AND MY AXE!

or, sometimes boys will be boys, I guess

Like many left-leaning people, we assumed most gendered play was a social construct. Something parents and society pushed onto boys and girls from a very young age. I still mostly think this is true but observing my own son has complicated this image a bit.

Which, honestly, shouldn’t be surprising. Few things in life are all nature or all nurture. Our genes don’t determine our future, but neither do our parents.

It all started with some hand-me-downs. Clothes we got from my brother who got them from his friend, who maybe got them even from someone else. Among the many articles of clothing we’ve received this way, there was a single shirt with Captain America, Thor, The Hulk, Ironman, and Spider-Man.

And so our lives were all changed.

So innocently did it begin that I barely even thought about it. He was maybe not even two yet. He wanted to know who was on his shirt. I told him. Seemed like a normal sequence of events.

But, see, our son is very particular about clothing. We know many people who dress their kids however they want. They pick out cute clothing and then casually put their kids in it and the kid doesn’t mind, just wears those clothes all day like it was their idea.

That is not our son. He minds. A whole lot! He has very strong opinions about his clothes. He’s also acutely aware of clothing, noticing any change in wardrobe, any peculiar garment he hadn’t seen before. And so when it comes to dressing him, he demands to take charge.

And what he likes are superheroes. Big graphic shirts and sweaters with heroes assembled.

This is not the kind of thing we expected or even really wanted. I hate graphic T-shirts. I always have. I never wear them. Have almost never worn them throughout my entire life (maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about his particularness with regard to clothing?). Chelsea definitely didn’t encourage him to exclusively wear shirts with Superman or Spider-Man on them.

Sadly for her, she’s bought him several cute shirts and sweaters that have been worn exactly zero times. This is a middle-class tragedy.

As a parent, you pick your battles. And for this we didn’t even try. The dude wants what he wants and he very much does not want what he does not want. He’s been picking out his own clothes since he was about eighteen months old. I know this is peculiar and you reading this right now may not even believe me.

What eighteen month old even has an opinion about their clothes?

Mine did. Strong ones!

If this sounds like a weird brag about my kid, congratulations! You’ve seen annoying parents on the internet before.

But this is definitely not me bragging about my son.

This is a lament.

So now he owns a variety of superhero shirts and sweaters. If he had his way this last summer, he would have worn a single Spider-Man shirt for about six straight months. He never wanted to take it off.

Fortunately, he’s also very particular about cleanliness and so it’s easy enough to get him to put on something new. Even if that something new is usually another superhero shirt. Maybe Paw Patrol or a train or something like that.

And then there’s the play. I don’t know when he first discovered sports since we don’t have a way at our house to watch any sports, but he loves every sport. He loves any game with a ball. He loves baseball and tennis and soccer and basketball. He loves playing them. He loves hearing about them. Sometimes when we’re at the park, he just sits and watches older kids play basketball or baseball or tennis.

Somewhere along the way, he discovered what a sword was, and it has been a part of our life ever since. Everything is a sword or an axe, and he runs through the house fighting bad guys and monsters.

There are a lot of bad guys to be fought in our house. And they never stop coming.

It’s not the kind of play we encouraged. Not really the kind of play we even wanted him to engage in, honestly. But the dude is singleminded when it comes to these things.

The bad guys are out there. Someone needs to fight them.

Sometimes he’s a knight. Sometimes he’s Spider-Man. Sometimes he’s a witch or fireman. But always he’s fighting the bad guys.

Unless, of course, he’s the bad guy.

This has been an interesting aspect too. He loves villains. Give him a proper villain, whether it be a monster or a person, and he’s fully on board. That’s who he wants to know about. That’s who he wants to be.

This is of particular interest to me because this is exactly how I was as a child. I loved Captain Hook, for example. Peter Pan? No thank you. Give me that dude with a hook for a hand.

He was badass, man.

And so we’ve watched him turn everything in the house into weapons. Every stretch of vacant air gets filled with phantasmagoric villains that I’m too old to see. Every ball is an invitation to be hit or thrown. And sometimes they’re fireballs or webs to be shot at bad guys, at monsters.

If you’ve been a parent online you’ve seen a lot of parents brag about weird things. Almost always the implication is that their child is a prodigy at something, whether it’s piano or, like, sorting shapes or walking.

Parents get proud about weird shit!

My son impresses me in a number of ways every week, but I don’t imagine other people would be impressed by these things. And even if you were, I wouldn’t exactly attribute these things to my ability as a parent. I know that I shape him in innumerable ways large and small, for better and worse, but I’ve come to see his development much differently than I expected.

He is, in many ways, who he is. Yes, we’ve cultivated certain things in him. We’ve worked on please and thank you, on cleaning up after yourself, on being kind. That last one is the most important to me.

I don’t care if he grows up to be an idiot or genius. I care that he be kind. Kindness is, to me, the most fundamentally necessary characteristic of a functioning human.

If he grows up to be a jerk, I will see only my own failings.

I have tried to be kind to everyone in my life. I have failed thousands of times. He will too. But I hope he fails less than I did.

What impresses me about my son is not his physical or mental abilities. It’s his strong sense of empathy. I would like to take credit for this, but I believe it has more to do with him than it does with me.

Same with his cleanliness, his sense of order. He’s not the kind of kid who has ever opened all the kitchen cabinets and drawers and just thrown their contents onto the floor. He’s the kind of kid who shuts doors, who puts things back in their place.

And, yeah, we encouraged this, but this is something deeper in him than me telling him to clean up.

When I see him make games of swords and axes, of monsters and villains, I see only him. As my mother likes to say, He’s all boy.

And I think that’s true. Despite our unwillingness to gender his play, he’s found what he likes to do. And it happens to be with things socially coded as masculine. I can try to divert him to different kinds of play—he loves puzzles and books—but eventually he will pick up a sword, hand it to me, tell me that I’m a monster or bad guy or maybe, this time, his companion in fighting the monsters, and we’ll go off into another room to fight what only he can see.

And that’s okay.

It’s not what I chose, not something I even encourage, but, yeah, I’ll swing that sword, beat up some bad dudes.

It’s worth it for the laughter, the excited smiles.