My Son, Aspiring Author

You can't shape your child's life or career.  It's a fact that all parents need, eventually, to reconcile with.  No matter how much I would love for my son to grow up to be a comic book artist, exotic animal veterinarian, globetrotting zoologist, Lego toy designer, or Disney Imagineer, what he makes of his life will, ultimately, be up to him.  Just the other night he informed his aunt that he wants to go into the Army someday - no doubt inspired by his mom introducing him to the old animated G.I. Joe series.  I thought it was rather cute that he wondered aloud if the Army would give him a tank, or if he would need to save up to buy one himself.  My husband didn't agree, and has asked that I reduce the amount of military fiction our son is exposed to.  I shrugged and agreed, after pointing out that HE was the one who had scoffed at my desire to ban toy guns from our home once we'd realized the gender of our then-embryonic progeny.

I'm not worried.  About a week before this, he had informed me that he wanted to be a ninja when he grew up - "A gold one, Mommy."  This, too, was influenced by me - I'd introduced him to the Joe commando/ninja, Snake Eyes, via YouTube episodes of G.I. Joe: Renegades.  Of course, a much heavier influence is Lego Ninjago, of which we are both incredibly fond.  (I like the blue ninja, Jay, the best... he's the sensitive one, you know.)  And I know, without a doubt, that my little man will go through umpteen bazillion career dreams before he settles on one... some of which I may be less than fond of.  Professional football player, for example, is not high on my list of "desirable careers," ranking somewhere below NASCAR driver and just slightly above mortician.

With God as my witness, however, if my son says to me, "Mommy, I want to be a football player when I grow up," I'll be his first and best cheerleader.  Unless, of course, he is prompted to say that by my meddling kid sister and her husband, who know my feelings about football in general and youth football in Western Connecticut in particular.  But that's another story.  I'll still be my son's first and best cheerleader, but I may not speak to said relatives for, oh, a decade or two.  And I will buy my beloved niece the chihuahua puppy she's always wanted.  Two, in fact.  The yappiest pair in the litter.

It's not football I object to so much as adults trying to steer children into particular activities.  Inflicting piano lessons on a child who would rather play the drums, or demanding that your son or daughter take Irish dance against said child's wishes, should qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.  I've no problem with exposing my son to a wide variety of activities - but HE gets the final say in what he pursues.

It's for this reason that I've never pushed him to create or illustrate stories.  As a writer, I'd love to do so... but he's never expressed a creative desire to do anything of the sort, until very recently.  And he made my night tonight - waiting for me at the top of the stairs and, after a hug, announcing, "Mommy, I know a book we need to write.  Ten Little Bears: Afternoon on the Moon!" 

That's as far as he had gotten - the title - and I told him that I thought it was a wonderful idea, and that we could start together this weekend.  My author brain started kicking into gear... what kind of bears?  Why ten?  What's caused them to want to go to the moon?  What will they do when they get there?  Perhaps they're only pretending to go to the moon - but if I know my son, it will be the Real Thing or not at all.

As I'm pondering this, he trots into my bedroom.  "Mommy, I know the second book in the series."  A series?  That's my boy!  Of course, it never hurts to dream big.  A series it is.  "The second book will be Lunchtime at Loch Ness."

Oh, NOW we're talking.  I'm a cryptozoology buff.  I can get into this... Nessie and the bears share a nice picnic of shortbread on the shores.  Hmmm - to rhyme or not to rhyme?  What would be the target audience?  How should the illustrations look?  And how do the bears GET to Loch Ness to begin with?

By the time we were tucking in for bed, my husband getting ready for bedtime stories so Mommy can have some writing time, he'd come up with two more:  Ten Little Bears: Adventures in Egypt and Ten Little Bears: Time on the Titanic.  He confided that he's getting the ideas for the titles from his favorite bedtime series, The Magic Treehouse, but that the ideas are all his own.

I'd love to have my son be an author... I'd love for us to be a mother-and-son team, like Anne and Todd McCaffery and their Dragons of Pern.  It would be a dream... right up there with myself being a working children's book author.

But if the weekend comes and my little muse doesn't want to work on our joint masterpiece... well, maybe I'll just have to write it myself.  And give him co-billing, of course.

His author career has to start somewhere!

My Boy and Me...

Driving home from spending Easter with my family, I was jogged out of a doze by an interview on NPR... "There are plenty of pop culture references to the dangers of a close mother-son relationship. From the myth of Oedipus to the movie Psycho, narrative after narrative harps on the idea that mothers can damage their sons, make them weak, awkward and dependent."

Oh, brother, I thought. I so do NOT want to hear this... it's probably some diatribe about how loving moms cripple their boys, make them targets for bullies, make them weak.  I've heard it all before.

But, reaching for the dial to flip stations, I was caught by the very next words:  "But for millions of men, the opposite has turned out to be true, author Kate Lombardi tells NPR's Laura Sullivan. Lombardi — a mother herself — is the author of the new book, The Mama's Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close Makes Them Stronger."

Wow.

I cranked the volume.

I listened, and my heart did one of those "happy-Mommy-dances" it does when I find out that something I was afraid I was doing wrong... is actually something I'm doing RIGHT.

It's hard being the mother of a young son.  There are picture books aplenty about Moms and daughters sharing magical playtime, sons and dads and grandpas bonding in masculine ways, even "Daddy's little girls" books focusing on that very special relationship.  But moms and their boys?  Few and far between... one that I did buy, despite my misgivings, was I'll Be Your Hero - a Christian picture book, the boy equivalent of its companion, I'll Be Your Princess.  Since I loved the first - a charming look at a little girl imagining herself as her daddy's princess, and also the princess of God's kindgom - I had high hopes.  Unfortunately, unlike in the Daddy-daughter version, the mother was very much a non-player in the text; always in the background, watching her son go off adventuring with Dad, never really DOING much.  Sigh.

There are plenty of Mommy-and-Me clubs for girls... even past the multi-gendered playgroups of toddler years.  There are Daddy-and-Me activities galore for both boys and girls.  But moms and their boys?  Not so much.  No Mom-and-Son book clubs... though I did find a Guys Read club targeted at boys, I can't lead it.  I'm not a guy.  Nothing out there but the expected role - sit on the sidelines and cheer or get violent with the overly-competitive youth sports parental units.  I'm not thrilled with that... I've seen the behavior, seen the cliquishness, and I want no part in it.

I've been left to wonder... AM I somehow doing what I ought not to do?  Is spending time DOING things with my boy - going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (his idea, after reading a picture book about it), going to zoos, visiting museums - not what I ought to be doing?  Is sharing my interests - comic books, animals, reading and creating stories, imaginative play - the wrong thing?  Should I be pushing him to play football, though I've no interest in it and he hasn't asked to play?  My sister thinks so.  Should I be arranging playdates to fill up the weekends?  Other moms do.  My mom feels that I need to learn to just relax with my boy -  sit on the beach, watch him play, take a book to the playground while he romps.  But I don't enjoy doing that... I like DOING things.  Together things.  Things that let us talk, and joke, and learn.

This weekend, Daniel and I spent a whole afternoon building a Lego diorama.  I made a T-Rex at his request, Daniel assisting with certain parts; he made a temple and created the backstory: there were three jewels, the Jewel of Ocean, the Jewel of Sky, and the Jewel of Fire, all with different powers.  The dinosaur guarded the treasure, which was in a shrine Daniel designed.  He was VERY proud, particularly of the corpse of the minifigure sprawled across the temple entrance.

"Few have survived," he intoned, as sinister as a six year old can be.  We were both thrilled - it was the first time he'd had an interest in building something that didn't have specific instructions.  I told  him that maybe we'd try to start a "Mommy and Me" Lego club for moms and their sons.  He's ready to start recruiting TOMORROW.

So I listened to the interview, which I've linked to below, and felt my heart swell to bursting.  I'm doing it RIGHT.  I'm not hurting my son by loving on him, keeping our lines of communication open, by sharing experiences we both find exciting and enjoyable.  I'm not a mom who wants to watch her young knight ride off in search of the dragon - I want to be out there with him!  And - go figure.  Science says that it's okay.  PHEW.

So I'm ordering the book tonight... can't wait to read it.  If any of you are moms of boys, I'd say you need to read it, too.  There are precious few books out there for women like us... we have to grab the good ones while we can.

The NPR Interview:  Ignore 'The Mama's Boy Myth': Keep Your Boys Close