Thursday nights the hockey school practices in the arena where the pro team plays, and hockey school overlaps with practice for the Junior Elites – the last step before a kid tries to make it in professional hockey. They’re 17, 18, 19 year old boys – men – and while I’m on the ice with the little kids the Elites are running their warm ups in the stadium. They run the stairs, playing a game of follow the leader where the first boy in line sets the drill: sometimes they run up as fast as they can touching every step with the balls of their feet, sometimes they jump up two steps then back down one then up two again, sometimes they run up on every other stair, sometimes they hop up on one leg. However they do it, it’s full gas to the top, then they jog over to the next aisle and down to get back in line to run the stairs again. These boys aren’t kids anymore, even if they are seventeen – if a kid is still in the SCB program by the time he ages into the Junior Elite level, he’s hands-down one of the best youth hockey players in the country. Those boys aren’t kidding around anymore, they’re looking to play professional hockey. Period.

I see these guys around the rinks, various versions of the future Small Boy – SB at twelve, SB at fifteen, SB at eighteen – and it’s disconcerting and exciting and mildly terrifying to imagine SB morphing into a big boy and then a man. It’s not the hockey I’m talking about here, I’m not imagining SB playing Junior Elite hockey, it’s just the vision of him tall and broad and muscular that’s hard to reconcile with my long stretched out boy of tendon and bone and high child’s voice. Somehow seeing these hockey players on a regular basis, and seeing them in their stair-step age groups, makes them more real to me than the fifth graders I see around town or the teenagers who take the train to school and work in the city. I know exactly how old those hockey boys are – the kids who take the ice Tuesday after SB have 1999 – 2002 birth dates – and I know exactly how far away SB is from looking like those boys. If I squint my eyes and tilt my head when the Mosis drill, it’s like seeing a vision of the future.

It’s like this, the now and the then in the same frame, and the staircase between them suddenly so unbearably short:

“As far as I know. Never noticed otherwise.” you message back. “Why? Are they not the same size now????”

“Nope.” comes the reply “one is larger – the left one – but could just be the light.”

At which point the only thing you can manage to type back is “What the FUCK?”

* * *

One of the small blessings of living right next door to R’s parents is that when this series of messages flew two weekends ago, my mother-in-law was able to walk across the driveway to take over putting The Boychen to bed and I packed a bag with some stuff for R and some stuff for SB – who was clearly going to be held overnight for observation – and drove to the hospital.

* * *

I’ll cut to the chase and say now that SB is okay. It was “just” a concussion; in spite of the most thorough opthalmological exam I’ve ever witnessed and a head MRI, no reason was ever found for SB’s unequal pupils. Here’s another thing you don’t really want, by the way: to watch over the technician’s shoulders as picture after picture of your son’s brain comes up on the screen. Pictures that you can’t read, and so you watch the tech’s body language instead, waiting for the widened eye, the sudden tilt of the head. It doesn’t come, but that doesn’t really make you feel any better until your kid is pulled out of the machine.

* * *

I’ve tried to write this a few times, it’s always a mess, brief paragraphs are the best I can do. Not even seven, a concussion, and though I know hockey players who have played for years and never gotten concussions, I find myself thinking “his first concussion” as if I expect more.

* * *

These recent articles in The New York Times about Derek Boogaard have not made me feel any better.

* * *

Trying to enforce a Sport-Verbot on a nearly seven year old physical boy used to playing hockey three times a week is not easy my friends. Not easy at all. SB has hated missing practice, hated being kept out of gym class at school, hates that I won’t let him play hockey in the driveway. The idea of being calm, and quiet and restful – it sort of makes him break out in hives I think and as a result his behavior at home has been … challenging.

This past Sunday was the Christmas party for SB’s team: a kids v. parents hockey tournament and then an early dinner. It was two weeks after the concussion, the earliest the doctors said he could start back with sports, and we thought it would be a good time to see how he feels – the tournament would be friendly and I would be right there on the ice to keep an eye on him. He played all three games and said he felt okay, but at bedtime he had a headache. He’s back on Injured Reserve and skipping training this week.

I played on the moms’ team and had the best time. I’ve been skating these past couple of years, but not playing hockey and this was hockey, with the full equipment, and even though it was a friendly match against the kids don’t be fooled: seven and eight year old boys play for keeps. They ran us hard. I still skate well, and I’ve got some game sense, but no puck handling skills at all; but I had so much fun that if I could somehow manufacture an additional twelve hours a week (stop laughing) I would run right out and join an adults’ recreational league because I had that much fun.

* * *

This is my new favoritest picture ever of me and the Small Boy. Look at that smile, do you think he was happy to be on the ice again? For all that hockey is a hard, physical, capricious and sometimes violent sport, anything that makes my boy smile like that has a place in this family. At least for now.

* * *

I am making pancakes when they start squabbling with each other in the living room; I let it go, giving them the space and time to figure out how to deescalate things themselves, but it goes in the other direction. Boychen hits the Small Boy, and I give him a two-minute penalty for unnecessary roughness, and Boychen tells me he doesn’t like me. I don’t like you, Mama! I’m sorry to hear that, I say, I still like you. But it stings.

* * *

Five minutes later they are happily putting together a puzzle of the United States. They finish it themselves, then come eat pancakes. Small Boy eats four. My mother used to joke that my brother, the hockey player, had a hollow leg. Yes, it would seem so. Boychen, the child who survives somehow on air and goldfish crackers, eats a respectable two. They drink their milk, ask if they are allowed to watch TV. The yelling, the hit, the penalty: forgotten

* * *

What will they remember from these teeter-totter childhood days? The horses and the puzzle, or the squabble?

And yes, I’ve read Siblings Without Rivalry although I suppose it’s time to read it again. In all my spare time. Actually I can read it next week, in the evenings, when I have nothing to do because R will be away on a business trip to the States.

And can somebody please tell me how it came to be the middle of September? And am I the only one wondering what has happened to the year?

Until last Monday, when I enrolled him in a vacation swim course for total beginners (and am very very grateful that there was another boy his age in the group so that he wasn’t the only almost first-grader in a class full of four year olds). He had classes every day for a week and at the end of the week he earned his first level badge, which basically means he jumps off the side of the pool into the water and puts his head under water – he’s still far from swimming. But he did it, and slowly came to enjoy it, and today he was retrieving objects from the bottom of the pool. Okay, it’s only one meter down but this is a pretty big step for a boy who tries to keep his head dry in the shower.

Unfortunately I signed him up for the summer vacation lessons so late that the next level classes are full for the rest of vacation; I’ll have to find something that meets once a week after school. Part of the reason I haven’t gotten him into lessons before now is that I try not to over-schedule him; he’s got hockey twice a week and I think that’s already rather a lot for a six year old boy. There is school, and there are playdates, and there is kid-time: I think there is a great deal to be learned from the throwing of rocks, the burying of mice, and the observing of frog eggs, to say nothing of the pure enjoyment factor, and I don’t want him to spend his days getting shuttled from one lesson to another. (Nor, to be honest, do I want to do that much shuttling.) But there are things besides hockey that he needs to learn, like swimming (he doesn’t need to be great at it but he needs to be competent enough that I can send him to a swim party without worrying) and things that he wants to learn, like tennis (I’m not sure where that came from, but he’s suddenly very interested in tennis), and these things are going to have to fit into the schedule somewhere. All while letting him take an hour to walk home from school, picking up every rock, feather, and flower that captures his imagination.

And the Boychen will have his own interests – he already enjoys the water more than Small Boy and is more comfortable in it, and I want to keep going with that while the enthusiasm is there. He wants to ride a proper bicycle. He likes music and would probably enjoy a music class. He also likes riding in the tractor with Grossvati, and walking in the woods with his Grossmutti, and puttering in the garden – he is a wonderful putterer – and doing anything with the Small Boy and I genuinely believe in not over-scheduling them because yesterday we walked in the woods and we spied a bird’s nest and when I held my camera-phone at just the right angle and took a picture we discovered that there was an egg in there and now there is the daily visiting of the nest to listen for the sound of a hatchling.

And I would hate to not have time for that in our day.

It’s also good to have break until the 25th to give the Small Boy time to get over his outrage at his trainer, who handed out perfect attendance awards after the final training tonight. An award which the Small Boy did not get (five kids out of 39 did) because he missed one training because it conflicted with a school play, and he’s pretty outraged about it. Not, exactly, about not getting the award, which was an SCB cap and scarf, but about the perceived injustice of it. He only missed the training because he was in a school play that he had to go to on the evening of the second training of the summer. The kindergarten had started practicing the play before we ever had a summer training schedule. It was a school thing. He had the lead role. It wasn’t his fault that he missed a training. It’s not as if he missed one because he didn’t feel like going, or was lazy, or we forgot, or just didn’t feel like it. It was a school thing. It’s not fair. (And it’ll likely happen again at some point, because in this house when there is a direct conflict between hockey and school, school will win. Until he’s 16 and can decide for himself, the rule is that school will win.)

I can see the Small Boy’s point that it wasn’t fair, especially when I see through the eyes of a Kindergartener, and I don’t entirely disagree with him, but it’s one of those tricky parenting moments when I’m supposed to be on his side, and agree that it’s not fair, and still teach him that coaches get to make their own rules and if you want to play on the team, you play by the coach’s rules and, by the way, life is unfair and you have to figure out how to roll with that. All while not undermining the coach’s authority along the way. Any tips?

I feel for him. He did everything right. He even, last week, chose to leave a birthday party – a swimming pool birthday party – 30 minutes early so that he would get to training on time. What kind of six year old kid decides that, on his own? I gave him the choice between staying at the party to the end and getting to training late; staying to the party to the end and skipping the training altogether (my preferred option, frankly); or leaving the party early to get to training on time and he said “Klar!” (because he speaks to me in German entirely too often these days) “doch logisch gehe ich ins Training. Hol mir einfach fruh ab.” (“That’s easy! Of course I’m going to training. Just pick me up early.”) Again, I ask you, what kind of six year old kid makes that kind of a choice? A really enthusiastic and committed one, and I’m hurt on his behalf that his commitment wasn’t recognized and honored. Of course he thinks it’s unfair. He’s not wrong.

He’ll get recognition from me (I’ve got plans, and they involve cake), but it’s not what he really wants. What he really wants is recognition from his coaches; he always has. These men who play such a role in his life. They’re going to teach him, and sometimes praise him, and sometimes break his heart, and I’m reminded again of what the head of the hockey school said to us parents once, thanking us for trusting the trainers with our children. The Small Boy’s puck control improved by leaps and bounds this summer and for that I’m grateful, but he got his heart broken just a little bit too and for that, well for that I’m sad even as I recognize that it’s part of sports and part of life.

He’s asleep now, the teary sleep of a six year old who didn’t get the reward that he genuinely believes he earned. And I’m typing this, the teary typing of a mother who agrees with him. Oh life in all your complicated unfairness, must you come knocking on his door so early?

It’s often the first thing the Small Boy says when he comes home at lunch-time, holding out a hand to share whatever treasure he found on the way home from Kindergarten that day. Usually it’s a rock that struck him as special; it’s all white, or it’s got a stripe through it, or it glitters a bit in the sun. Sometimes he’ll bring home a flower that he picked from the side of the road that runs between his Uncle J’s fields; the poppies are coming up and the other day he gave me his first poppy. Rarely, it’s a snail shell. He’s got a big glass vase for his special stones and snail shells and the occasional feather, his treasure chest.

So today, when he came home for lunch, calling out for somebody  to open the door, saying “Mama, look what I found!” I was expecting a rock. I was not expecting him to stick out his hand and show me the dead mouse he’d been carrying for the past quarter mile.

“Oh! Okay, you need to put that down. You can’t be holding that.”

“I just want to make it a grave.”

“Okay. Okay. Just put it down, we can make it a grave but now you need to go wash your hands with soap and water and when you’re done,” I add, taking a pump of anti-bacterial hand gel down off the counter, “you need a spritz of  this. There can be a lot of germs on dead things, just go wash your hands.”

“I’m sorry, Mama, I just wanted to give it a grave.” In his other hand, he’s carrying a flower he picked to put on the grave site.

“It’s okay. It’s okay, we’ll make it a grave. You didn’t know about the germs. Now you do. And I love that you want to give it a grave. Go wash up now.”

I leave the mouse on our doorstep, cover it with a box weighed down with a pair of R’s shoes so that one of the farm cats doesn’t snatch it before we can dig it a grave. I wish I could go back, take away my startled and slightly disgusted first reaction, give him the time to tell me about the grave so that the first thing I say can be “Oh, that’s sweet. Sure we can dig it a grave. You should probably go wash your hands, though. There can be a lot of germs on dead things.”

Later we go into the woods and find a hollowed out tree stump, more mausoleum than grave. We put in a bed of leaves, then the mouse with the flower, then cover it with ferns. Over the ferns the boys put more wildflowers and then a lattice of branches to prevent dogs from sniffing around.

“Sorry you died, little mouse,” we say, “but it’s pretty here, you’ll like it.”

Then the boys run off down the trail holding hands, dead mouse forgotten as, for little boys, it should be.

Let me tell you a little secret about the chicken pox. It’s not the pox that’ll kill you, it’s the cranky. And the boredom of a 10 day house-bound infectious period. Which leads back to the cranky. Also, the knowledge of impending doom ringing in your mind like overwrought background music in a horror movie: there is no way that 17-21 days from now Boychen’s not going to come down with this too and we’re going to go through the same thing all over again.

This, my friends, is why we own a TV.