FROM TREES TO TOWERS

I am posting this essay that was written about 10 years ago.  Much has changed in our language and understanding of gender as a construct.  I will work on updating this to reflect more gender fluidity.  In the meantime, please feel free to substitute your favorite noun or pronoun for my use of the word "boy." My use refers to an inquisitive, energetic, impish child whose energy usually outlasts my own.

 Sensible parenting falls somewhere between oppressively strict and dangerously lenient, in that vast terrain that stretches from disconnected to “helicoptering”. I often struggle with negotiating the balance between technology and quietude, allowing my children to keep up with current culture and technology, while making sure that they know how to handle a world without electricity or constant cyber-madness. Can you entertain yourself? Get yourself something to eat? Handle emergencies, or a simple handshake?

Not having grown up with brothers, I’ve been surprised by how physically challenging parenting a boy can be. I remember one morning coming to terms with the fact that a forty-year-old woman and a four-year-old boy have vastly different ideas about how to spend a Saturday. I was trying to keep him safe, as he crawled all over the place, out of his crib, on top of sheds, in trees.

While it was tempting to plug him into something just to find his PAUSE button, I resisted that urge, pushing him instead in other directions: Get a stick, find a ball. My friend still laughs at the time she called and I was “just drawing” with my daughter, while she was crawling out of her own cramped house, looking for someone to accompany her and her son to the playground. When my boy came along, I called her and simply said “So, now I know why you didn’t get much coloring done.” She had already known that young boys had different ideas about Saturday.

Boys will busy themselves wrestling, shooting, hiding, jumping and building. A constant source of amusement and intrigue for me is witnessing backyards transform into battlegrounds, trees into towers and walls into sniper posts. An energetic, imaginative child can turn a sloping patch of grass into a football stadium or a baseball diamond.

Every once in a while, though, there are startling moments of surprise tempered only by amusement. Like last Saturday when I discovered my son in a recycling bin. Green barrel, lid closed, son tucked inside. My face registered how gross I thought it was. I suggested that he really didn’t want to be in there. Oh no, he reassured me, he did. Not only was it pretty clean (compared to the garbage bin apparently), it was comfortable. And evidently, I had narrowly missed the real action.

Like an astronaut home from orbit, he was just disembarking from his journey. While I had disappeared into the house to fold laundry, he and his cousin had been taking turns wheeling each other up and down the street in the recycling bin. Lid closed. At full speed.

Luckily they didn’t both fit inside together, so one lowered himself in, while the other held onto the handle and ran like a cowboy on an open plain.

So yeah, my story hasn’t changed much. We have vastly different ideas about how to spend a Saturday.

Megan Davis Collins confesses that she and her sister used to crawl around in the sewer like rats, but would never have climbed into a recycling bin. Boys are just different.