Hurricanes and Maple Syrup

Beckett’s a peculiar eater.

His food can’t be sticky or messy. Ice cream and mac and cheese have been completely out of the picture. Last week, though, we were having pancakes for dinner, in honor of his Papa visiting, and Beckett decided to try maple syrup. His life was forever changed. 

We realized our finger-food-kid needed to figure out how to use a knife. We taught him how to hold it and angle it, but he struggled a bit. The next morning, he was drenching his leftovers in syrup and said, “Can you just cut it for me?” And I responded, “No.”

That was a big for me, not over-parenting to show my utter love and devotion for my boys. 

With Valentine’s Day upon us, I was thinking about what love looks like as we read the book Hurricane by John Rocco. This book is about a little boy that loves his neighborhood dock. He loves exploring the creatures below, fishing and cannonballing into the water. One day he walks home in that eerie pre-storm feeling and learns a hurricane is coming. The next morning he wakes up to the destruction of fallen trees and hanging gutters. Perhaps most significantly, he finds his dock has collapsed into the water.. 

He goes to his parents and neighbors to ask for help rebuilding, all of whom lovingly tell him they can’t right now, they’re all tending to their own mess. (Which is a lesson in and of itself!) He takes to the dock himself with hammers and nails. But, it’s too much for one person. He almost gives up, when along come his parents and neighbors, with all of the manpower to build a new dock with the boy, not for him.

A lightbulb went off with a parenting tenet that I will surely wrestle with my entire life — letting my kids struggle to solve a problem is a counterintuitive, but powerful way of showing love. In this book, the boy’s parents didn’t race to the dock to fix it for him. They let him try to solve the problem with a hammer and nails first.

This Valentine’s Day I’m reminded that one of the best ways I can show my boys love is through the gift of struggle, whatever their goal may be. Sometimes love means giving my peculiar little boy the gift of figuring out how to enjoy his pancakes with a little syrup on top.

#johnrocco