He figured out reading eventually. Not on anyone else's schedule, on his. The maps are still happening, they've got more detailed if anything. He made one recently that had its own mythology written in the margins. I don't know what any of that means for his future. I genuinely don't. I just know I almost made him feel like the best parts of himself were beside the point.
The story everyone tells, the instant overwhelming love thing, I think it sets you up to feel like something is wrong with you when it doesn't arrive on schedule. Maybe it does happen like that for some people. But a slow build is also real. It's not a flaw, it's just a different shape.
Taking it away was so much harder than not giving it so freely in the first place. We spent about eight months doing slow boring afternoons on purpose, just sitting with the discomfort together, him and me both. Some days were genuinely awful. I kept thinking about how much easier it would have been to just not start the habit. I still don't fully know if we're through it.
It wasn't a character flaw that needed resolving. It was a thing that was happening in my body. I know that now in a way I didn't when I was in it. Not sure knowing it then would have helped though, honestly.
They do not hear the rules you say. They watch the thing you do at three in the afternoon when you think nobody is looking. I thought I was just knackered and cutting corners, I did not think I was teaching anything. Turns out I was teaching constantly.
I think when you never explain yourself to a kid they don't learn to follow logic, they learn to wait you out. And then when they're big enough to wait you out properly, they do. I'm not sure it's more complicated than that. We were the adults so we made the rules, and that was fine, but we never once said here's why this rule exists and here's what we're actually worried about. So they never had a reason to care about the rule itself, only about whether we were watching.
I think what I took from it is that if you pay a kid every time they're decent, they learn that decency has a going rate. And when you stop paying, why would they bother. Some stuff is just what you do when you live with other people. We muddied that for a while.
I think I was scared of them being bored because when I was growing up boredom felt like something was wrong. My mum worked a lot and there was nobody home after school most days and bored meant lonely. So I think I just. I don't know. Filled it all in so they wouldn't feel that.
But they weren't lonely. They had each other and they had us and they just needed an afternoon with nothing in it. The sticks and crates thing. Theo spent four hours one Sunday drawing a map of an imaginary country and naming all the towns. He never would have done that before because there was never four hours.
I'm not saying I had it all wrong. The swimming has been good for him, he genuinely loves it. But most of the rest of it was mine not his. I was handing him a packed schedule and calling it opportunity.
I think the apology told him something he needed to know. That I wasn't one of those dads who just moves on and pretends. That he was allowed to be upset when I got things wrong.
I don't know that it changed everything though. I still lose my temper sometimes. I'm still not great at it.
I should've let them mess up a small amount at fifteen instead of a large amount at twenty three. That's it really. A tenner lost on something stupid at home is cheaper than. Well.