Giving My Middle Child a Few Moments in the Spotlight Was So Worth the Effort
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I don’t know what it’s like to be a middle child. I’m the youngest in my family and my closest sibling is eleven years older. So, when I was growing up, I was the only young kid in the house. I had plenty of individual attention from my parents, siblings, and moody chihuahua.
All my children are experiencing a much different kind of childhood. One lived as part of a small tribe. A tribe that is peaceful and united one moment and engaged in all out civil war the next. I can only imagine how different it is to share the spotlight every day of your young life. But perhaps it is most different for my younger son, our middle child.
Our oldest child had a few years when he was the only little one in the house. The Sun to our Earth. And now, my daughter has plenty of alone time with me or my wife while the older two are in school. My five-year-old son, however, has never been alone. He’s never been the soloist on stage. There are occasions when he has a soccer game or other event and one of us takes him by himself, but we almost exclusively travel in a pack.
We go to playgrounds at our local parks often, it’s one of our primary pastimes, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve taken my five-year-old to the playground by himself.
By some weird alignment of events, however, I recently took him on a solo trip to the playground on a Friday evening. My wife was off work and we had just come home from the boys’ gymnastics class. My seven-year-old didn’t want to go the park and the three-year-old had her finger poked by a bush she was playing in outside the gymnastics facility, so she was clearly in no condition to venture outside the home.
So it was that my middle child and I made the short drive to the park. Alone. It was another warm October day, but as a Florida native, I noticed the slightest hints of fall. Primarily, my shirt wasn’t instantly dripping when I stepped out of the car at six in the evening and the alligators seemed slightly mellower than normal. Like they had been sipping an early cocktail or maybe they had finally tried CBD.
The park wasn’t too busy. Although, that friend I made awhile back, remember him? He was there! And it was a different park. Anyway, he didn’t seem to remember me, but that wasn’t devastating at all. The point of this story is my sometimes-overlooked middle child and so let’s stick to that, please!
With no siblings to block his light, my son took the opportunity to show me everything he could do.
He made up two obstacle courses, showed me how to do them, and dominated me at them.
He hung upside down from the climbing bars.
He slid part way down the curvy slide, stopped, climbed over the edge, and slid down the support pole like a firefighter (see picture above — he was fine, I promise).
He did the zipline by himself.
He soared high on the swing without me pushing him and explained that, while he could jump off, he didn’t want to at the moment.
He told me he knew how to say “fire truck” in Spanish.
He balanced carefully on the middle bar of the bouncy see-saw-like thing with a frog on one end and a duck on the other.
He tried to do the monkey bars, but they weren’t the kind he liked, really, so he decided to table that activity till later.
He got a running start and leapt over the low plastic barrier that lines the edge of the playground.
His endless chatter and extreme commitment to conquering every piece of playground equipment made it clear that he had no desire to ever go home.
I couldn’t blame him. Who would want to leave the peaceful bliss of a mostly empty playground on a early autumn day to return to a steel cage death match for parental attention?
Eventually, though, we had to leave. It was getting dark, and more importantly, I was getting hungry. We walked from the playground toward the car. He trailed a few steps behind me on the path made of crushed shells and white dirt. The last of the daylight slipped away as we buckled into the car.
It was back to the grind, but first, my son had one more request.
“Can I pick all the songs on the way home?”
Absolutely, buddy.
He chose Old Town Road three times in a row. It was only fitting. He wanted to ride that solo horse until he couldn’t no more.
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