencil drawings of the experiment, each kid noted how the toothpick on the top of the insider jar pushed down when you lifted the balloon on the top of the larger jar that held the smaller one inside.

Put a small bit of glue on the balloon and secure the toothpick on top of the small jar, said the instructions, after the first two steps were done. Olive opened the glue and announced it was dry. I told her to get some fresh glue from her room and as she walked there and back I watched two more minutes of a YouTube interview with a young singer whose music I don’t even listen to. 

“The toothpick is supposed to be mostly OFF the side of the jar,” I corrected, as Olive glued with her glue and I held up the page in between us and pointed at the diagram. 

Eventually she / we got some version of toothpick stuck onto a balloon stretched over a small jar and put it inside the large jar with another balloon stretched overtop. 

Now watch what happens when you lift the top of the balloon up and observe the toothpick inside. Olive watched the toothpick which she had already colored purple as she pulled the knotted end of an orange balloon up toward the sky. 

“Nothing,” she said, as it lay flat on top of the baby food jar, which I then took back out and tried to tighten the wrap of the balloon overtop. At some point I got up and walked into the kitchen I looked at the recipe for pizza dough I planned to make and I did the math with the time. I don’t know if we tried the experiement again. I do know I went into my room and sat on the chair where I once nursed her and cried. 

“Come,” I said when I emerged, “let’s go out to dinner,” but not before I reapplied glue to the toothpick and told Olive to let it dry and then repeated myself when she accidentally knocked it all of the kitchen table. “O, let it be,” I said, not in a mad way but in a way where I wanted credit for having pointed out that it still wasn’t stuck.

After dinner I forgot all about the experiment and worked for two hours in the bedroom while Olive kept herself busy in the living room because what better time to do whatever you want than between 7pm-9pm when you’re supposed to be taking a bath and brushing your teeth and getting ready for bed. I’d say this is a parenting hack but the night ended badly - with her falling asleep in her clothes, which is my absolute #1 can not happen ever boundary. 

But here is why I’m telling you all this. It was the next morning when I almost missed the best part. I was lamenting all my failures over text with a friend when I came upon the jar which looked different than I remembered it. 

The top which was a flat pink balloon had new elements. In the center was a set of fake flowers glued down and on top were secured four circles, cut from a coloring sheet from another restaurant meal, now nestled around the blooms. Inside each circle Olive had colored a symbol of one of her friends, which she had already showed me, but now they made a three-dimensional shape along with the flowers and it all grew out of the pink plastic top where the balloon stretched over the jar as instructed. On the sides of the flower shape were the bits of the balloon cut off during the formal experiment and glued back on in a cool monochromatic like sculptural shape way, encircling part of the flower as well as forming another circular shape, like a mirror of the whole, glued just on the side. Colored pipe cleaners from an old project made up the other petal-like forms under the flower, in purple and blue, and the surface of the pink plastic was now colored a lovely shade of purple as well. If this is what failure looks like, I’ll take it, I thought. It’s not as though I had another choice really. But I heard my own voice saying “let it be,” earlier that evening and I knew it could apply here as well. 

We explored the jars together later when Olive pulled it apart and explained to me that the balloon shape was a couch for Tinker Bell and the little ring of plastic that was complete on the side was a miniature bathtub. She showed me with her finger how the fairy would come inside from the window and curl up right there or jump in the water and have a little bath. We didn’t draw a picture for the log, but if we had, O said she would have wanted to talk about how she started the project one way and it ended differently. As she push down on the top to show me how Tinker Bell would fly all the way in, the little purple toothpick began to rise up in the air. 

It worked after all.