Quietly, my 6 year-old son spread his body on the carpet floor, immersed in opening his world through reading.
Suddenly, he jumped off the floor like a desert mouse avoiding a hungry snake. His twisted kinetic dance turned his body towards his bedroom. I then heard the random pronouncement of "I am going to make Spongebob" fade in the living room air as he raced to his room.
Kids are like that. Random thoughts redirecting energies for the next task of play.
About 90 minutes later, my son reemerged from his lair with a plastic Spongebob made from Legos.
Legos are great toys, as long as you do not step on them while walking barefoot through the house. They allow a child to drive a thought into action; to transform imagination into a creative piece of child art.
I do not buy the Legos kits that build specific things. I buy the plain box of assorted Lego blocks in various colors. I leave it to his imagination to create somethings sans an instruction sheet. Artists do not color by number.
We are all artists, we are all poets. We are all capable of creating. As children we are in tune with these natural qualities. Some of us disconnect from these qualities as we travel through the chapters of our lives.
I try to provide the materials for my son to nurture the human desire to create. There is always paper scattered on tables and floors. Scissors, crayons, colored pencils, and markers abscond from designated storage containers seeking to avoid the oblivion of being exiled inside plastic pencil containers. The evidence of a boy creating is always present in our cluttered home.
I indulge him with the things he needs to play with. I bought a large box of copy paper from Sam's Club so he could have plenty of paper to draw on. He has a tub of pencils, pens, colored pencils and other writing utensils for his use to create. Sticks of glue await his calling.
I do not urge him, I do not guide him. I let him be who he is.
I try hard not to be a parent who lives vicariously through his children. I do not need my son to absolve my failures by pushing him with the things of my past.
Still, I am glad to be able to provide him the things I never had as a child.
Someone once asked me what my favorite toy was when I was a child. My initial response from my quickest neural transmissions wondered "what kind of silly question is that?" I did not verbalize that thought. Rather, I answered that when I was a child, we were very poor and I had few toys other than some plastic soldiers and cowboys and Indians that I bought with my paperboy earnings at the Woolworth's on 18th Street.
The person who asked me was saddened by my response. I was never sad by the scarcity of toys in our home. I turned the soldiers and cowboys and Indians into baseball players. I would find things to use as tiny bases and line up the figures into position. I would use a marble as a ball. I developed a card game where I would try to simulate an actual baseball game by drawing a card and then drawing another card. An ace followed by a deuce would be a home run. A king followed by a deuce or a three would be a triple. I cannot remember all the combinations I made, but it was complex. I had much fun playing this game.
My family thought that I was crazy playing this game in my make-believe world. I never once heard "hey, that is clever" when I played. I only absorbed the befuddlement from others.
I told the person who asked me the question about my favorite toy, that I always wanted Lincoln Logs but I never had a set. I told the person that I would look at the toy section in the Sears catalog, and that I would stare for long periods of time at the ad for Lincoln Logs.
I would look at the picture and I would imagine that I was actually playing with the Lincoln Logs. My imagination was so strong that I was actually building a fort and playing with the figures in the fort. Imagination is a strong quality in a child.
I became so deeply involved in my imaginary play via the Sears catalog that it was no different from physically having the toy. I had to deeply engage myself with my imagination to get beyond the reality of being too poor to actually have the Lincoln Logs.
Play is about imagination. I was using my imagination, even if I could not physically hold the Lincoln Logs. I was still playing with them.
I still craved them. I was never sad about not having them. My mind was always engaged in a pretend world to deal with the harshness of poverty. I remember once when all we had to consume for dinner was a cup of coffee. I put sugar in it and I slowly sipped every drink, imagining as if I was enjoying a grand dinner of every imaginable food.
But I never lusted after what I did not have. I never felt as if I was missing out because I lacked what the other kids had. I created my own games and became the weird kid living in his strange world.
I was always the weird kid in the neighborhood. Different drumming sounds heard only by those standing outside the peer produced "do not cross" tape.
I feel lucky and blessed for that experience. I also feel blessed to have a child that I can help nurture with his creativity and imagination.
There were times in my life when the incredible pain of depression weighed so heavy upon me that I ingested things that would have killed most people. Instead, I once awoke in a strange car and soon spent a day in a jail cell, or another time I was in an emergency room drinking awful tasting charcoal to absorb a multitude of ingested substances. That attempt resulted in a week in a psychiatric unit.
Life was once a twisted, knotted string of horror.
Yet, here I am-still alive. I am not depressed. I have gone far and beyond what I once thought was impossible. I was certain that my depressed destiny was suicide. Now, It saddens me whenever I read about someone fulfilling this most unnecessary of false destinies.
Depression is the greatest liar of the human experience.
I am now filled with hope. I am alive and thankful for it. Most importantly, I am entrusted with a child to love and care for. I realize that his road in life is being paved today with the experiences I share and create with him. Then, I do realize that perhaps I do live vicariously through him. It is not with baseball triumphs or Lincoln Logs. It is just with the simplicity of the absence of crazy abuse in his life.
I am the luckiest man in the world to have that chance to provide a child that opportunity of living in a safe environment where his main concern in life is "where is the box of Legos?"
Life is very good.
