Carrying The Box

As my son Riley settled into two years of age, he developed a new tendency. Whenever we went up or downstairs, he insisted on bringing a box of his belongings with him.

We had a set of fabric boxes we’d bought before he was born. My wife Heather had been using similar ones for clothes storage and they seemed like a practical solution for him, too, without the harder edges or sharper corners of dresser drawers. We bought him colorful ones with the faces of cartoonish animals over them, and a plainer set of beige ones with dog faces printed on one side, floppy ears hanging off in three dimensions.

In that time when he had some words, but not a lot, he would simply cry No! No! No! if we forgot the box, or tried to sneak a trip up or downstairs without it. There was a box he brought most often, filled with his plastic trumpet, tambourine, drums, and maracas. But he added more. Books. Wooden cars. A miniature trolley from Daniel Tiger, which he then began filling with figurines from the show, as well as other miscellaneous ones.

It’s not that he played with these toys faithfully once he got up or down. In truth, the box and its contents often went untouched, especially upstairs where he spent most of his time sleeping. Still it seemed important to him to have these things near.

It got worse.

He overstuffed the box and added a big blue truck to his regular regimen of items to bring up and down, and toy plane. On occasion, particularly when he was tired, he’d let us get by with not bringing a box up, but then he’d still want to bring a different box down with a different set of toys, then want to bring both boxes back up. Heather foresaw the pattern before I did that we would escalate to two or three or four boxes consistently. Riley could climb up the stairs himself, but we didn’t trust his balance and footing going down—the fall too high and steep to risk letting him fall, so we typically carried him, or held his hands as he walked down. The former was more difficult while carrying his box(es). The latter impossible.

So we tried getting firmer. Just the one box. Most of the time. There was a morning when my head ached and when his screams of no! were particularly piercing, such that I gathered everything he wanted, closed the gate to the stairs behind me, then ran downstairs with all of his things and ran back up for him—not a sustainable solution by any stretch, but surviving the day.

And then he stopped.

There were a few trips between floors when we forgot or he forgot about the box. These instances strung together into consecutive occurrences, then spanned days, then weeks, the logistical nightmare over as suddenly as it had begun.

There was a day, settled into our new routines that didn’t involved toting extra boxes, when Riley carried an oversized flashcard up the stairs with him.

His climbing involved his hands. He was late to walk and even if his coordination were more advanced, the stairs were still tall for him. Carrying the card, thus, complicated his climb, until he developed a strategy, throwing the card up two steps, then climbing after it. Retrieving the card and throwing it upward again. Repeating until he’d reached his destination.

He repeated this approach with a ball the next day—a good principle, if a bit less efficient because the ball often as not bounced back, often bouncing further back behind him. But he took this in good humor, laughing rather than growing frustrated. I helped him some, and let him scramble after the ball others. Letting him learn. Letting him work it out.

But this sort of climb never became a routine the way the box did, and though we were grateful when Riley gave up the box, and only occasionally insisted on us taking a single toy or book that he was actively using when we traversed the stairs in the months to follow, I nonetheless got a little wistful thinking back on this ritual that used to be a part of every day.

I suppose that’s what it is to be a parent--to miss even the hard parts, the silly parts. To get a little sad at thinking we don’t have photos of this particular small thing, if only because our hands were too full to negotiate a phone while we were managing it all.

We did manage it all.

And at least for these years while he is so small and the world around him is so big, it’s hard to imagine not carrying the load for this boy.