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Joys of MotheringI wonder sometimes how my kids play off our family’s inherent nerdiness at school. Do they tell their friends what we did and how hard we laughed? Or do they stay quiet as their peers regale everyone with tales of the latest Wii game? Or watching a new release on the flat screen in hi-def? I feel certain that my youngest, Jeffrey, complains the way only a seven-year old can. We don’t have a game system in the house. He’s good at video games. I’ve seen him play at our friends’ houses. He’s quick, intuitive and very focused. But I’ve also seen the way his entire demeanor changes after about 30 minutes in front of a screen. And it’s not pretty. He grows surly and openly defiant with everyone around him. Instead of plugging in with a video game, he and I solve Sudoku puzzles together. He is just as good at those. He uses his focus differently and figures out the answers quickly. We laugh while we do it. And we really enjoy ourselves. I am not at all ashamed to say that he is better than I am at Sudoku.
When the kids were very young, I would call them out for little white lies by saying to them, “Is that true, or are you telling me a story?” Now we know that Emma is often “telling a story” on purpose. And she works to make it as big and colorful as possible. If Emma decides to tell her classmates that we once spent an entire road trip making up a story about Martian squirrels with purple hands, she will invent a story around the story. She might talk about how her mom “made her” participate and about how her part of the story was the best. “Everyone said so.” Or maybe she’ll change the details. Maybe we weren’t simply driving to a friend’s house up in Oshkosh. Perhaps instead we were stuck in the car during a blizzard for two whole days with no food except half a box of Cheez-its. And it was the only way to keep warm and stay awake until rescue workers could save us! The truth, of course, is that Emma loves to create all kinds of things, not just stories. She draws cubist seahorses, paints fairies in flight, colors her fingernails with markers and costumes herself daily in splashes of hot pink and day-glow red—at the same time. My oldest, Lena, loves to spend free time on our home computer. She researches Harry Potter characters. She builds huge files of information about them. She chats with friends. She sends emails out from her very own email account. And she plays the Internet version of Guitar Hero. Additionally, she loves music. She loudly laments that her mp3 player is only a 512! How can she possibly store enough songs on there? But she willingly leaves the computer room in a rush if I yell, “Who wants to play MadLibs?” Or if someone opens the box for the deluxe Scrabble board (you know, the kind on the lazy Susan) and wants to get a game going. We turn off the TV. Then we spend the evening trying to decide if we’re going to allow proper nouns. Sometimes, one kid will play Othello with me, while the other two play chess. Or we’ll cut up a mess of cheese to have with crackers. And we fill our time beading little doo-dads and key chains. It all seems sooo nerdy when any of us tries to talk about it. Even my grown-up friends will occasionally roll their eyes. When I start a sentence with, “Last night Lena was reading out loud to the little kids from a new book…” it seems so wildly unrealistic that we truly enjoy those things so much. But I don’t care. I am grateful that my ultimate geekiness was passed genetically on to my kids. Otherwise, I would have no one to play with! Lucky
Tomaszek | |
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Fall
2008
My
middle child, Emma, may well invent stories about our life for her
friends. She invents stories about everything. I have had to
redefine the term “lying” in our house. This is so she can be openly
creative without getting in trouble about it.