"I Can, Too!"

Large isn’t the first word I’d use to describe my son’s bedroom. Or the second. Or the third. You know the kind--it’s the starter-home special, the just-big-enough-to-fit-a-(small)-bed-and-maybe-a-dresser second bedroom. But Honey Bear and I are magicians, or maybe just delusional, because my son’s bedroom contains the one (small) bed, not one but two dressers, and a poofy rocker-recliner the color of warm caramel.

The rocker-recliner’s great. We found it on clearance at our local if-we-teleported-the-place-to-the-East-Coast-it-would-squish-the-entire-state-of-Rhode-Island furniture outlet, and it’s so soft and, well, rock-y. Honey Bear has visions of someday moving it to the family room (when we actually have a family room, that is), but right now, it lives in I-gots’s room, in the corner. And gets in the way.

That's what it was doing last week, at least. I-gots--that's what my son called himself up until a few days ago--wanted to play in his room, so my eight-month-old daughter and I were sitting in the chair, watching, and throwing off I-gots’s groove. A random toy had somehow slithered behind the rocker-recliner, and that, of course, was the toy he wanted to play with.

“You can’t get it right now,” I told him. “We might squish you.”

(We’re not quite as big as the furniture outlet, mind you, but then, I-gots’s not quite as big as Rhode Island.)

“I get it!” he assured me.

“No, I-gots. You can’t.”

So I-gots backed out of the tiny gap he’d been trying to squeeze through, and I thought to myself, “See what a good mother I am? And I-gots is such an obedient child.”

Well, I-gots is pretty obedient, but on that particular day, he was in more of a problem-solving mood. If he couldn’t get the toy from one side of the chair, then maybe he could get it from the other.

I realized what he was doing once he started pressing himself into the other gap, and responded accordingly.

“No, I-gots,” I repeated. “You can’t get the toy right now.”

“I get it!”

“No, honey,” I said, a little less patiently this time. “You can’t do it!”

And then I-gots reared back, in all of his two-year-old glory, and put both little hands on his hips, and exclaimed, “I can, too!”

His words--and mine, after hearing myself say them like that--stunned me. Of course he COULD do it; in fact, when I looked down at that moment, I realized that the toy was right there, a few inches in front of him, barely behind the chair at all. But hearing myself say that out loud--“You can’t do it!”--made me realize how much I never wanted to hear myself say that again.

I want to be I-gots’s cheerleader. I want to be the supporter of dreams. I always want to be able to say, “Yes, I-gots, you can.” Because even if he can’t, he has to learn that for himself. No one, especially me, should tell him otherwise.

I am Mom, after all, and that makes me, if nothing else, a believer.