“Dad, where are the pandas?”
My almost 5-year-old asked me this while walking down the road this weekend. He had caught up with me during my morning walk. Running full speed with no shoes down our holler. He tugged at my hand when he asked, but the question didn’t quite register at first. “Do what, buddy?” I leaned down to ask him.
Ian stopped and pointed into the woods beside us. There’s bamboo across the road from us. It’s not incredibly uncommon to see the neighborhood boys running around with bamboo swords. Ian pointed toward the woods and started chopping the air with his hands like a politician making an important speech.
“We have bamboo!” he said emphatically. “So why don’t we have any pandas?!”
I didn’t have a great answer for him. “You know what, that’s a good question,” was my reply. We finished our walk while he educated me on the eating habits of pandas. And what pandas looked like. And how there are pandas in Minecraft. But they only spawn in the jungle. But they eat bamboo. And maybe cake? Well, you get the picture.
We have bamboo. So, we should have pandas.
Even though I thought our panda conversation was cute, and I was so intrigued by how his little mind works, it made me think. I don’t want to go full LinkedIn cringe here, but it did make me a little introspective.
What’s the thing I expect to have just because I’ve got part of the puzzle? What expectations am I holding onto because I’ve done part of the work?
Ian doesn’t know pandas don’t live in southeast Ohio. He doesn’t know they need a habitat and all those things (that, honestly, I don’t either). Maybe a trip to the zoo is in order.
But just because we have bamboo doesn’t guarantee the pandas.
Just because I have done my part doesn’t guarantee me results.
What expectations do I have that I’ve confused with a guarantee?
What’s my bamboo?
Meg and I struggled for a few years to have this barefoot little boy rambling about pandas. And we struggled with infertility for several years before trying to have his older brother. While it’s easy to look back with gratitude now that we have two healthy and ornery little boys, the journey wasn’t easy.
Years of struggles and tests. More questions than answers. Never knowing if we would ever have kids. And then not knowing if we’d ever have another. Those years were tough for us. We questioned lots of things and earned some scars that may never heal. At the core of the struggle was expectation and disappointment.
“I just don’t understand.”
“It just doesn’t seem fair.”
“We’ve done everything the right way.”
We might as well have been saying
“We’ve got bamboo. Why don’t we have pandas?!”
Truth is, there was so much we didn’t understand. And so much we still don’t. My boys have taught me so much about life. More than they will ever know.
But maybe their greatest gift has been teaching me to be grateful for the rambunctious little pandas when they do show up.
Besides, we do already have bamboo.
It's so wonderful when children make us look at things from a completely different angle.
We focus on teaching them (which is important, of course) but eventually we learn more than we teach.
I love the lessons our kiddos teach us. Thank you for the insightful question I’ll be chewing on for a while.