A cute thing happened today with our monster child. (I’m calling him that here because in the past few months he’s piled on several inches and morphed into a super-tall, gangly, rubbery, energetic, sassy, 12-year-old.)
He’s not a teen but…
He’s already somewhat not wanting to be seen doing anything with his parents. Yeah, it’s the usual.
Airsoft, Maple Story, Halo, Spore…that’s where it’s at. We lose a bit of our boy to Amerika during the 20 minutes a day we let him cast off his moorings and hook into someone’s profit-center (yikes, that sounds pretty bad).
But I can also still win him over to fresh air once a day.
And he still wants me to read a book out loud to him every day, too.
And even now he just MIGHT hold my hand for a few seconds while walking across a far, dark (scary) parking lot with no one else around…
The last couple times I talked him into XC skiing in the yard he instead opted to put on his snowpants and lay in ambush for me as I skied around, jumping out of the brush, attacking me with sticks and pine-cones and trying to wrestle.
I think he should be wrestling with neighbor kids for an hour a day, but there’s a new reality in today’s neighborhoods, I guess. There’s maybe 10 within a half mile, but the kids don’t get shoved out every day and forced to play with each other. (He is doing fencing at a nearby class, though, with an ex-NCAA coach, and going gungho for it.)
But here’s the cute part… Whenever we get outside doing something a ways away from the house he starts singing and humming to himself. It’s like he clicks back to being 6 again. No, as a friend said, he’s just becoming his real self. He forgets the Others and the Screens for a moment.
I keep thinking such moments will all be over with soon. But, actually, they should only become stronger. Sure, they’ll change — and perhaps fewer will remind me of when he was six — but I’ll do all I can to give him chances and spaces where he can keep becoming more and more himself.
So today I got him out for some real XC skiing (without the pinecones) and let him go first down the trail. After 10 minutes he’s skiing along — asking me questions that I can’t hear, about chemistry, about machine guns — when once again he starts singing to himself, singsongy, quietly, like he doesn’t know he’s doing it. And I think that’s pretty cute. And I look forward to watching where he goes…
