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.