It is the middle part of summer. This is the part where I’m kind of bored and very anxious that summer is going by too fast. My kids are good kids, but they have had enough of each other. There has been enough downtime and we’ve used up a lot of our great ideas for entertainment. They can be alone for an ever tightening window of somewhere between ten minutes and thirty seconds before earnestly trying to kill each other. The games that make them want to kill each other are the games they love the best. From upstairs, where I am definitely not sleeping anymore, thanks, it mostly sounds like everything is fine and then the big one is screaming at the little one. The little one is sneaky and I know better. They just don’t see the world the same way.
Wesley is my squish-hearted eight year old. He is kind first if kind is possible. Wes is earnest and conscientious. He organized a student group called “Litter Dominators” in the first grade and has been spearheading playground cleanups with his friends for more than a year. He has requested that I stop signing him up for organized sports. Wes prefers guitar, theater and robotics at the moment.
When he was a baby, strangers would pause in the grocery store and listen to him talk. He has always loved language. His humor has always been wordy too. He is quick witted like his father and his on-the-fly puns have been making me genuinely laugh for a long time. I just about fell off the dock when he dubbed the four-stepped swim later at the cottage a “good quadrilateral.” He rolled his eyes at me when I made him define quadrilateral. I don’t know why I was surprised when he could.
He came into the world overwhelmed by the sensory input of it all. He still pulls a blanket over his head when he’s in the living room and prefers not to stack social engagements so that he has time to be alone. Wes retires to his room for an hour every evening before bed and studiously divides his time between twenty minutes of guitar practice, twenty minutes of reading, and twenty minutes of free play where he may draw, write a story or imagine. He usually plays his favorite podcast in the background. He was thrilled when we told him he could read until he felt tired because it was summer. He keeps checking to make sure that he isn’t up too late because his book is really good.
With Wesley, gifts are easy because he loves things with his whole heart. We had so many intense phases. Wesley has loved sea creatures, dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, pokemon, harry potter, greek and roman mythology and rocks. Wes pours over the guidebooks to his Pokemon, skylanders and other anthologies and memorizes facts and battle stats. He likes to know everything there is to know. His interest is sated by volume and obscurity. He sometimes absorbs information without digesting it. I will never forget the look on his preschool teacher’s face when he told her that Australopithecus (a very early human ancestor) mated face to face. He had no idea what that meant, and I hope he’s not only kid whose parents were too late to consider the uncomfortable conversations necessitated by that part of our child’s voracious consumption of BBC nature programs. Wes strives for authenticity. When he was in preschool, his plastic animals were under the stewardship of a generic action figure “Super David Attenborough” and he always attempted a Brittsh accent. He cannot squash the instinct to correct anyone who has used a term incorrectly. It’s the worst, but my husband would like you to know that he gets this from me.
Wes is into epic tales of good and evil. He likes to go to the backyard and imagine these battles with his whole body. He makes sound effects, bends, twists and darts. He often gets so excited by an idea that he runs out the door to go pretend it out right that second. He likes elemental battles that work a bit like twelve dimensional rock paper scissors. He prides himself in knowing how it all works. He has started to invent his own board games.
Cheaters and rule breakers offend him personally. He likes the rules because he likes to know what to expect. The rules are the bones of the world. They come first. The better you know the rules, the more fun the game. Anyone out to skirt the rules is out for a bigger share of the pie than they deserve. As soon as the rules are broken, the offender is trying to take something from someone else and Wes will not have it. An infractor’s awareness of the rules does little to mitigate the offence. The games he likes are complicated. It is easy to break the rules accidentally. Enter little brother and their bi-hourly screaming match about why Mac’s early Beyblade launch was “so not fair.” Beyblades are Japanese battle tops and I hate them, how I hate them.
Malcolm is four and a half. He came into the world uncomfortable. He had a club foot and wore casts and braces. He had a floppy windpipe that caused squeaky breathing. He produced a poor immune response to pneumococcal bacteria and was constantly battling infections. He coughed and puked nightly for years. If you met this child during this time, you never would have known. It’s why it took such a long time to have his medical concerns appropriately addressed. He was climbing the walls and charming the medical staff and he looked completely fine. He holds nothing for the back half. Malcolm will party until he cannot party anymore and what happens after that is not pretty.
Malcolm is intense. He once told me, “I think my face looks mean when I’m not thinking anything.” Not many four-year olds are troubled by their own resting bitch face, but that’s Malcolm. He’s aware. His interest is fleeting and unpredictable. Mac’s favorite toys have included a brown ball of string, a small stuffed dog, plastic lizards to be used exclusively in the bath, freebie orange sunglasses from a brewery, and an ever growing stash of plastic easter eggs. He likes to tie fake leashes to scary stuffed beasts. I am never really sure what Malcolm will like, but Malcolm knows right away. Malcolm has never been into baby stuff. When he was little, I remarked often that he hated to be addressed in motherease. It annoyed him to be treated like a baby, even when he was a newborn. I was the only one screaming “duuuuuude.” across the playground to rebuke my toddler. He has always known that farts are funny. He insists that I sunscreen his entire butt just to be safe. You never know when it might be out, and a red crack would be the worst.
He was later to talk, and I often have the sense that Malcolm’s language is catching up to his thoughts. When Malcolm imagines, he creates systems. “What if there was a dinosaur suit with a button inside that granted one wish? I would push the button and wish for a ton more suits. Then I would get in the suits and make my wishes. The suit would have a stomach and it would roar and I would use my human voice to tell people it was just a costume, unless I needed alone time and then I would roar and maybe you could come inside and sit in the stomach with me and you use your human legs to make the dinosaur legs work.” that’s what I remember from the drive to nature day camp this morning. He is full of what if.
If you give this child an inch, you will give him a mile and he will make sure you like doing it so he can see if he can get two miles next time. He is exercising the boundaries partly out of curiosity about where they are. He respects a hard limit, but he will work until he reaches it. “But what about, but how come, but last time, but remember when, but before you said.” He will come with proposals designed to negate your most obvious objections. “Can I drive this car outside if I wipe the wheels with this towel when I’m done so it’s clean?” Malcolm is a strategist. He is making a mental map of the rules of the universe, the REAL ones, and he is doing it by sonar. He is pinging out behavior and tailoring his response to whatever he gets back.
My child that treasures the rules above all else has little patience for his brother who likes to figure out the rules by systematically nudging them. I am incredibly lucky that the personalities and birth order are not reversed. There are plenty of peaceful moments. They amicably collaborate on occasion. They are capable. Despite their efforts, their play is punctuated often by, “Wait, Ow! No, Mac! Not like that! We’re not doing that anymore!” Wesley makes rules and Mac challenges them. Over and over again. Swords, robots, dinosaurs, whatever. Wesley explains the game, Mac corrupts it. Wes sets up a battle, Mac turns into a tornado. Usually there is more angry exclaiming than there is punching, but there is not no punching.
If another child, any child, is entered into the equation, my children typically revert to kids I am mostly happy to claim in public. It’s magical. But seeing friends means I have to put it on pants so it doesn’t always happen. I’m not really worried about the fighting. I had a little sister. I like her much better now than I did when we were eight and five. I know it’s normal. I am sure I fall somewhere in the reasonable parameters of where I intervene and where I let them figure it out. I’m mostly just fascinated. I know these kids better than I have ever known anyone. Watching them piss each other off in their own unique ways is its own twisted parenting joy. I will not pass up an opportunity to be entertained. Or I will try not to. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t scream for some quiet on the daily. It’s really, super loud here. And we are all here. A lot. It’s July.
