Tarry and the Space Between

Tarry talks a lot. She knows it. Her mum says she could talk the ears off a donkey, and her best friend says she narrates her whole life like a nature documentary.

So the first time Tarry played with Kit, it went like this.

“Shall we build a castle? Let’s build a castle. This can be the tower, and this can be the gate, and we need a moat, what shall we use for a moat? Ooh, the blue scarf! Where’s the dragon going to live? I think the dragon lives at the top. Do you think the dragon is friendly? I think he’s friendly.”

Kit, who was five, said, “Yes.”

“Brilliant! Now the knights. How many knights do we need?”

“Three,” said Kit.

They built a castle. It was a good castle. But afterwards Tarry noticed that Kit had said about six words in twenty minutes, and all of them were answers to her questions.

She told Sola about it. “He’s very quiet,” she said.

Sola smiled. “Is he? Try something next week. Every time you say or do something, count to five in your head before you say anything else.”

“Five?” said Tarry. “That’s ages.”

“It feels like ages,” said Sola.

The next Saturday, Kit was at the block basket. Tarry sat down and put one block on the rug.

One. Two. Three. It felt horribly long. She wanted to say “shall we build a castle?” so badly that her mouth was half open. Four. Five.

Kit picked up a block and put it next to hers. Then another. Then he said, “This is a road.”

Tarry nodded and added a block to the road. She waited again. One, two, three, four.

“And here’s where the bus stops,” said Kit, “because the man wants to get off, because he lives in the house, but the house isn’t built yet, so he has to build it, and he’s got a hammer.”

Tarry nearly fell over. That was more words than Kit had said in the whole of last week.

They played for half an hour. Tarry said maybe ten things. Kit told her about the bus driver, the man with the hammer, the man’s cat, and a pond where the cat was not allowed to go. Every time Tarry left a gap, Kit filled it with something she would never have thought of.

“He’s not quiet at all,” Tarry told Sola afterwards. “He just needed room.”

That’s the Wait move. A little kid’s brain often needs a bit longer than ours to get an idea out. If we fill every gap, they never get to go first. So you do one thing, a block, a word, a silly face, and then you leave a space for them.

The silence feels awkward. Tarry still finds it awkward. Some days she has to count very slowly in her head while her mouth tries to start talking on its own. But she has noticed something. In the gaps, little kids lead. They make choices. They tell you what the game is really about.

Tarry still talks a lot, at lunch, on the bus, in the corridor. But on the Playroom rug, she has learned to tarry.

One thing. Then five quiet counts. Then see what they do.