My boys, at 3 years and 2
months, are on the very edge of having real playmates besides each other. They
have great fun with their little buddy J, who they’ve known since they were
babies, and it is so much fun to see them all shrieking and talking to each
other about this and that imaginary plot. With most kids, they still hang back
and play with each other or alone, but I can see that this is changing fast. They’ll start preschool in the fall, but I predict that even by the end of the
summer, they’ll be in a whole new social universe.
As fun as that is to watch,
I confess to also being a tiny bit sad about it. Until now, the boys have been
fairly sheltered. I don’t plan to shelter them from everything their whole
childhood, but for ages zero-three, that has felt right to me. They haven’t had
much (really any) media exposure, save for a bit of YouTube Sesame Street when they've been sick. They don’t even know how to spar like pirates, or pretend to shoot
a gun. They wouldn’t even recognize a gun.
So far, their little
buddies are also pretty gentle little kids who aren’t yet caught up in
aggressive TV characters and competition and violent play. But it will change,
and I will need to be tolerant of their finding their places in a complicated,
media-driven culture. More and more, I also feel that my role as a parent
extends beyond my family into a covenant with other kids and their parents,
even if those families act differently, play differently or have different
rules and standards. Nurturing those connections, within preschools and
classrooms, on the playground, and with neighbors, requires putting aside your
own perfect ideals for what kids are exposed to. The reward is less alienation and more connection,
mutual understanding, and a healthier community in general. These things are
very important to me, but so far, nurturing those connections hasn’t had a cost
because my kids are so young. That’s changing, though. It doesn’t take more
than one kid to teach your own kids all about fighting, and winning, and
scripted media worlds. It seems like all the moms of older kids I know are at
least a little bothered by the subject of their kids’ play.
Really, part of what’s hard
for me to let go of at the moment is simply the fact that I so very much enjoy
the subjects of their current play. They pore over books about reptiles, and
bugs, and every kind of transportation. They make cities out of blocks, catch
and identify bugs under a magnifying glass, water the garden, pretend to be
baby birds. They kiss their “babies” (mostly stuffed animals) and put them to
bed. They turn a pair of mittens into a game about snowmen, a colander into a
trip to the moon. They run back and forth in inscrutable games, dragging their
toys behind them with strings begged off their daddy.
They do fight some, but
their conflict centers on having two ideas about how the same game should go,
or both wanting the same toy or object, not competition: not comparison or
wanting to best each other. They become jealous of each other’s piece of my
attention, but they don’t engage in one-upmanship to garner it. I know this will come, but we haven't seen it yet. It bothers me
that so much of the 3-and-up media and even literature I see seems bent on
promoting competition over cooperation. Some of the 3-and-up books we bring
back from the library are all about one kind of race or competition. It’s like
once they turn three, the jig is up-time for the “real world”. Won’t they
figure all that out without our tutelage? Are any kids really in danger of not
competing enough? Kids are certainly in danger of not learning how to resolve
conflict. The whole world is suffering from our not knowing how to resolve
conflict, share available resources, and show love for people we don’t know
first-hand. Do the writers of that kind of book or movie think that’s all
3-and-up kids are interested in, because if so, I beg to differ.
Last night, after we met
our church playgroup for a park outing, the boys and I stopped by the ball
field, both boys sitting in our red side-by-side double stroller. They watched
intently, asking questions, trying to figure out how the game is supposed to
work. I tried to explain, that there are two teams, the object of the game, and
so on. It was useless, because they don’t yet understand that for one team to
win, the other must lose. They don’t know what winning and losing are.
I know that I can’t shelter
them forever, and really, I don’t want to. We don’t have a TV, and that
will probably be an issue for them at some point, so we don’t plan to worry
much about what they watch at friend’s houses as long as it’s age-appropriate.
I believe that play is an important way of working through what kids are
exposed to in their environment, so even “war play” probably won’t be censored
in our house (though I don’t have to have it in my face either). There are
probably some things I won’t shelter them from that a lot of parents would. We
often go to the Wednesday peace vigils on the bridge here to protest the war,
and I talk with them in frank terms about what all that means. We talk about
how killing people is very sad, that it isn’t what God intends for his people
to be doing, that we all have a purpose in life—we are all gifted with a way to
contribute— and that someone who kills or is killed is not getting the chance
to live out that purpose. We talk about how people sometimes have to use their
loud voices to stick up for those whose voices have been made quiet. The boys
take me literally, run up and down the bridge with their tiny hands stuck in a
bona fide peace sign, screaming “Peace! No war!” at the top of their lungs, and
I am kind of a mess when I see it, because they are sons, they are boys, and
war is always a possibility for my children’s future. But so far, they are
little peacemakers, good at conflict resolution, not yet caught up in a world
of competition, materialism, and violence. So far, their games don’t make me
cringe, their playmates are sweet and fun to have around, their orbit is still
our little house and family. Forgive me for being utterly grateful for how long
that’s lasted.
When we had their dedication
in church, when they were almost four months, we promised to let them go where
God calls them, to the ends of the earth if need be. That wasn’t an easy
promise to make even then, and making it on that day was largely symbolic, an
abstraction, almost like our pastor was sealing the deal before we read the
contract that is raising children. It isn’t until they get a bit bigger that we
can even begin to comprehend what that kind of promise means. It is a promise
that I have to make in tiny ways every day, in more and more complicated ways.
It is a promise that I really might have to keep someday in its entirety, as
some of the parents in my church have recently, letting their teens do relief
work in a Third World country for an entire summer, swallowing hard as they put
them on the plane with their Ipods and giant duffel bags. Risking life
and limb for a greater good. The ends of the earth.
God help me to be self-less
enough to let them do what they are called to do in the world, today and beyond,
to look at parenting as an engagement with a community and not waste my energy
on creating some sort of personal laboratory of ideal circumstances. God help
me to remember that my children are citizens of the world, and trust enough to
let them find our way in it, to be their base, and their foundation, but let
them go, today just a little, someday, to the ends of whatever parts of the
earth their gifts are most needed.
Last night, we had another
milestone around here: I discovered that my boys are really ready to enjoy the
Shel Silverstein books. There aren’t too many pictures, so it requires that
they’re sophisticated enough to really listen to the words. Oh, how we laughed
at Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, and Captain Hook, and the man who lost his head and thought it
was a rock. I have many memories of reading these poems to my brother when he
was just four and I was eight, not long after we moved to the United States.
New
to a foreign country, he and I played all kinds of games alone together, many of them
competitive and full of shoves and angry words, but we also played a game
called “Hug-O-War”, where’d we hug and roll over each other until we both ran
out of breath. It was rough, and physical, and probably loud – the kind of game
that my mom probably told us to take somewhere else, saying, as she often did
in her native Dutch, that “this will end in tears”. I don’t think it did end in
tears often, though. What I remember anyway, is that the two of us clung and
rolled down our grassy hill, chanting the poem as loud as we could, squeezing
each other as hard as we could, feeling the sensation of being squeezed hard by
gravity and arms, grass rolling right over our faces, laughing and holding on
for dear life.
Hug O' War
by Shel Silverstein
I will not
play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.
