And Zen What

Four just raced into the kitchen with his hands behind his back. (Yes, quite a feat; I wish I could provide a visual--think speed ice skater.)

He asked me to bend down, which I of course did, and he presented me with a necklace he'd just made. It's purple and white and green. After it was on, he fussed a bit with it, making sure the beads were spaced just exactly right.

And here I was suspiciously thinking they have been entirely too quiet and probably up to no good.

"Mom, MOM! Is anybody sleeping in my room?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I want to go there."

"Why?"

"To get something."

"What?"

"Something to play with."

"What?"

"A box."

[Ok, I don't actually care at this point, but now it's a challenge.]

"What box?"

"A brown box."

"What is the brown box for?"

[As you will see, adding syntax does NOT help.]

"To play with."

"To play what with?"

"A brown box game."

"What brown box game?"

"The one with the box in my room."

[And so on.]

They are their own tribe, the children. And like all tribes, they depend on one another not only for validation but also for confrontation. Identity is built not only on peaceful, approving mirroring relationship, but also on aggressive, contestatory contradictory relationship.

Ask any parent. Especially any parent of an adolescent--where "adolescent" is defined as the alien thing your dear sweet snuggly child inexplicably morphed into in the dead of some dark night when you were asleep in your own warm queen sized bed.

What I've been noticing, here in the lees and dregs of the remains of summer, is that this push/pull version of identity building and maintenance is not the sole province of puberty. The boys (aged 8, 7, 5) and Four (11) do it all day every day--with each other.

When I'm not taking an intellectual interest in the process, I call it "bickering" and at the end of the day, it can have me close to something like despair ("I swear if I hear you say that to your brother one more time, your new bedtime will be right after lunch--til you are 32 years old!!!!"). But here, at the start of a new day, before the 37 hours of the Bickering Day get started, I am taking that intellectual interest.

They just have to do it. They just HAVE to. They play absorbedly and intensely with one another all day long, in various combinations and re-combinations. They fight, ditto, on all counts.

Kids need to be the same; they need to be different. They need their sibs to be the same; they need their sibs to be different (or, lacking sibs, their parents, which ups the ante for everybody). They fight over stupid stupid stuff. They even, often, know it's stupid stuff. Back when there was only One, or only One and Two, I thought it was something I could prevent (or even something I caused, somehow).

But with six kids in the house and one on the way, my perspective (if not my attitude) has changed. Like so much else in the world, it's not actually about me.

They are building themselves. It's less difficult for them if they can do the contestatory part of it with peers some of the time. When they do it with me, the stakes are higher and the lines that must not be crossed far more difficult to discern.

Just ask Six, who is back in bed for snarling something at me that would have gotten him a more or less patient reprimand had he aimed it at Four or Five.

That would make this the first hour of that 37 hour Bickering Day I mentioned.

Knowing (or thinking I know) that they need to bicker, that they need to oppose me, that they are trying on versions of themselves every day and blah blah blah does NOT make it any easier to live with. It's at this point that every parenting book I have ever read failed me. I don't recall ever getting any advice from an Expert approximating the advice I give myself every day:

Try repeating one or all of these sentences as a mantra.

Or if you are too aggravated to talk soothingly, even to yourself, go grab one of those parenting books, open it at random, and start bickering with it.

Why should the kids have ALL the fun?

// posted by Mom, MOM! @ 9:31 AM 0 comments