Trains and New Beginnings
an essay by Lucy Huber
Something strange happened to me at the botanic garden recently. I took my kids there before Christmas to see some model trains. Amongst the fake greenery and the little model lumber yards, an emerald green train puffed towards us.
“Look! It’s Emily!” I exclaimed, catching the ear of a volunteer who, embarrassingly, said, “Wow! Good job! You know your Thomas trains!” likely assuming I was a four-year-old child and not a 37-year-old woman. But my four-year-old Elliot looked confused. “Who?”
Excuse me? I thought. What do you mean who? Emily! Emily, the emerald green engine! Emily, number 12, a member of the Steam Team! Emily, whose story about looking for a best friend we’d probably listened to 38 times on the way to preschool drop-off on the Thomas the Tank Engine podcast. Emily! Emily the Train!
But Elliot’s expression didn’t change. Did he not remember?
When he was two, my son Elliot became obsessed with trains. I know a lot of people say their kid is obsessed with trains, but it’s hard for me to explain the level to which Elliot was obsessed with trains. It wasn’t just something he loved, it was like a deep primal urge to exist within a realm of train-ness that I don’t think is possible for an adult with a fully formed brain to comprehend. Elliot adored trains, he adored them so much that seeing them made him slightly angry. I suspect, somewhere in the back of his mind, he understood that no matter how many trains he saw or read about or heard or even touched at the American History Museum, he could never fully consume the amount of Train his brain wanted and that made a small part of him burn with rage. He wanted, in some way that does not exist, for his molecules and trains’ molecules to simply blend together into a transcendent state of Train.
When we went to see model trains, which we were doing a lot at the time, he would just stand in one spot and stare at them, slightly tense and on edge, as if afraid at any moment if he moved too quickly, the concept of trains might disappear forever. We once stood in 35 degree weather watching some model trains at the Botanic Gardens for two hours straight. I watched other little kids come and go, look at the trains for a few minutes, get bored and wander off, but Elliot just stood there, transfixed for two hours straight. At some point I started to get scared if I moved trains would stop existing, so I, too, stood there silently for two hours straight.
We went to train shows and train museums, bought train toys, train books. I learned how steam trains work and which country had bullet trains and where their routes went. And of course, watched and listened to and read endless hours of Thomas the Tank Engine, and played with the toys on his wooden railroad tracks pretty much every day. Everyone in the family was well-acquainted with the characters, their mythology, the topography of the Island of Sodor, the family tree of Sir Topham Hatt.
As I watched Emily puff towards us, I thought about it. It had been quite a while since Elliot had requested to listen to the Thomas podcast on the way to school. Thomas episodes had sat unwatched on our TV for months. But how could he just not remember all the hours we’d spent with Thomas and the Steam Team? My husband spoke in Diesel’s thick Cockney accent so much there were times I was afraid he couldn’t actually stop. Once Elliot lost his wooden Thomas train and I’d been in tears tearing the house apart looking for it. But I realized I had no idea where that Thomas even was now. At some point he’d put him away and just never picked him up again.
“Oh right, Emily,” he said. OK, so he didn’t forget about Emily. But something was different. That fury had disappeared. He no longer wanted to merge with the trains into a train-boy hybrid. He just seemed to enjoy them a normal, human amount. I realized that little by little, trains had dropped out of our lives.
But where did that leave my relationship with trains? Trains had become just as much a part of me as it they were a part of him. Thomas and trains were so entrenched in our daily lives that our house’s Wi-Fi network is called Tidmouth Sheds. But now it was gone. Where did it go? I’d never be asked, “be Emily, mama!” and have to hold up her train and do a stupid little British accent. That part of his childhood had just been bricked up inside an old tunnel like when Henry didn’t want to get his new paint job wet.
I know they say “it goes so fast” and every day I scoff at people who say that while I pass the hours with my kids, trying to cook dinner while they wrestle toys neither one of them cared about 24 hours ago out of each other’s hands, vacuuming rice off the dining floor (again), changing a diaper while being woken up for the third time in one night because someone is coughing or peeing or had a bad dream about the angry combine harvester from the movie Cars. But to Elliot, his Thomas obsession with a whole lifetime ago, he barely remembered it, but to me it was… yesterday?
I know this will keep happening as my kids get older. I’ll get invested in something and they’ll just move on like it was nothing and I’ll be left alone gripping a wooden Thomas, trying to learn who this new version of my kid is. I remember my own childhood as this vast, long time that seemed like it would never end but watching my kids grow up, it all feels so sudden. I want to hold each version of them, to remember them exactly how they were in every moment. Yesterday my two-year-old daughter said “tada!” instead of, mistakenly, “teedee!” She’ll never say “teedee!” again. Can you believe that? I loved “teedee.”
But in other ways, I’m in awe of watching them grow. At the trains this year, Elliot still had fun, but his intensity was gone, replaced instead by curiosity. This time instead of staring at the trains motionless, he wanted to do a little scavenger hunt game they’d set up. And he could do it, all by himself. He wasn’t the same kid as he was two years ago, no. He keeps starting over. He keeps getting better.
For adults, it feels like you don’t get a lot of chances to have new beginnings. You get New Year’s, when it’s legally required you become a brand new person who loses 10 pounds and eats kale (and likes it) and finally figures out a place to store scissors in their house instead of “in every drawer, wherever.” But you fail at that, usually, and then it’s hard to find the time and energy to ever really start fresh. But not for kids. They’re just naturally ready for the next thing all the time. And as their parent, maybe I can do that, too. Move on from all the times I’ve made a mistake, when I yelled or made a joke that didn’t land at preschool pick up in front of the Much Cooler Thinner Moms Who Do Actually Like Kale. How lovely not to be burdened with who you used to be four long months ago. See you later Thomas, on to something new. Teedee!
Our January theme is “new beginnings.” Check back next Thursday for another essay on this topic by .
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Oh, Lucy. I feel this so much. I joked when my son was a baby that he was teaching us gibberish faster than we could teach him English. He has pronounced instead as "in-steed" for a while now, i.e. "no water, I want milk INSTEEEEED" and recently he corrected me to the standard pronunciation when I said "insteed." The possibility of this guy being a new kiddo around every corner keeps me guessing but what a valuable hope to carry through hard days.
Saw Justin Bieber twice for my kid. First time, I had to squeeze her in my arms, as she trembled and sobbed. She felt like human go gurt, her bones seemingly gone, a floppy human form. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t talk. She was motionless, but also quivering. We were in the cheap seats, and I was convinced she’d lurch forward and fall to the bottom of the Boston Garden, and evaporate.
The second time, within in that same year, as Biebs emerged on stage, she only shook briefly. She behaved like a normal, excited concert goer. Expecting another night of Bieber fever, I was surprised. Her Justin fever had broken.
It is more than a decade later, and JB’s pricey concert swag we bought that night, is boxed in the attic. She told me to throw it out. But I won’t. All my Justin knowledge fading, I know I still remember more about him than her now.
And she forgets who she was then, but I remember that too.
Isn’t it crazy to see?