A few weeks ago, my five-year-old and I tried something he now calls “going out for a drive.” Granted, this turn of phrase is already taken, but since he won’t be able to borrow the car for about a decade, I’m okay with the potential ambiguity.
We were out running errands, and had someplace to be in half hour that was a ten-minute drive away. Home was too far away to justify heading back there before our next commitment. “Is there anyplace you’d like to go?” I asked. “Someplace cool we could just drive by and look at?”
“I don’t know…”
“How about this: we’ll go explore. I’ll drive, and you tell me when to turn left or right. If it’s safe and legal, I’ll do it. You can take us wherever you want.”
He loved the idea, and off we went. I figured he would spot the nearest crane and try to navigate us there, or try to figure out where the nearest train tracks were. Instead, we headed back towards home, but instead of turning left into our neighbourhood, we turned right into a different one.
“What’s down here that you want to see?”
“I’ve always wanted to go down here and see what’s there.”
“I think it’s just houses, buddy.”
“That’s okay.”
We did a slow, long loop around a regular old suburban neighbourhood: house after house with siding ranging from beige to tan, one scraggly tree freshly-planted in every front yard. He stared out the window, fascinated. When we wound our way back to the main road, I asked him if there was anywhere else he wanted to go.
“No, that was great!”
And so we went to our appointment.
I’m usually pretty good at guessing what’s on my son’s mind and tuning in to his likes and dislikes, but I did not anticipate the bland neighbourhood tour. For him, though, there was a big blank space in his mental map of our area, and he found it so satisfying to fill it in. It was a good reminder for me that I can’t read his mind, and there are some thoughts bouncing around in there that I’m only going to hear if I give him the chance to tell me.
Not only that, but he didn’t exactly take the fastest route to get there—we made a couple of right turns by turning left over and over until he saw where he wanted to go. I could have pointed to the road he wanted and said, “no, it’s over on the right”, and headed straight there. But if I’d done that, we wouldn’t have laughed together at the funny-looking dog we passed after the second left turn, and I wouldn’t have had to chance to find out what his current favourite kind of dog is. If I’d just decided to go straight to the construction site to look at a crane and some diggers, I wouldn’t have the same insight into how he thinks about the area closer to home, even if it strikes me personally as way less interesting.
It was also a great metaphor for life as a five-year-old. Life is full of so many confusing choices for him, and there are gaps in what we wants to understand about the world. Sometimes he needs me to take the wheel, but sometimes he needs the chance to call the shots in a safe way. It turns out that sometimes I need it too, to shake up my ideas about what his world is like. And who doesn’t want to laugh at a funny-looking dog every now and then?