Maybe it was Utah...

We didn't start out to have four boys. What sane person would? We started like most people--with one, and then we felt that an only child might not be the best thing. After all, he would never experience sibling love (or rivalry), or have a built-in play-mate. This was, admittedly, selfish on our part. Numero Uno (or "Primero" as we will call him--our boys have insisted on anonymity--apparently the statute of limitations is not up on everything and I have learned not to ask too many questions) was a very verbal child. The air around him hummed with questions from morning to night. A spare would absorb some of his attention and give us a break, or so we thought. And of course, we thought, how nice it would be if we had a girl--one of each to keep things balanced.

Then we had two--boys, that is. Oh well, hand-me-downs were great, they could share a room, etc. etc. What we hadn't figure on (and I think this is where many parents' fantasies crumble into reality) was the vast difference in the personalities of little Primo and baby Segundo (we're trying to learn Spanish after a very pleasant holiday in Mexico--it's a lovely language!). Where Primo was chatty and gregarious, Segundo was intense and hilarious at the same time. He'd say something funny and then become enraged when we dared to laugh: "Don't laugh at me! Don't LOOK at me!' became his toddler mantra.

While a baby brother drained off some of Primero's attention, the additional energy that Segundo required of us rendered everything moot. Nice word that--moot--I scan its definition and find an interesting constellation of meanings: "no significance", "having been previously decided", "argue", "debate", "question"--it seems that toddlers embody moot and scatter it about like fairy dust (or pollen).

For some strange reason, we thought that three was a good number of children to have, so we had a third. It must have been the rule of three at work: fairy tales, folk tales, nursery rhymes, baseball--three appears to be a significant number, and who were we to buck a cultural trend? Again, we (foolishly, it turned out) hoped for a girl. Instead, Tercero arrived on a wave of amniotic fluid, a small, determined surfer nearly colliding with the waiting doctor. We didn't know it at the time, but this was to be his recurrent life pattern--determination and collision--a dangerous mixture. We have since learned that it is courting danger to have the children outnumber the parents, especially when those children are boys. But by then, it was already too late. We were two for three. Or so we thought.

We had a nice little family going. Primero was seven--a bright and active child, sweet-natured and generous. Segundo was five--solemn and funny at the same time, always running after Primero and his friends. Segundo was three--whip-smart, determined and idiosyncratic (this in a three-year-old should've warned us, but what did we know?). Then the bombshell exploded.

There was to be a fourth baby--this one sneaked by us. I know, I know--you ask, how can that be? Well, families and history are full of sneaky babies determined to be born. Of course, we thought (salvaging some positive sliver) that here was another chance at a girl. We put a brave face on it, but really, we knew in our hearts that there was to be no girl. We knew that another Y-chromosome package was on the way.

Friends and acquaintances would say "What'll you do if it's another BOY?" This quickly became tiresome. I often imagined roaring in reply, "Send the little stinker BACK, what else? Maybe YOU'D like to take him?" However, I never had the guts.

I do believe that people mean well.

When Cuarto was born, I didn't need to inspect the equipment. We'd know from the beginning that he was a boy. This had come in handy when we were forced to buy an entire new set of baby gear--after Tercero, we'd foolishly given it all away, secure in our delusion of the three child family. This time, we were safe in choosing boy stuff, although economics dictated that the odd girly item would find its way into the wardrobe. We told ourselves that this would result in a securely gendered boy who would not balk at wearing pink. Actually, this may have worked, as Cuarto is the most sartorial of all the boys, and has worn pink in various guises, and made it work.

Cuarto was also the punchline of the ultimate "Good news/Bad news" cosmic joke--the "Bad news" was that we had another kid on the way, and a boy to boot! The "good news" is that he turned out to be the easiest of them all, although his brothers like to take the credit for this. They claim that their brand of home boot-camp toughened him up for a hostile world.

And so we were two for four--we had to buy another car--one that had room for six passengers. We took up two tables at fast-food restaurants--the only kind we dared go to. Grocery shopping required me to slip into a dissociative trance, a skill that has come in handy over the years. We added rooms (actually, entire wings and floors) to our house, a pantry to the kitchen and a large entry for the boots. We also added grey hairs and likely subtracted several years of living, which is fine becuase who wants to live to be really old? We would have to depend on the charity of our kids--this often keeps me up at night.

However hairy daily life was, my husband and I can say, from the safety of years, we would not have wanted to miss herding these boys into adulthood. Of course, all parents are expected to say such things. What we mostly remember was the incessant action around the house--no dull moments existed. The frisson of danger was always lurking (explosives and incendiaries loomed large). And, of course, the discover that boys are the most sentimental and sweetest of creatures. Who knew?

William Pollock, in his book Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myth of Boyhood, says that we must realize that the "rascal and the scam" stereotype of boys is limited and false--that "while there is a grain of truth in myths about boys--which is why these myths have endured--the full truth is more complex and considerable more positive." Pollock goes on to bust some myths about boys and men. Having lived with males most of my life (only girl surrounded by brothers, only woman in family of five males, including the dog--although he was fixed), I can attest to the fact that boys daily defy their myths. They are always being Mythbusters. They try to bust the myths that constrain and trip them up, like clothes that don't fit. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don't--their struggles cause parents pain and the world much energy. The best assistance I can give the myth-busting endeavour is to tell the story of the wonderful, maddening, complicated, interesting, hilarious and heart-breaking creatures who are our sons.

Busting boyhood myths aside, this story is, above all else, a tender look at what it was like to share a home (usually in some stage of demolition and renovation) with these rare and wonderful boys. Of course, certain things have been adjusted for anonymity, as previously mentioned. Also, wherever needed, dramatic effect trumps accuracy.

After all, what is any story of a family but a version of Freud's "Family Romance"?[1] A romance requires a plot, characters, protagonist, antagonists, conflicts--in short, story ingredients. And this is a story before all else--we shall call it "inspired by"--that handy locution that gets us all off the hood of authenticity and allows us to rummage to our hearts' content in creativity's closet.

If our family has a guiding work that informs and inspires our lives, it is the Coen Brothers' 1987 film Raising Arizona. We've watched that movie for years. Our grown sons have tested the humour-senses of prospective partners with it--if they laugh, they're in. If not---! We have memorized the dialogue. Quotations have entered the family lexicon--a particularly good meal will elicit "Might fine cereal flakes, Mrs. McDonough." Lines such as "You never leave a man behind!" or "Son, you've got a panty on your head!" or "Recidivism--not a pretty word, is it?" punctuate holiday dinners. Guests are usually mystified.

The movie's final scene is particularly poignant--a favourite sentimental scene in a most unsentimental film--it's easy to find on Youtube--it tugs on the heartstrings of people who dig Coen Brothers' films (enough said!). I, too, can never watch the scene without tearing up. It so echoes our family path--it seems we've been heading to that final scene since 1979 when little Primero (like little Nathan Arizona Jr.) blew into our lives and started the family rolling.

The scene opens with the central character--knuckle-headed career criminal H.I. McDonough (played to moronic perfection by Nicholas Cage)--who, exhausted by his misadventures, is dreaming of the future when he and his wife Ed (Holly Hunter) are old. He dreams, and his voice (Cage's best adenoidal chicken-fried accent) says,

"But I saw an old couple bein' visited by their children, and all their
grandchildren too. And the old couple wasn't screwed up, and neither
were their kids or their grandchildren. And I don't know, you tell me.
This whole dream, was it wishful thinking? Was I just fleein' reality,
like I'm liable to do?"

In the trailer where the old couple lives, the table groans under a lavish Thanksgiving dinner, complete with ridiculously huge turkey. A hand-lettered sign says "Welcome Home Kids!" The door opens and in pour the grown-up children and young grandchildren, who all take their seats at the festal table. The voice, that chicken-fried voice, continues its nasal drone:

"But me'n Ed, we can be good too."

We see the elderly couple, their backs to the camera, as they face the laden table and extend their arms to their progeny. The voice continues, waxing elegiac (by now, I'm usually a puddle, eyes streaming, moved by the insane poetry of it all)

"...And it seemed real. It seemed like us. And it seemed like, well...
our home....if not Arizona, then a land, not too far away, where all
parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy
and beloved...

"I dunno, maybe it was Utah!" [2]

And so follows the story of a family: two parents, four boys, many friends, pets, extended family, etc. We, too, lived in a land not too far away. We, too, tried to be strong and wise and capable. Often we missed by a mile. Sometimes the children were happy and sometimes they weren't. But they were always beloved--to the best of our creaky abilities.

Maybe it was Utah after all. Actually, it was Saskatchewan.

[1] "The family romance is a conscious fantasy, later repressed, in which a child imagines that their birth parents are not actually but adoptive parents...typically, the fantasy parents are of noble lineage, or at least of a higher social class than the real parents."
(Hmmm! This rings true--at some point each of our kids believed he'd been adopted by us and his real parents were way cooler, richer and more interesting that we were, if he could only find them!)

[2] Raising Arizona 1987 Written by Joel and Ethan Coen; directed by Joel Coen; produced by Ethan Coen.

Herding the Mob

"Four boys!" People say in horror when I tell them we raised four sons. "You look so normal!" This is the usual reaction. However, I like to remember a very different reaction just to balance things out. Years ago, we were in a Chinese restaurant known for its generous buffet--when you have four boys to fill up, "All you can eat!" and "buffet" are required menu items. As the six of us (parental units accompanied by a boy train) filed in, the Chinese hostess counted down the line and sucked in her breath. "Fo' boys!" she said. "Lucky! Lucky! Lucky!" Then she showed us to our table. Apparently having four boys is a bit of a deal--for good or ill.

People are amazed that we survived it relatively intact. So are we--amazed that is. Intact is still up for debate. There is something about boys in numbers that causes folks to quake. While there were many times over the years that cause us plenty of quakes, it never seemed to be that big a deal. Of course, time has a way of misting over the rough spots, becoming "misty water-coloured memories" (remember that syrupy Streisand ballad from the seventies?). As William Faulkner said, "The past is never dead, it is not even past." Kind of ominous sounding, but at least this has heft.

My husband and I are at a time in our lives where we wonder what we'd like to be when we grow up. For the first time in decades we have a wee bit of time and economic wiggle room (well, enough for a quiver perhaps--wiggle might be pushing it)--enough space for reflection, deep thinking and some tentative wonderment about our future. As children of a generation that invented going with the flow, we did our bit of drifting into parenthood and regular employment--for a long while, these two activities gobbled up all our time and energy. Parenthood also sucked up all our material resources--for many a year, there was a lot more month than money at the end of the pay period.

But now we are in a hiatus of sorts. As soldiers recently de-mobbed from the front lines, we look at one another and say, "Now what?" Time sits awkwardly on our hands--we're not used to having it. We're conditioned to be doing, going, working, cooking, cleaning, parenting, driving, shopping, list-making, etc. We are especially not used to the absence of children--as all parents know, children are superb time and energy sinks. Ours have taken their sinks (and ours, quite literally, as one once took an old kitchen sink to a new set of digs) out into the world. We sit, bewildered, blinking in the peace and quiet, the fridge full and the towels hung up.

Recently a friend told me her husband, an artist, was asked what his greatest accomplishment was. He, a print-maker and teacher, didn't even pause. He said, "Well, I have three kids."

Yes, indeed. In so many ways, we see our children as just that--our greatest accomplishments. As with all good works of art, they are complex, flawed, challenging, maddening, beautiful, breathtaking and brutally honest. Old Sir Francis Bacon (the seventeenth century philosopher, not the twentieth-century artist--.although he may have had his own thoughts about children...most people do--famously said about spouses and progeny: "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief." Now forgiving Sir Francis the crack about wives--he did live in a misogynistic age, after all--the idea of children keeping you from accomplishing great deeds or screwing up royally is interesting. Likely people simply didn't last long enough back then to have a life after the kids left for London or Canterbury or some other urb or burb.

However, medical science, material progress and technology have given us the longevity to hang around a bit after the kidlets launch into the world. We've all seen the bumper stickers that bray "I want to live long enough to be a burden to my children!" Well, now we can, and we can choose the particular burden that best fits--how great is that?

In my case, the chosen burden must be words, for this is my raw material---words, words, words. Never mind old videos and photographs--pictures don't lie and they're worth a thousand words. Words can bend the truth and who needs a kilo of 'em anyway? So, I choose my burden--a story! A story about raising four boys on one salary in a house that took twelve years to renovate.

In a way, the chosen burden is also my revenge. For years I cursed our eldest son with the age-old parental whammy--"May you have a child just like YOU someday!" until my husband pointed out that this needlessly punished any potential daughter-in-law, and also burdened the grandchildren with baggage no grandparent wants unloaded at the doorstep. With visions of us showing up, feeble and gray, at youth court to bail out the latest generational misadventurer, I ceased cursing. But I never stopped thinking about payback. Payback is, of course, a much nicer word than revenge. It could be giving a gift, taking stock, etc. So I choose my burden--the story. The power of words. The pen is mightier than the sword. I seem to be taken by aphorisms--likely need to reign that in....

So I wonder what I should call this opus, this memoir? It feels weird to even think in terms such as these--memoirs are for people who've led extraordinary lives. Our lives were and are quite unextraordinary (which my spell check insists is not a word--too bad--it is now). But, I think, what means extraordinary? I consult the dictionary which tells me it means "far more than usual or expected." Okay then, I can live with that. Four boys are more than we expected so I guess we qualify.

But back to the title. Being a prisoner of linearity, I must have a title before I can start. Unfortunately, Shirley Jackson (of "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House among other works) already took two of the best child-rearing memoir titles: Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages. Who could possibly top those? Not me...

Thinking and thinking, I googled the word "raising", hoping to find some ready-made gem of a phrase. Unfortunately nothing rose except dogs, bread, roofs and Cain--this had possibilities but the plot-line of one son slaying the other and wandering forever in the wilderness seemed to be tempting fate, so I dropped it.

I returned to my playing with words--I have always loved words--their histories, connotations, the way they sound and look. I love the idea of words. They're the building blocks of everything--even God had to say the words before He could create the world. I wasn't about to create the cosmos, I just wanted a snappy title. But what to use? What to say?

Stuck for the moment, I did what I always do when I have some free time--I read. I came upon a passage by Larry McMurtry, that extraordinary storyteller, as I was reading Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. He mentions his regret for not continuing to work the family ranch in Texas. He stumbles upon a metaphor (always a dangerous business) and realizes that, as a writer, he's not so different from his cowboy forbears after all. Not content with just stumbling over the metaphor, he starts shoving it around (even more dangerous, but in McMurtry's case it turns out all right). He says, "...the metaphor of herding can be pushed even further, to writing itself: what is it but a way of herding words? First I try to herd a few desirable words into a sentence, and then I corral them into small pastures called paragraphs, before spreading them across the spacious ranges of a novel."

If McMurtry can push metaphors around, maybe I can too--if words can be herded, then surely boys can too. Don't we, as parents, herd our children across life's range, crossing rivers and wash-outs, always looking out for the good grass and the bad rustlers? Hmm, perhaps we should leave the metaphor here before it completely breaks down as we arrive at Dodge and its corrals, the last stop before the abbatoirs of Chicago. Although, when you think about it, adult life--our symbolic Dodge City--can be rough.

So I play around with the term "herding"--I get herding cats, herding chickens, herding sheep, but herding boys? I look further--for the noun "herd" I find the following: "see flock, mob." Promising. I look further--I learn that in Australia, land of kangaroo, koala (and nasty little creatures they are, too, so I hear) and great grazing herds kicking up Outback dust, herds are called "mobs". Hmmm--I like that. There's something anarchic about the word. Herd seems to sedate somehow, but mob--well, mob appears to be the mot juste. There were many days (months? years?) when mob described the horde of boys and their interactions to a T (really must stop dishing out these sayings).

So I think I have a title--tentative as it is, it'll do for a working one: Herding the Mob: Raising Boys for Fun and Profit.

Now I can start paying back.

Holy cow--who'da thunk it was so easy!

Having heard about blogs, blogging, bloggers, etc. for some time now, I thought I'd check it out--you know, get into the 21st century and all that. Also, I thought it would give me incentive to do some writing--if the words are being shooed into cyberspace, then perhaps I will take them more seriously and actually produce some. I've actually begun a writing project about raising our four boys "back in the day" (as they say--not ME--sounds way too lame!). Anyway, any excuse to tap some words out on the old keyboard (although being a boomer, we recall using goose quills in school--a step up from the cuneiform clay tablets our parents used!).

Being the most techno-UNsavvy of people, I was impressed with how easy it was to begin blogging--hmmm, hopefully it isn't TOO easy. The road to hell and all that stuff--what would blogging hell be like? Would there be 9 circles? If Dante Alighieri was blogging today, who would he populate his infernal circles with? Would there be a URL limbo in circle 1? Porn sites that entrap the lustful in circle 2? The mind wonders...

It was pretty easy to get started--I've got my password, my URL, my template, yadda yadda. Who knows what will appear here? We're all full of words--words are how we reach out and know we're not alone. Words are how we share our stories of being human beings--all bozos on this bus of life that is moving us through the world. Some of us have a LOT of baggage in the compartment, and some of us have learned to travel light (not me--I'm hauling all kinds of stuff!)

No longer on the front lines of parenting, I have moved away from the front and can take some time to gather my thoughts and memories about raising boys. I realize how lucky I was to have boys--not that I have anything against girls (having been one myself long ago). But for me, being around boys is fun, exciting, dangerous and explosive (literally) all at the same time. They are also, in my experience, sweet and sentimental creatures who, once they emerge alive from the self-absorption of adolescence, are quite nice to their mothers.

Over the last several years, stories have emerged from the troops--apparently the statute of limitations is up on more things all the time. While their educational value is likely dubious (other than to demonstrate how easy it was to pull wool over parental eyes), they have been wildly entertaining additions to family dinners. So I thought I'd share...

Anyway, writing from beautiful Vancouver Island on this almost spring day, with daffodils nodding their golden belled heads and cherry blossoms bursting like pink popcorn up and down the streets, it bodes well for a new project--"Blogging begun--now I'm done!"