• Previous posts

  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

I like almost everything about the Boy Scouts. That almost is enough for us to decide that the Scouts probably isn’t the right choice for our family, but I wanted to figure out how we could incorporate some of the scouting traditions I knew the boys would love.

So we invented Sharps Camp. There are no den meetings, no formal recitals, no sashes, no Cubs or Webelos. Also, the troop is pretty small.

But they’ve got patches, by golly.

I picked Riley up from school the other day and while I was waiting in the hall before the bell rang he came skipping out of his classroom with a lanky brown-haired girl. They raced towards the cafeteria together, on a mission to bring back the lunchboxes, and I saw him reach out and fumble to take her hand. She hesitated, but gripped him amiably for a bit before they let go to swing their arms in a fist-pumping burst of speed.

He can be a loud boy, an obnoxious boy, occasionally a rude and selfish boy—but oh, he can be as tender as the milky base of a grass stem.

At seven years old he doesn’t have any idea that some kids might not want to hold hands and I felt a confusing whoosh of loving him so much for that gesture and being terrified that the girl would mock him for it. Jesus, this age of big-little is filled with so many new things and I have chastised him, sometimes, for his tenderness, for weeping over small wounds or being afraid of movie scenes or whatever it is. Grow up, I’ve snapped.

I finished Rick Bragg’s The Prince of Frogtown last night. It’s a memoir inspired by Bragg’s relationship with his ten-year-old stepson, and towards the end, he writes,

The little boy started to fade, just like we left him in the sun too long. (…) He had been a ragamuffin, hurled into space by the seat of his pants. Suddenly, he shopped for shirts, and worried about his hair. He got too heavy to throw. (…) He turned twelve, then thirteen, and then the little boy just disappeared.
Just when you start to get used to it, to not minding it so much, it all vanishes, and the little boy you launched in the air stands at your shoulders like a man, and when you turn to say something you find yourself looking right into his eyes.
He is not helpless, not needy.
He is everything I rushed him to be.

Do you know how sometimes you read something, and it’s like the air in the room grows heavy? Like something you can touch, like you’re held fast by the words. I felt that way, last night. My god.

He is everything I rushed him to be.

Next Page →

• My product review site:

  [Older recommendations]