Boys and gender issues

It looks lovely with his coloring....

I’m still wrestling with what it means to be the mother of boys. I was always a tomboy growing up, so in many ways I suspect I’m more comfortable this way. I can backpack, paddle a canoe, pitch a tent, play trumpet, program computers, role-play, curse out the pitcher, lift heavy objects, and do stuff without fear of breaking my nails. I’ve always been a bit more comfortable in the guy’s world than the girl’s world. I still don’t wear makeup or nail polish regularly. I don’t dye or style my hair. It’s not that I’m incapable of being girly: I have an extensive jewelry and wardrobe collection, delight in sparkly gel pens, and cook up a storm in the kitchen. But, well, if I were a 19th century heroine who had to cut her hair, bind her breasts and pass as one of the guys, I think I’d do fine.

I’m finally completely comfortable with my own gender and it’s expression. I am who I am, and for the most part I like who I am.

But I’m responsible for helping to raise two young men. And guess what? There is no “default gender” that happens to be male. Just because my boys are boys doesn’t mean that there aren’t gender issues. I think it just means that we’re less likely to confront them.

A few examples.

Grey came home from daycare the other day, and told me that one of the girls at daycare said he couldn’t play with her toy, because it was a girl’s toy and he was a boy. She was probably right in a strict gender-divide definition. If you flip through the 900000 toy catalogs I get this time of year you can more or less mark each page as “boy”, “girl” or “neutral”. It takes maybe a second a page to determine this. The number of neutral pages is depressingly slim. In fact, for more fun, for each page note how many toys have BOTH boys and girls playing with them. There are the blocks. And, um, the blocks. Maybe. If they’re not divided into GI Joe and Hello Kitty colors.

So he wanted to a play with a friend’s toy, and was told he couldn’t because he was a boy and this was a girl’s toy.

I’m pretty sure that if someone had told me, even at four, that I couldn’t play with a toy because it was a boy’s toy and I was a girl, I would have told them to take a long walk off a short dock and promptly spent the next 3 weeks playing with nothing but that toy. (Man, parenting me must’ve been SO MUCH FUN.) At five my favorite night gown said, “Anything boys can do girls can do better”. In fact, if you want to know the #1 reason I became an excellent trumpet player, it was because I was consistently told by the boys around me that girls couldn’t play trumpet. There was only one way to prove them wrong.

Why would I consider it acceptable to make my sons accept gender constraints that would’ve infuriated me when I was a child?

So I told Grey that different people have different opinions, but I’m his mom. And I say that he can play with any toy that’s safe and fun, and that I don’t think there are girl toys and boy toys. And if he wants Shrinky-dink jewelry or a My Little Pony, I’m happy to put Santa’s money where my mouth is.

But… but but.

For one thing, so many of the girl’s toys are absolutely atrocious. Have you LOOKED at those? Fashion designer software. Dolls in 93 outfits of the same pink. (Try to find a boy baby doll appropriate for a 2 year old next time you have time to kill in a toy store.) Bratz. Makeup kits. Hair kits. It makes me, I confess, extremely glad to have boys when I flip through those pages.

And then there’s the bit where, like all mothers, I want my son to be accepted and have friends. I want him to be liked. I want him to feel comfortable in the world he inhabits. These things are much easier when you look and act “right” for how people expect you to be.

I recently read a blog entry (wish I could find it — I can’t — please pass on the link if you read it and remember! EDITED: Here it is — elapsed time for internet audience to find the answer = time it took to go to the bathroom) about a mom struggling with her son’s sincere wish to wear a dress to preschool, even if it meant that people teased him. I admired her pragmatism and courage. I admired his sense of self and determination. I was so grateful that it wasn’t me having to make those choices. So far, at least, Grey seems very comfortable being a boy and doing boy things.

Grey in his pink kitty cat pajamas

But he’s not monolithic. He loves his pair of pink kitty cat pajamas. (He asked for them, and I said yes. Because why not?) The other day he wanted to try on one of my dresses (he hasn’t asked to since). He nurtures his stuffed animals with great solicitude. And sometimes he wants to play with the girl’s toys. He’s not yet afraid to be caught doing the “wrong” stuff — having a pink toy or a brush. I don’t want him to. I want him to look and say: is this fun? Will I enjoy this? I want him to have friends who are girls and friends who are boys.

And most of all, I want two things. When Grey does encounter someone (as he almost certainly will) who does not feel comfortable with the gender expressions assigned to them, I want him to see them as the person they truly are.

And finally, I want Grey to feel free to be the person his is.

One of these things is not like the others

Prayer at the Close of Day

When I was in college, there was an evening service in our chapel. It was at 10 pm on Wednesday nights. The first semester I was there, still trying to figure things out, our chaplain left. But before he did, he taught me how to set up the service and how to sing the chants. For the next three and a half years, in close connection with the college organist John Anthony, I led that weekly service.

It remains one of the most significant spiritual experiences of my life.

We were a small , extremely ecumenical group that met late on those Wednesday nights. There was me the Protestant, a handful of Catholics, a Greek Orthodox girl and an agnostic. Harkness Chapel was always airy and dark on those nights. I’d enter in the back door and light the candelabras. They made a pool of yellow light below the vaulted ceiling. We’d begin in silence with muffled greetings. Then song, chant, prayer, more silence, song and chant again. We’d end holding hands and singing, before scattering back to our homework and brightly lit dorm rooms.

In the four years I was at college, I believe I missed fewer than five of these Wednesday night services.

During that brief period of velvet night, I felt peace, fellowship, contentment. I made room for silence. I listened. I slowed down. There was room for the Spirit to move in me and to speak to me. There was space for me to slide back inside my own skin, and remember who I am. There was a tremendous connection with those few other pilgrims, coming to find the same thing.

I suspect many of us want to get back what we had in college. There were our collegiate figures, our somehow ample time for fun, the energy of youth, the proximity of all our friends… heck, just getting to sleep in and have someone else do all the cooking. But the thing I’d like to get back from college is that service — that peace.

Happily, unlike my youth, this may be something attainable. I can aspire to this connection to the Almighty. As my living is concentrated down to the most necessary, I find I need to stop taking away and start adding. This is something I will add.

So. Next Wednesday night at 9 pm (a nod to my now-elderly status), I will open the doors of Burlington Presbyterian Church and light candles. I will sing “The Spirit within us moves us to pray”. I will make room for silence. And if you would like to come, I will smile and worship with you.

Prayer at the Close of Day
Wednesday nights
9 – 9:30 pm
Burlington Presbyterian Church

May the spirit of the Lord remain with us throughout the night.

My husband turns 33

I spend most of my family-blogging words on my sons. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, they tend to say and do funnier things than, say, the cats. Also, they will not correct me if I apply selective editing to tighten up the tales of their goofballery. Finally, they do not claim that just because I was an English major, I am not permitted to use words in whatever way I deem fit. Like goofballery. So generally they make easier targets for writing about than, say, my husband.

However, my SONS are not turning 33 today, so I will risk grammatical corrections and the fact my that my target will actually read what I write to tell you about my husband.

First if all, he’s 33 today.

Which is divisible by 11, in case you’re curious.

Give me the camera

My husband claims that before he met me, he was innocent of sin. He did not know what the “Snooze” button on the alarm clock did. Long before he met me, however, he was deeply immersed in the world of the RPG – Role Playing Games. He spent his childhood reading supplements and devising fantastic adventures with intricate maps and completely consistent world-views. When he grew to adulthood, he put aside such childish things in order to focus on more mature pursuits: rules systems. He wrote several of his own and has an entire bookcase of rules systems, which he’s generally read cover to cover. I remember he once turned to me and said, “Brenda, I think I’ve actually read everything on the internet about these games.” Granted, that was when the internet was a smaller infinity, but still.

I mention role-playing first because when I think about what makes my husband who he is, it’s right up there. But that’s hardly comprehensive.

Adam loves delving deeply into arcane problems. He’s currently being tempted, non-ironically, by a book called “Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests”. He used to complain that no one would ever play obscure gaming systems with him. Now he complains that he doesn’t get to do test-driven agile programming. Previous deep-drinking has included medieval sociology (where he’s more knowledgeable than I) and aikido texts.

His #1 repetitive complaint is that he doesn’t have a photographic memory and can’t remember everything he’s read.

Adam and sons

This might make him sound like a distant academic. He’s nothing like that. I love, love watching him with our sons. He’ll cook with Grey and hold one-sided cooing conversations with Thane. While I was watching baseball, Adam was sending pitches across the back yard to Grey. There is a lot of tickling, chasing and zombie-noises when the boys are all home.

If you’re met Adam, you were probably dazzled by his smile. He has a great smile, which always includes his eyes. I don’t think he knows how to fake-smile.

His dazzling smile

He makes an amazing chocolate cake.

Adam is an optimizer. He’s always looking for ways to make things better; for the most efficient and most logical way of doing things. Once he arrives at what he thinks is an optimal solution, he’s happy to stick with it until and unless data presents itself that there is a better solution. I love variety. I’ll go out one way and come back another only because they are different. This boggles his mind.

He listens to techno when he programs.

His body is composed of 60% pretzels, 30% iced tea and 10% trace elements.

He mixes three cereals in the morning in order to arrive at the optimum combination of texture and taste.

Adam loves songs. He has a beautiful warm tenor and he’s not afraid to use it. He specializes in Celtic/Irish songs and folk ballads. When we were in Saudi Arabia and Washington State (you do not want to KNOW about our phone bills that summer), he used to sing me “Road Go Ever Ever On”. I thought he was an English major when I met him, because he quoted Kipling and Byron at me until I was bedazzled. I never stopped being bedazzled.

His actual degree was in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology — but he hated Chemistry.

He has an astonishing ability to fall without hurting himself. Usually he hurts himself doing things that you couldn’t possibly think you could hurt yourself doing, like walking down the hall.

He reminds me to pray.

He is a remarkable husband. He supports me when I choose to do something, advocates for my needs when I subsume them, compliments me even when I feel unlovely, never fails to look me in the eyes and tell me he loves me, and holds my hand as often as he can.

This is the 14th time we’ve celebrated together on his birthday. The first time I got him a wax dragon candle thingy.

I could run through a thousand more bullet points and still fail to capture just who he is. He is my husband and I love him.

How I will always see my husband

PS – Watch this space for the comment from him with corrections or clarifications!

My choice of media

I’d like to start out by saying that I am clear that I’m the weird one here. Everyone else SEEMS to be in line, and I’m the one who just doesn’t fit in.

That said, I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND why people like depressing media. For example, through a miracle of babysitting, my husband and I got to go see “Where the Wild Things Are” on Friday night. (I would post a spoiler warning, but sheesh. If you haven’t read the book, which spoils the plot, then go get it right now!) The movie is sad and depressing, and does not cease to be sad and depressing. You have a lonely kid, an all-too-human and overstretched mom, a teenage sister in a loving but rather grim world. Then you get taken to a fantasy world where …. things are just as bad. In fact, bad enough to make the real world where people break your igloos and your sister ignores your pain and your mom is dating some guy seem much better than your fantasy world. So we conclude feeling just as crappy as we started. Actually crappier — I was in a good mood going in. But hey, it was visually lovely.

It’s a box office hit.

Why?

I get it: other people really like reading books and watching movies that make them feel horrid. I know I’m the weird one because I don’t. I just fail to fathom what about it feels good and makes you want more?

See, I understand WHY it is important to tell and hear stories about real things that are awful. I will sit down and read about the holocaust to understand how humans can be so brutal to each other and work to prevent it. I understand why it’s important that we know and see that humanity is capable of great evil. I listen to the news, even when I’d rather never heard again how some person strapped in a bomb-vest blew themselves up in a crowded marketplace full of sons and mothers and beloved uncles. But I turn on the news anyway and look at the world as it is, to the best of my abilities.

I do it with the same amount of joy and enjoyment that I have for dental hygiene, without the sparkly teeth afterwards. I do it because it is important and necessary and part of being a good citizen. I do not enjoy a minute of it.

So why on earth would I choose to watch movies that inspire the same sense of impossible despair? Why would I want to read books where people are horrible to each other and hurt each other and terrible things happen and at the end of the book, it’s still horrible and no one has learned and the sun will die someday? Why do people spend so much time imagining ways that we could be awful to each other that don’t really exist? What about this is satisfying? I read those books, and am usually glad I have, but I never desire to read them again.

It makes it very difficult for me to find media that suits. It’s hard to explain to friends. I often sum it up by saying that I don’t like violence. (I nearly vomited at the Serenity movie — I actually left shaking and crying.) But that’s not actually it. I’ll get through violence (as long as the folks writing it/showing it don’t seem to enjoy it too much) to get to redemption, learning and hope. I found Firefly generally fantastic. The body count in the Lord of the Rings is high, but so is the hope-count. One of my favorite books of the last decade, “The Curse of Chalion” by Bujold starts with a beaten, broken man who has experienced utter betrayal. But it ends up with redemption, healing, hope, love and victory. There are very bad things in it, but the people who ENJOY doing horrible things to other people are a minority, and they get theirs in the end.

I guess I feel that the world is sufficiently grim without imagining more worse things in it than actually exist. I choose to spend my imaginative time on seeing the world as, perhaps, a better place than it is, and humanity as generally loving and redeemable.

If you love those kind of movies or books I’m talking about — the dark depressing ones where it all seems futile — can you please explain to me why? What it does for you that makes you want to come back?

Melancholy October

It’s a dark, windy, rainy mid-October day. I’m listening to a Pandora station that seems to be taken entirely from my own iPod library. But still, it’s good. It’s just a little, well, sad. All the songs of love, loss, home, journeying, hope, despair — with strong overtones of a capella.

In addition to writing a complex query and laying out (yet another) pdf report, I’m thinking about what to do with a long weekend. It looks like the weather has a chance at brisk and glorious. Here’s what I’m thinking about for a glorious Saturday…

We’ll rise earlyish. I’ll let Grey finally finish the Avatar episode he’s started 3 times this week, and I play with Thane in his room. Thane loves, loves his bedroom in a way Grey never has. He’ll bop the Weebles down the slide, crawl between stacks of books, and then imperious hobble over to me, a Weeble-princess in one hand “Horn to Toes and In Between” in the other and announce “Boo! Boo!” We’ll eventually pile our sons into the car, carefully loaded with snacks and entertainments and drive North through the Merrimack River valley. Grey will be confused, wondering if we’re going to daycare on a Saturday.

We’ll pass through the lands of concrete onto smaller and smaller roads, through impossibly picturesque New England towns with white steeples and lots of acrimonious town politics, until we get to the Shaker Museum. Grey will get up close and personal with a livestock. We’ll stand in a room built by hands dedicated to equality and pacifism. No one lives there now. Perhaps there will be a hayride. I’ll feel torn between permitting my youngest to explore his world and forbidding him to explore cow-patties. I’ll buy a token of my memory of this period of unworldiness and optimism.

Last time I was there, my mother bought me a pin that was also a vase. It could hold a pansy — called heartsease — in water on your chest. It was stolen from me in a burglary we experienced on September 11, 2009.

Unless fortune truly smiles at us, we’ll have to leave when one or more boys hits too-tired. We’ll put them in the car, hoping for a nap. The child who desperately needs to sleep will not. We’ll drive to our next destination. 5 minutes before we arrive, the child will fall asleep and silence will descend on the car for the first time all day. We’ll drive in circles around our destination, afraid to stop until just a little more sleep has been obtained.

We’ll go to Moose Brook State park. The boys will play on the playground, swing in the swings. We’ll play with the great stomp-rocket Grey got for his birthday. As the shadows loom long, we’ll get a campsite and build a campfire. I imagine sitting around the fire, watching embers fly up to the stars, singing songs together and telling stories. I imagine putting our sticky, sweet, sleepy children into the car and silently returning to our daily lives back in the suburbs, flying down thick freeways in time to be at church the next morning.

Thus I imagine. I have enough experience to know that it’ll be nothing like this. It will be better. It will be worse. There will be a moment most sublime. There will be several that will be quite banal. I give it 50/50 odds that Grey throws up at least once.

On a melancholy autumn day, I think about these days and moments. This is my sons’ childhood — their one and only. It’s desperately brief. You get one shot at being a child, and one shot at giving the people you created their childhood. Will Grey remember this trip on a melancholy autumn, some day 30 years from now? Will these journeys be the touchstone for him? When the smells of October waft through his office window, which of these memories will pop unbidden to his mind? Which cobalt sky will define perfection in cobalt skies for my sons? Will he remember the laughter? The hot dogs? The feeling that the world is a bigger place than he realized?

There’s a Simon and Garfunkel song (“And the Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall”) that says “I don’t know what is real, I can’t touch what I feel.” I sometimes think about how few of the things I touch are real. When is the last time you ran your hands across the bark of a tree? Do you remember how silky soft the inner petals of a dandylion are? I sometimes fear that so much our world is created, constructed and extruded that my sons will never touch what is real, to know it when they feel it. I suppose that’s a funny thing to fear. But my roots still reach down to the water table of the wild. I drank great draughts in my youth. I can only hope to help my sons know that it is there if they choose to reach for it.

I aspire to be the sort of mom who doesn’t talk about vomit

My sons are generally healthy, fit, bonny little boys. I’m very, very blessed by their general health and fitness. But Grey has …. a quirk. When he was about seven months old (wee little Grey!) he got a cold. And with the mucous, he started throwing up. I was concerned, but figured it would pass.

It didn’t.

For about 6 weeks, Grey threw up several times a day. The worst day he threw up nine times. We took him to his doctor. We took him to a gastroenterologist at Children’s Hospital, who looked wistfully at him and commented on how healthy he was. The constant vomit never seemed to, you know, BOTHER him. We have reports that he smiled while throwing up. Because he was thriving despite it all, the doctors just sort of shrugged and said that anything further they did to figure it out had possible bad side effects, so it wasn’t worth doing. It was a grim period. You would not BELIEVE the laundry. Finally, we discovered that Prevacid stopped him from throwing up. He stayed on Prevacid until he was about 13 months old. The barfing did not resume the same way.

Grey threw up all over London!

But… Grey has always thrown up at the drop of a hat. Potty training is an accomplishment. But I have my son VOMIT trained. He seems to have quite a bit of warning — usually — that he’s going to throw up and makes sure he has a bowl or a bag or a toilet or something. He actually does a great job of it.

But right now Grey is in the throes of an incredibly mucousy cold. And once he starts coughing, it seems to end up in vomit pretty often, and too quickly for him to take appropriate measures.

Yesterday coming home was AWFUL. He pitched a fit coming out of daycare (despite my best, best efforts to wheedle and amuse instead of order). It was a full-on tantrum of a type that’s become blessedly rare. Then he spit at me for two blocks (his aim has much improved — he hit me, which he wasn’t able to do previously). I informed him he would be going directly to his room when we got home. Then, as I was driving, he took off his shoe, threw it at me, and hit me in the head with it.

Images of Bush in Iraq flashed through my head. I pulled the car over and gave him about the third spanking of his life. I reserve corporal punishment for times he’s put his safety or the safety of others at risk. Throwing shoes at a driver counts for that. But when I say spanking, I do mean a few light swats on the butt, nothing more.

This did have the outcome of having him cry. And the crying led to coughing. Which lead to him throwing up all over the back seat of the car. Again.

I have had better commutes home.

The evening got a bit better with him. He did spend his timeout in his room and nicely apologized. He had some dinner. He went to bed.

This morning, he didn’t want to leave Spongebob and cried bitter tears. I got him into the car by reminding him just how unhappy the “sad” way had been yesterday.

We weren’t two blocks out of the house when he coughed and threw up AGAIN in the car. I turned around and drove back. My husband is home sick today. It seems unfair to put childcare duties on the sick, but welcome to 21st century parenting.

All this is to say: my car is at the detailers. It’s pricey, but there are some things you just have to ante up for. My husband is home sick with a sick kid. Thane is at daycare with an unexpected provider (Abuela has been in the Dominican Republic since August) and when I left he was pitching a fit.

I feel really, really tired but otherwise fine. There’s this sense of impending doom about that. There is no way I can be surrounded by this many sick, snotty people and not succumb. Even for a fantastic immune system (which I have) the onslaught is just too overwhelming. I can only pray that the boys are better by then.

Ah, parenting. Is it the glamour? The riches? The appreciation of our hard work? What keeps us coming back for more? Humanity is a wondrous thing, to choose to do this.

Which brings me to a thought I had last night. I was looking at the curly head of my baby boy, nursing in our remnant night nursing in the soft light from the hallway. And I realized WHY it is that parents hope their children also have children. Sure, there’s the vengeful belief that they should suffer as they have caused us to suffer. But mostly, we hope our children have children because there is no other way they will ever understand how much they are loved. It’s an impossible amount of love and invisible, I fear, to the recipient. Feeling that themselves, looking down at their own curly-haired snot-monsters, is the only way they’ll ever understand.

A green Mario DS

Last Christmas, everyone Grey knew got a Nintendo DS from Santa. At daycare Pablo (junior to Grey by nearly a year!), Jordan, Ivan and Isaiah ALL got DSes. At church, Kasper, Thomas and Susan carry them around — that I know of.

Grey, at three years old, did NOT get a video game system for Christmas.

I figured at first that this was the latest passing fad and he’d forget about it and move on to Moon Sand followed by GI Joe action figures. Three year olds are not known for their persistence and patience. I murmured something about maybe if he still wanted it and was good, perhaps one would be forthcoming for his birthday. Christmas to an October birthday is 10 months. That’s like a third to a quarter of his ENTIRE LIFE. In ten months, he went from a newborn to a small walking person. No way was he going to remember come his birthday.

Boy, was I ever wrong. Every. Single. Day. since Christmas, Grey has begged for a DS.

Scene:
Soft light, snuggles on the bed. Mommy is telling Grey a fantastical story about Grey and the Magic, Magic, Magic, Magic Door, which involves a genii in a bottle. The genii appears in a puff of fragrant smoke and offers Grey a wish. What does Grey wish for? (Thoughtful look on an amazingly perfect, sweet face) “A green Super Mario DS”.

Scene:
A rainy morning drive in, with windshield wipers rhythmically passing across a drizzly sky. NPR, talking about the latest financial indicators, is nearly drowned out by the thump of raindrops on the roof and the swish of water from semi tires. Grey sighs wistfully in the backseat. “Mommy? Do you know what I wish? I wish, I wish (oh, if you could hear the wistfulness in that small voice!) I wish I had a DS.”

Scene:
Grey was led into malfeasance by an older child. Specifically, running away and hiding when it’s time to leave daycare. The wrath of MOM is called down upon his head, and great sadness and woe ensue. After the tears are dried, a post-mortem occurs. Mom carefully leads her golden-haired child through the thought process about whether someone who asks you to do something wrong is being a good friend. We’re almost there. “So Grey, would you want to be friends with someone who did something that made you feel badly?” (Grey ponders, seriously, having followed his cues this far.) “If they had a DS, yes.”

If Grey could have anything ANYTHING in the whole world, it would be a DS. I’ve started using the DS as a touchstone for money. “Mommy, can we fly to Grandma Johnstone’s RIGHT NOW?” “No, that takes a lot of money.” “How much money?” “About three DSes”.

Grey has learned truly astonishing social skills in pursuit of the DS. I have seen Grey walk up to a completely unknown child and in less than one minute con them into loaning him their DS so he can play.

All this is to say: Grey is getting a Nintendo DS for his 4th birthday. His Grandma Flynn begged the privilege of being the one to grant him his heart’s desire. His father and I are providing the games (Kirby and Super Mario Bros)

I have extremely mixed feelings about it. I don’t fundamentally object to a child playing video games. We let him play Wii. Last night I let him play video games after preschool because I was tired, and he’d gotten very little screen time over the weekend. But I am very concerned that video games and tv not crowd out both real experiences and reading. I KNOW how addictive video games are. Will he play games instead of building block towers? Instead of learning to read? I also know that the answer to this is good parenting and rules.

Guess what, folks? Good parenting takes ENERGY. Sometimes it’s much easier to avoid a point you know will be contentious. The phrase, “No, you cannot play the DS now” will probably come out of my lips a thousand times in the next two years. I’m tired just THINKING about it. I think the DS will be reserved for car rides and times where he has to wait (drs. office, etc). Maybe exceptions can be made when he is sick (or I am). I suspect this will not delight him.

But in the final analysis, I cannot deny my son something he wants so desperately that is in my power to permit. A three year old can’t get a job and earn enough money to buy his own. In the ways available to him, my son HAS worked extremely hard and diligently in obtaining his goals.

I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he opens that gift from his Grandma. I don’t think I’ve ever held such a dream so hard and had it come true.

The boys at church around a DS

Board Games

A common scene in our household

My husband and I have always played a lot of games. In the gravy days, back when we had TIME, we mostly played games in group setting — with friends. But lately, board games have become one of our primary date activities. That’s what we do when we want to spend time together.

Board games (and I’m not talking Monopoly here, people) fall into various categories. There are epic ones, quick ones, medium ones. There are hand-builder games (Dominion), resource games (Agricola – I first played this while in labor with Thane), spatial reasoning games (Richochet Robots), screw-your-neighbor games (You’ll probably disagree with me, but screw-your-neighbor is usually a defining feature of our games of Catan), strategy games (Memoir ‘44) and party games (Werewolf).

There are games that play best with 6 or more people, and there are games perfectly balanced for 2. (Although it seems like most of MY favorite games are best with 3 – 4 players.)

Lately, Adam and I have been playing lots of Dominion, Roll Through the Ages and St. Petersburg. We’ve been playing so many games lately, that I’ve started to see and perceive patterns in what makes a game fun for us, and how we’re different in our makeup.

For example, Adam has a slight edge in Dominion, I dominate Roll Through the Ages, and he completely trounces me in St. Petersburg. Reliably. I have a slight edge in Memoir ‘44, but that one takes so long to set up we rarely play it. All four of those are games we both enjoy playing.

What’s the difference? Adam is a perfectionist – an optimizer. He will take as long as he needs to figure out the absolute optimum strategy and apply it. I’m more of a good-enough-er; an executive decision maker. I go with what seems like a pretty good idea, make my decisions quickly and change my strategy midstream if it seems appropriate.

Neither one of our personalities is better, not even for game playing. I enjoy games that overwhelm him, like Race for the Galaxy and Agricola. He doesn’t like these games because he can’t really map out all possible outcomes and plan accordingly — there are too many and the fellow players at the table get impatient. He hates Catan because his careful planning usually gets spiked by the moves of other players in a way that feel malicious.

It’s been fascinating to watch how RELIABLY he beats me in St. Petersburg, even though I’m really trying my best, haven’t made huge mistakes, and have a competent strategy. In that game, night before last, the difference between competent and not making mistakes vs. perfectly optimized was a mammoth 30 points.

We’ve played a lot (a LOT) of games together to notice the differences between our decision making styles. I’m glad we have, though, because the styles hold true whether it’s in a board game or in life. I would (for example) win many more games if the scoring included the speed with which decisions were made. It always takes him a lot longer to decide what he wants to do, because he’s weighing all his options carefully. The same holds true for, for example, buying a computer. He’ll investigate all the options. I’ll find one that seems pretty good. Sometimes the difference between the third one on Amazon that seems reasonably priced and has high ratings and his careful research is nil — I end up with the same computer he finds after weeks of investigation. Sometimes it’s terribly significant. I begin to wonder if he should be in charge of some of our more major financial decisions. Or if, alternately, choosing a mutual fund for our IRAs might paralyze him with choice.

What about you? What kind of decision making process do you use? Have you discovered truths about yourself by playing board games?

The training starts early

A lump

Like every blogger in the universe, I struggle with how much I should talk about. My mom and my mother-in-law both read this blog. A future employer will very likely find it. (Hi future employer! Hire me!) Who knows – my sons may someday find themselves reading about it. (“Mooooom! How embarrassing?!” “What? Your Iron Man undies were soooo cute!”)

So it is with a certain hesitation that I tell you that I found a lump in my breast.

But wait! Before you panic, I’ll also tell you: the story is completed and it ends well.

I’d noticed the lump a few months ago, but as a nursing mom, well, Tigris and Euphrates are moving targets. They change a lot, all the time when you’re nursing. So I didn’t worry much about it. But now that I’ve dialed back and the girls seem to be returning to more normal proportions, it was time to pay attention to the lump that didn’t go away.

I’ve found lumps in my breast twice before. The first time I was maybe 23. I was newly married and so in love with my husband (still am, for the record, it’s just too late to die as newlyweds) that I was superstitiously afraid it would be poetically appropriate for one of us to die young because the universe just doesn’t like for people to be that happy. I spent a week convinced I was going to DIE of breast cancer! I went to my dr. She agreed it needed to be looked at. I went to the Breast Center at Faulkner Hospital (to which I could and did walk). They ultrasounded it. They mammogrammed it. They let me feel up a model boob. The result? Just normal but lumpy breast tissue. No problem. Let us know if it grows big or something, but it won’t because it’s just normal breast tissue.

Phew.

The second time was Grey’s first birthday. I panicked only slightly less than the first time because I had a baby! Imagine him being orphaned, never knowing how much his mother looooooves him. (Good thing I have the blog so he can now read about it in excruciating detail should I die in a tragic chopstick accident, eh?) I went to Lawrence Hospital and they ultrasounded and mammogrammed me. Shockingly, this too turned out to be lumpy breast tissue and perfectly normal.

So you can understand that I wasn’t ready to get all that worked up about what felt to me very much like lumpy breast tissue. But, as it remained through weaning etc., I decided that even though I was pretty darn sure that this one is just like the others, and even though due to changes in our health insurance, this time I’d likely have to pay for a good portion of that testing myself, it would really suck to self-diagnose as lumpy breast tissue and be wrong.

So I went to my midwife. And I went to get ultrasounded. I provided them entertainment by being a nursing mom (still at night) which totally messes up mammograms, so they didn’t even bother. The diagnosis? Well, as the charming, Russian-accented radiologist said, “Your breasts are lumpy-bumpy-happy.”

I do very much think about how this kind of health care plays into the larger debate. On one hand, all three of these lumps were significant enough that my primary care physician could feel them and not be certain that they were normal. (Of course, how much malpractice plays into that, I can’t say.) For two of the three, even after an ultrasound they wanted the second look with the mammogram. (Fun!) But none of these are dangerous, precancerous, anything. I would be perfectly 100% healthy if I’d never seen a doctor for any of them. What is the responsible healthcare decision to make? Should I keep going in every 3 years when I get a new lump? Is the best systemic financial decision for me to get some training in the difference in feel and morphology between my normal lumps and cancerous lumps? Is it best for my family and the system if I go in every single time to get them checked out, even though past history indicates my boobs are lumpy? How much does that cost? How much would it cost if one of them was a problem and I missed the chance to catch it early? What about studies that show (ok, that I think I read like 5 years ago) lumpy boobs are more likely to eventually get cancer? What is the rational treatment for the ongoing care of my lumpy ladies?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. The part that dismays me is that I’m not sure anyone does. My healthcare providers default to doing all the tests because THEY have no motivation to do otherwise. I follow their recommendations because I can, because I’m not a trained medical professional, and because the cost of being wrong is so high. But I’d love better training instead to know what cancer looks like and how it acts, so I can spot the difference. Or a statistical study saying that 90% of lumps aren’t cancerous and you should only go in with these criteria. Or even a study that says the most efficient outcome is to get every lump checked, every time.

I hope you will forgive me if I fail to include a picture with this post. My future employer and sons are reading.

Brownsmith

The summer we lived in Bonner’s Ferry, I was five, or maybe six. I remember that summer fondly — the first of the golden buzzing summers in the Northwest. I remember one of my favorite things to play: Brownstone. I would walk out of the house – on the side with the big tall trees toward town, not towards the deep forests – holding a full cup of water and a spoon. Then I would creep under the porch. There was dappled light down there; more than enough to see by, but not enough to nourish plants. It was just plain dirt. Not dirt with construction waste mixed in, or dirt with old roots, or rocky dirt. Just, well, dirt.

And with the consummate care of an artist, I would spend hours under there transforming that dirt into mud. There’s a particular delightful state of mud when it’s nearly solid, but the surface gleams with smooth moisture. I can see it a lifetime later in my mind’s eye. My goal was to create patties of this delightful stuff. I named myself a brownsmith. A blacksmith works with iron, but a brownsmith’s stuff is mud.

From the eyes of a parent, I have to suspect that what this looked like was an hour of silence followed by the need for a bath. Funnily enough, I don’t remember the baths at all. Just the way the mud looked.

Yesterday I had a reprieve from my usual schedule. A friend was coming, and she was bringing dinner. So instead of tying my children to my apron strings as I cooked a proper meal for them, we all sat in the front yard together. Thane sampled the tasty bubble rods. I drew an outline of Grey on the sidewalk and added antennae and a spaceship, having way more fun with it than he did. But finally he noticed the flowerbeds. I had mulched them, but they need loving care again. Apparently you have to deal with your lawn more than once or twice a summer — who knew? Anyway, he asked if he could dig in them. My first reaction was: no! You’ll mess up the flower beds.

Then I thought, “Am I the sort of mother who won’t let my son play in the dirt?” and I said yes.

Then he wanted to use some bricks to plant brick seeds that would grow into brick plants. And I thought, “What a mess this will make!?” and then I wondered. Am I the sort of mother who won’t let my son play with blocks in the dirt? So I said yes.

For 20 minutes my son happily built a brick hovel and piled intermixed dirt and mulch on top, while Thane sampled the fine vintage of grass clippings on the lawn. I played Bingo with him for the 30000th time. The sun shone dappled through the trees, and I remembered the dim recesses of Brownsmith.

Maybe tonight I’ll give Grey a spoon and a cup of water, too.