Little Body, Big Attitude. Tuesdays With My Boy.

You know, you go along in life thinking your kids aren’t absorbing things, or noticing things, or caring about things. It’s easy to think your children have all the depth of a potato-chip. I mean, by the time one of them has described every painful detail of every playstation game he wants, or dirt bike he wants, or book and movie she wants, or store they want to go to, you start to think life for them is just a giant vacuum, sucking all the little unimportant, material, worldly things into the canister that is their soul. They certainly can’t seem to see over the edge, most of the time.

And then you have an experience. Something that opens up the unexplored portion of your child’s brain to you and you realize that there is a world of depth in there just waiting to be tapped. And maybe, since you are their mother, you should be the one to help them tap it.

So, I dragged my youngest to a play last night. “Tuesdays With Morrie.” (We’ll discuss my choice of theater later.) Except I didn’t think I was dragging him. I was teaching him. I told myself it would be good for him, and even though I was braced for his eternal boredom with anything that doesn’t involve racing pixels, I had decided it was a cultural experience that would broaden his limited horizons and enlarge soul. He had to go. I was ready for his complaints, and already had my heels dug in to the soil of his resistance. I certainly didn’t think he’d gain anything other than a notch on the staff of his education in discipline.

The play started, and my son spent about fifteen minutes attempting to read the Calvin and Hobbes he had brought to entertain himself in the moments before the lights went down. Then he began begging for a pen light, for which he was turned down under the rules of propriety. So he flopped back into his chair with his petulant, lowered-brow neanderthal look, and grumbled to his eight year-old self.

But the show was funny. And my son laughed. A lot. Then he leaned over to me, after realizing that the main character was terminally ill, and said, “So, he’s trying to look at the best in everything, right?” Um. Okay. Surprise. My son was getting it. I told my husband and we both sat there feeling proud. Of both our son and our brilliant parenting.

Then the story progressed and Morrie became more and more ill, and my son began to complain. He had to go to the bathroom. NOW. (He wasn’t allowed. I know that little game.) He had a headache and had to lay down. He was bored. Would probably be dead from boredom before Morrie died from his disease. Would report me to DCFS for Abuse of a Child With a Blunt Humdrum. Became more and more insistent that I take him home now because he wasn’t going to survive. And it was dead obvious to me that I had misjudged this child. He was too immature for this. Couldn’t do it. My mistake. What was I thinking. Husband agreed that we wouldn’t bring him to shows anymore.

Thankfully “Tuesdays With Morrie” is a brief play. It was a wonderful production which we had mostly enjoyed. The show ended. The audience stood and cheered wildly. I faced my son and opened my mouth to express disappointment at his behavior.

And all at once there was a sobbing little head on my shoulder. My boy’s shoulders trembled and heaved. And through the cheering crowd he cried, “I hate that show! I never ever want you to take me to a show that sad and depressing ever again!” He cried in my arms for ten minutes. He hadn’t been bored. He’d been distressed.

So. Not the depth of a potato-chip. The depth of a compassionate heart and a keen and insightful mind that perhaps doesn’t have the emotional maturity yet to handle what his intellect is capable of understanding. I can work with that, and I should. And next time I’ll take him to see “Charlie Brown” instead.