Train Trip

Max took a train this morning to my mother's. He left at 7:15 with Miriam, Sophie, Rick and my mom, carrying two Richard Scary books, three pullups, blank paper, seven magic markers and Blue Blanket in his "Max" school backpack. His last words before falling asleep and his first words on waking were that he had changed his mind about wanting to go on the trip, but Rick said by the time he and Sophie left them all on the train at Penn Station, he was good to go, armed with a chocolate croissant.

Max is fascinated by trains but not in the way that many little boys are. He was terrified last summer when, waiting for Rick's train in Westerly RI, an Acela passed through the station. He literally jumped into my arms, and wailed until we were in the car. He didn't even want to wait for Rick's slower train to come, and talked about the scary train for weeks. But he also in the fall, concocted an elaborate secret fantasy with Miriam, where they planned how they would take the train to Grandmother and Dziadzi's house by themselves. It was the first of many planning conversations that have got Max and Miriam through the tough companionship that's being forced on them this year sharing many pick ups and drop offs at school, and it broke down eventually into arguments about the plans, but lasted for days before deteriorating.

I wonder about this intersection between fear and desire. Because when we saw that scary train, we were staying at the thunderstorm beach house, the name coming from a two and a half year old memory of a thunderstorm that Max dug out of a four year old brain. The thunder claps he remembered were remarkable. Back when we were cowering in bed that night in a one floor slant roof extention to a rickety three season house, where the walls were made primarily of glass, Max was on the verge of a new life––new house, new friends and cousins sharing under the same roof. Plus, later that year, a sister. And all that came with it––time outs, rules, a schedule that was not his.

At the train station, when the Acela ran by, his fear response was way more developed and nuanced than it had been during the thunderstorm, but also elemental and simple, the way all of ours are. Planning his train trip with Miriam, he was combatting his fear of a new school. This morning, his instinct was to cancel his adventure. And yet he went.

I know that this is how it should be, and yet I find myself left with a really intense fear response myself. Something abstract, because I know he's fine and I want him to go and Eliza and I have big plans for the time he's away (aside from the 8 hours of babysitting I've signed her up for each day), but still, if I'd had my druthers I would have held onto him this morning, instead of giving him a brisk kiss and pointing him toward the door.