“Son, I understand you’re tired, but pull yourself together. Now you’ll have English, after that – capoeira, and after that, you’ll go straight home.” The boy yawned and held a toy dinosaur firmly in his hands, while his mother was taking his warm pants off.
“This is Allosaurus” the boy suddenly decided to acquaint me with his toy. “Everyone thinks that it is Tyrannosaurus, but in fact it is Allosaurus.”
“Wow, I also mistakenly thought that it was a Tyrannosaurus, they are very similar.”
“Well, apparently, they are, but not too much. They’re both Theropods, but they’re completely different dinosaurs.”
“Son, the lady is not interested in your dinosaurs.”
“Why not? I am interested.”
“You see, we still have to review the German material. He is forgetting everything, he keeps nothing in his head. Today he even left his folder in the art school, so I had to bring him over to the dancing class and run back to the art school to fetch it.”
The boy was yawning. And looked at his feet. He was about to start another lesson for today.
“And have you already chosen your school?”
I was quite confused, because, thank God, I graduated from school long ago. I barely figured out that it was me who was equalled with somebody else’s daughter waiting on a chair nearby. I explained to the woman that the child wasn’t mine. At that moment a shadow of suspicion fell on the woman’s face as if she thought that I was some serial killer. I had to tell her why I was here and what I was waiting for. That I also have a child that is still in the kindergarten, that we haven’t chosen a school yet – that we intend to apply to the nearest few to our home, and the rest comes down to luck. I seemed to have become the biggest disappointment to this tired, but such a fervent mother. For a long time, she could not believe that there are people in this world who don’t live in elite areas, who take their children to public kindergartens and don’t dream of their children attending some famous academy for some academic development of children.
“When we were two years old, we started attending an English course. At the age of three, we started dancing. He whined a lot before the dancing lessons, but he needs it – it’s his development. And then we decided that he also needed French and German. I barely found the kindergarten where there are genuine French teachers. I knew what school we were going to attend when he barely started crawling. That is a very good school, it is difficult and expensive to get in. We need to drive him through the whole city, but the school is very good. They introduced fencing there, so we had to take fencing classes as well – in the kindergarten they said he was frail and had some fine motor skills issues. Can you imagine? We also joined the art school. But he’s totally ungrateful! He would suddenly lie down on the mat during the fencing class and refuse to do anything. Apparently, the coach is bad, he doesn’t even kick him out. At the art school, he doesn’t draw normal pictures – just some scribbles and dinosaurs. He doesn’t want to learn French at the kindergarten, so we signed him up for an additional French course. He only keeps quiet or laughs at the German lessons. And nowadays the teachers are not forcing pupils to do anything. Anything. You pay them money, and they don’t even make a single shout to force him to work. And next year we need to go to school! And we need to get enrolled, but there are only dinosaurs in his head. Is your daughter attending any courses?”
“English.”
“And that’s it???”
I was obviously the biggest disappointment in her life. No one could possibly traumatize her more with such maternal negligence than I did. At the same moment, she grabbed her phone and started to look for something in it. I exhaled with relief. Because for some reason it was physically painful for me to listen to the life story of that boy, these never-ending courses, lessons, classes when he only wanted to watch the dinosaur’s teeth, fly paper planes from the balcony, smell trees or watch the rain roll down the window glass for a long time.
Only later I will start to doubt and think that perhaps I’m a bad mom. I will tell my friend about it, and she will laugh and say that I’m indeed a bad mom – because I didn’t annoy my child with my requirements, my dreams and my plans since birth. And the other friend will say that we are all bad moms in some ways, because no matter how hard we try – our children will anyways speak with therapists about us.
“Kids-projects” – I don’t how they are as grown-ups. How much happiness they contain, and how much love, what measures of progress they learn in their lives. Who are they, “kids-projects”, and how does it feel to fly on their parents’ wings?
Tatusya Bo