Years ago, when I was the mother of just one baby, I met a woman who had several kids. One of her children, she told me, had been very challenging as a toddler and preschooler. "She just didn't like being a little kid," she told me. "It wasn't fun for her, it wasn't interesting for her. She got a lot easier to deal with when she got old enough that she could do the things she'd been wanting to do all along."
I thought that sounded very odd. Children are supposed to be children, after all. The years from 2-6 are something every kid has to live through. Surely the pleasures of the age are universal? It just didn't make sense to me then.
A few months ago, I was doing one of my periodic sweeps through the rec room in the basement, getting rid of stuff nobody was using anymore. With the Tiny Tornado about to turn five, I finally gave up on keeping things around in case he got interested in them in the future. Among the stuff I hauled off to Goodwill, or donated to his preschool, were two large bins of food and cooking toys.
The Tiny Tornado counfounded us for all his years of baby- and toddler-hood by not playing with toys. I tried to get him interested. I bought all kinds of toys in the vain hope that we simply hadn't found the right ones yet. I tried to play with him. I removed nearly all the toys from our living area on the theory that such a quantity was too overwhelming and disorienting, and that maybe one smallish bin of toys would be more appealing that the wide variety we'd collected in 8 or 9 years of parenting.
Nope. Toys, he made clear, were just not interesting
People ask me, "What did he do with his time?" I hardly know. I know he wandered around the house exploring and getting into things. It was from him that we learned you can draw pictures under the water in a toilet if you use a pencil, for instance. He was talented from a young age at putting boxes on stools on chairs to get to things on high shelves. He never, except when watching a movie (and not always then) sat still in one place long enough for me to, say, use the bathroom in peace. But he wasn't unfocused; he was very focused on looking around, getting curious about things, imagining things one might do if one could only get to that shelf, or through that door, or into that cabinet, and then doing them.
Usually he followed where I went. Lots of little kids like to help their parents around the house, dusting or sweeping or wiping tables. It was a passion for the Tiny Tornado, to be doing what I was doing.
I was halfway up the stairs with a bin of plastic food when the obvious hit me between the eyes: the Tiny Tornado never played with toy food because, before he was even 2, he wanted to be in the kitchen with me, cooking for real.
He always wanted to be doing things that were "for real." He loved to watch us do things, and try to emulate us. He dressed himself from an early age; fed himself from an early age; toilet-trained himself--not early, but when he got tired of waiting for me to do it.
One of my favorite stories is from when the kids were maybe 10, 7, and 4. Word Boy--the 7-year-old--has asked me for a snack. I say, "Just let me finish this up and then I can help you. Or, if you don't want to wait, you can get yourself something."
Word Boy went off, whining, to his older brother, who said, "I'm right in the middle of something, but if you can wait a bit then I can help you."
Word Boy collapsed, still whining, into a living room chair. The Tiny Tornado--age 4--said in a resigned tone, "All right. I'll do it." And he did. He got up off the couch, went into the kitchen, and fixed his older brother a snack.
Sometimes we say that the Tiny Tornado did a thing earlier than his brothers, and people say, "Oh, that's really common for younger kids, they want to emulate their siblings." And we say, "No, you don't understand. He didn't do it at a younger age then they did. He literally did it before they did."
Back to the staircase and the bin of plastic food. I don't just realize that the Tiny Tornado has never been interested in play as much as he has been interested in doing real work, but I realize, that like the daughter of that long-ago mom whose name I have forgotten, he didn't really enjoy being a toddler. He is still busy and into things, and that's still a challenge--because he often does things I don't want him to--but it gets easier and easier to pass the days with him as his abilities catch up with his aspirations.
It also gets easier as I learn to help him find real things he can do with his time. You can see from the picture above that he is quite adept in the kitchen. Yes, that's my big chef's knife! No, I don't let him cut anything but tofu and mushrooms with it, so far at least. But he can measure ingredients, mix and pour them, stir a pot at the stove. Like his older brothers, he likes to cook with me, and like his older brothers, he does most of the work when he does.
We took a class called "Small Dogs, Big Fun" this summer, where he learned some training techniques. Not only was he almost completely in charge of his own dog in class, but he has been working with Gemmy every day at home, sometimes for more than an hour. Gemmy has become a very happy dog, and very attached to the Tiny Tornado. He has also become reliable off-lead, something he never was before.
Our wonderful teacher took this picture of TT calling Gemmy to him after working on "stay." His summer class ended last week, but in the fall session we'll be taking our dogs to "Circus Dogs," where they will learn to jump through hoops and other neat tricks.
Likewise, he is surprisingly adept at archery:
As a toddler, his most common morning greetings to me were, "What are we doing today?" and "Where are we going today?" His special gift is competence at planning and carrying out tasks and activities. Most often, he wants to be in the world and interacting with it not as a kid at play but as a person at work.
I hope some kid somewhere is having a great time with the kitchen toys. I know the Lego Savant loved them when he was little. The Tiny Tornado, in the meantime, would be happy to cook your lunch.
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4 comments:
wow. it just clicked for me, maybe one reason TT "is" a boy is that in the real world one still sees many more males than females doing "real stuff" like building things, fixing things, being firemen, etc etc. I was a woman who did her best, along with my feminist age-mates, to give our daughters (mine born in the mid-1970s) every push in the direction of trying everying and aspiring to anything. I don't see much chance of male predominance in the visible active physically demanding "doing stuff" occupations changing any time soon. Had I been 5 in 2012, with parents like S & D, I might well have opted to be a boy too, just on general principles!
Susan, with respect and affection: People's attempts to explain away TT's gender by referring to things outside himself--like cultural pressures--always make me uncomfrotable. For several reasons. One is that it doesn't accurately reflect his own lived experience. His preference for male gender expression started at an age when he could not reasonably be thought to be aware of the kinds of social forces you mention. Another is that he lives his life surrounded by woman with active "real stuff" jobs and hobbies--like our next-door neighbors, a lesbian couple who run their own dog-training business and are his inspirtation and support for his passion for working with his dog, or a close friend of mine who is the person he knows who builds things. Likewise, because there are so many lesbians in his life, he is perfectly aware that there are women who don't dress or act in traditionally feminine ways. For that matter, he is also close to a neighbor of ours who is a tomboyish straight woman.
When I try to put in a paragrph break, my browser freezes, so I'll finish in another comment, just to add that I'd prefer not to see scare quotes. Right now, as far as we know, Tiny Tornado is a boy.
What a joy to see such a remarkable reflection about a sweet, rambunctious kid... Thanks so much - from a long-ago-mom of 2
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