All the Children Are Mine
But do I really have to push them?
On an unseasonably warm end-of-winter day, my kids are carousing at the park with a gaggle of other preschool-aged children. On and off the swings, down the slide, swinging from the monkey bars and fighting over who got to bang on the plastic drum set. I am in the middle of pushing my two-year-old on a baby swing he’s nearly outgrown when another child approaches me. Five or six, perhaps, a similar age to my older son. “Push me too,” he demands.
I pause. There’s no please, no request, no politeness of any kind, nothing to intimate that I am a stranger who does not owe him entertainment or assistance. Who is raising this kid? I think, while out loud I say, “Can you ask your mom or dad? I’m pushing my little boy right now.”
He asks again a few more times, wending his way through the playground and back to me again, and each time I am perfectly polite to him but internally I become more and more annoyed. This isn’t my child. I have enough to deal with. It’s not my job to keep him occupied on the playground. Where are his parents and why aren’t they stepping up?
