The boys have swimming lessons on Wednesday afternoons, and lately I've been running during Alex's lesson while the three younger boys play in the childcare room. Yesterday I dropped them off and said, "I'm really not sure how Pete is going to do. He's had a clingy day. Please overhead-page me if he has any trouble -- I don't want him to cry."
There's a window between the childcare room and the track, and four laps later I saw him standing alone by the door -- I knew he was saying, "Mama? Mama?" Two laps after that I saw him crying in a staffer's arms. A lap later I stopped running and went to get him. He was red-faced and wailing; the staffer said, "Oh, he's fine."
I understand that they deal with a lot of parents who don't want their workouts interrupted, who are irritated if they're summoned to come get a crying child. But if I say, explicitly, "Please let me know if he's unhappy at all," is that complicated?
I wouldn't even be posting about it except for the comment: "Oh, he's fine." You know, in my little corner of the world, fine ≠ crying inconsolably. If she had said, "I was going to call you in three more minutes if I couldn't settle him down," I wouldn't be grumpy about it today.
This was going to be a longer post -- I was going to tell you about the mother at Joe's preschool whose theory is that kids only cry to make us feel guilty, and not because they're actually sad -- but Pete is still pretty needy today. And it would be the height of irony for me to keep telling my own unhappy child to go entertain himself so I could complain dramatically about all the people in the world who don't CARE that young children have REAL NEEDS etc. So I won't. Off to hold my little guy.
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