April 23, 2005 - the burgeoning boy -
I remember being pregnant with Everett, and I remember thinking about how well I would mother him, how he'd rarely watch TV and never play video games and how we'd spend the weekends mountain biking, maybe he'd be in the little seat on the back of the bike, maybe he'd have his own bike. We'd read poetry together and do endless crafty projects and bake cookies and dance to La Vida Loca.
And it's not that he's nothing like the boy I imagined. But things have definitely not gone as planned. Take TV for one, and video games, for two. He's spent this entire day either playing the games from his Best of Thomas DVD on the television, or on the computer. Or, complaining about it.
It was a beautiful, sunny, breezy April day. It was a Sunday, and we should have had a picnic or a bike ride down the waterfront or a roll down a hill. But something in him was fiercely committed to media today, and though I lured him onto the back porch for 20 minutes of soccer, he bathed in multimedia the rest of the day.
Although this disappoints me terrifically, this media addiction, I'm struggling to remember that I might have chosen a similar path when I was his age. And he is his own person. He's not me, and I'll never convince him to become a collage artist or a quilter or even a chef.
Please don't think that this is all he ever does, my spirited boy. Many days are spent running and running and running, around the house, around the park, around the track. We go on errands together and we race the four blocks to the grocery store - Everett getting in invisible starting blocks every 40 feet or so and asking me to get in mine. We dance together, and he studies the moves of other dancers, whether they be The Backyardigans or The Incredibles or the chorus on West Side Story. His execution is amazing, a dramatic and wiggly interpretation that always blows my mind (I'm signing him up for musical theatre as soon as I can afford it).
He loves to move, and even when he's sitting in front of the TV most of the day, he's never entirely still. And he loves to read books with me, but God forbid I steal him away from a good episode of Spongebob Square Pants to assault him with a book!
He's developing into his own little human being, and he's silly and dramatic and wonderful. But I'm doing almost nothing to effect the little soul I had so firmly in mind. He's his own sculptor, this boy, and my hands seem to barely touch the clay.
