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.
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