Monday 25 November 2013

In lieu of a twee title about seas and monsters...yeah, I've got nothing

I had a lovely little moment with my son yesterday.

I tend to post more about my daughters.  They're older, noisier, and have some of the same interests that I do, while my son tends to prefer flying under the radar. Being a girl myself, sometimes it's just more intuitive to relate to my daughters. They love internet memes, music, books, clothes, makeup, nailpolish.  They're interested in my knitting and jewellery-making, and quite often just want to sit on my bed and have girl time with me, which I adore.  My son is quieter, tries to stay out of conversations, doesn't ask too many questions, loves to help but doesn't like making decisions. He is still my baby, at eleven, and I flounder, sometimes, trying to connect with him in a way that respects him getting older with interests of his own, without falling into talking about video games I wish he didn't play or television shows I wish he didn't watch, in order to keep him talking.

***Redacted from first draft - a rant about videogames and television shows that are inappropriate for eleven year old boys combined with parental inattention and indifference.  Trying to stay on topic!***

Unlike his sisters, Cal is more of a gamer than a reader.  I've tried to find things that interest him, with some success.  We went to meet Dav Pilkey, the author of the Captain Underpants books, at Indigo when he came to Toronto last fall.  Cal has read the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, some of the Junie B. Jones books.  He tried some Roald Dahl, some Gordon Korman, the first Harry Potter book.  He loves manga, so we loaded up on Naruto and InuYasha.  He loved the Lord of the Rings movies, so I got him a graphic novel of The Hobbit, with gorgeous photos.  He's definitely game to enjoy a good story.  It's just not as easy as I think it would have been, if he lived with me.  There would definitely be less videogames, more reading.
















Steph took it upon himself on Saturday to invite Cal to go out to run some errands with him, and they stopped in at BMV Books.  It's one of the larger used bookstores in Toronto, and while they have a couple of locations, the biggest and best is on Bloor Street West in the Annex.  It's three floors, with the top floor being the main place we buy manga - it's all graphic novels, comics and mangas.  Cal came home with a book of short stories about dragons, and spent they first hour of Sunday curled up with a cup of hot chocolate and a blanket on the couch, engrossed in a story by George R.R. Martin.  That made my day.

The exception to Cal's feelings about books and reading is the Percy Jackson series.  He got the box set from Steph's parents last year for Christmas, and while he was slow to pick the first one up (not till the end of August, when we went to the cottage for a week), he read the first one happily, and is now well into the second.

Our Saturday night ritual is to have dinner together and watch a movie.  Steph usually downloads a few to choose from, and while we can always choose any others from his huge collection, he had specially downloaded Sea of Monsters thinking Cal would want to watch it.  Surprisingly, Cal balked very strongly, because he hasn't finished the book.

Before I continue, can I just savour having written that sentence?  Didn't want to watch the movie because he hasn't finished the book.  How much do I love that?  A lot.  A LOT.

Maddie was irate, and said so, because she read the books a couple of years ago and knowing that this movie was available, insisted that it was unfair of Cal to hold us all hostage just because he hadn't finished reading it yet.  I brokered a deal where the girls could watch Sea of Monsters on Sunday morning while Cal was otherwise occupied.  Sadly, things didn't work out quite that way, and it wasn't until just after lunch that the girls said, okay, let's put the movie on.

Cal tried very hard not to watch.  He declared his intention to watch some Minecraft videos on youtube, and put on headphones.  My computer does that thing where it shuts down periodically while on youtube.  I've replaced my fan, run scans, updated my drivers.  It still happens.  And it happened over and over to Cal during the first half hour of the movie.  Eventually, he gave up on youtube and settled into the beanbag chair, saying he would watch the movie until they got to the part he'd read up to, and then he'd leave.

Yeah.  That didn't happen.

SPOILERS.

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I was trying to find a board that would tell me what else I could do to address the spontaneous shutdown of my computer, and suddenly Cal was standing beside me, big tears rolling down his face.  

"I need a hug," he struggled to say, before bursting into full-on tears.

I took him into my room and cuddled him while he cried.  I rocked him, rubbing his back, stroking his hair, crooning wordlessly, and whispering, tell me what happened, buddy, until he choked out, Tyson died.

Tyson is Percy's only friend at school.  In the book, he's a street kid that Percy's school has taken on as a charitable thing, and he is widely regarded there as a freak.  He is eventually found to be a half-blood, like Percy and his friends, and goes on a quest with them from Camp Half-Blood.  Last weekend, when Cal brought his book and asked me to read to him, I enjoyed listening to him telling me about how if Tyson was at his school, there was no question that he, Cal, would be Tyson's friend.  That he sympathized with Tyson feeling like an outcast, and said that sometimes he feels that way too.

Tyson died.  Awesome.

Both of my daughters have friends who have lost parents.  Two for Maddie, this year, the circumstances of one of which I want to blog about very soon.  They were small when my grandmother died, and had never really met their half-sister's mom before she died abruptly of heart failure while driving.  Messy and ugly.  Grief is something that is really outside of my son's life experience up to this point.  The only people he has lost have been characters he has become attached to, in books or movies.  Don't even get me started about Wall-E, or the first five minutes of Up.

I blundered through about five minutes of talking about how sometimes a really good writer can create people that seem so real that they become friends, and it hurts to lose them every bit as much as it can to lose someone you love in real life.  I told him it was okay to cry when you were sad, even if his sisters made fun of him, and ventured the suggestion that sometimes it was good to have a kind of a practice run at experiencing emotion about something in a book before you go through something in real life.  I almost told him that this bit of wisdom was much more elegantly presented in my favourite Robertson Davies novel, The Lyre of Orpheus, but I refrained because TOO MUCH TALKING MOM.

I stopped rocking him and shifted so I could see his face.  His eyes were closed.  I touched his nose, and he smiled at me, my blond angel boy.  Thanks Mom...I love you for always trying to make me feel better, even if I don't understand all the things you're saying.  I'm still sad about Tyson, though.  I wish he hadn't died.

We rocked for another couple of minutes, and he said he thought he wanted to watch the rest of the movie.  I raised an eyebrow, and he laughed.  I'm still going to finish the book.  In the living room, Maddie mocked him gently for not remembering that Tyson was Poseidon's son, and that it was unlikely he would drown.  Cal's eyes lit up, seeing Tyson on the screen and none the worse for wear.

I can't make him love books the way his sisters or I do...but I want so desperately to find ways to relate to him.  Even if he doesn't understand all the things I'm saying.

And I MAY just have ordered the Percy Jackson game for Nintendo DS.  Just because it doesn't always have to be about books.

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