Human worlds and Hello Kitties

One of Declan's best friends at preschool is an extremely sweet little girl (I'll call her Nora). The intensity of her smiles and happy bounces make it seem like she's about to explode into a big, shimmering firework of pure joy when she tells me how much she likes my son.

She made him a gigantic valentine, replete with a big blue glass gemstone and a poem that she dictated to her mom about him. According to him, she wants to sit next to him every day at lunch. And he likes that. On the playground, they pretend they are Jack and Annie from the Magic Treehouse and go on adventures together.

The other day, her mom told me that Nora has been worried because when they grow up, Declan will no longer "live on the human world." Declan's affinity for space in known far and wide. She's going to miss him a lot when he's off on his galactic adventures, but she and another boy from their class will plan elaborate "welcome back to Earth" parties whenever he comes home for a visit.

Earlier this year, Dec started asking for Hello Kitty things. First he asked for band-aids, then stuffed Hello Kitties. He has one dressed in a lamb costume and another in a panda costume. They go most places with us, especially to his school. He feeds them at mealtimes. He puts them in the cupholders of his car booster to keep them safe. He tells me what they are thinking. He sleeps with them.

It's been hard for me to figure what makes him so attached to them. Until I asked him one day in the car.

"I told you, it's because all of the girls in my class love Hello Kitty so much," he told me.

He loves the ladies, my boy. He wants to stay in their good graces. He's a four-year-old that's begun to unravel the mysteries of social currency with so little self-consciousness.

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This little wish

He's been considering wishes for a few months now, toying with fairy dust and never missing a fountain.

Since this year began, he's had a new one. And he repeats it every time there is an opportunity for a wish to be made:

"I wish that everything that we need to have happen would happen for us."

Godspeed, my boy. And I wish for all of your wishes to come true.

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The perfect heart

The other night, Declan decided he wanted to make one big special valentine for his father. I pulled out a sheet of paper, folded it and drew half of a heart for him. It was art paper, so cutting it was tough. He switched scissors a couple of times. He got frustrated. Then he took a couple of deep breaths and finished it. He spread it open on the table and looked at it proudly.

He wrote his dad's full name on the big heart. He filled the space around it with rocket stickers and gems and glitter. Then he tried to draw a heart. It was sweet and soft and curvy, like dough that swells beyond the edges your cookie cutter promised when it bakes.

He hated it. He hit it with his fist.

I loved it. I thought it was so precious and perfectly four, perfectly him.

He covered it with a dog sticker and tried again. He didn't like the new heart either, so he covered it with another dog sticker, ran into the living room and threw himself into the couch cushions.

I tried to reason with him that I knew his daddy would love it, that I could see it was a heart and that there were lots of kinds of hearts. He was frustrated. He told me no. It needed to be perfect. It needed to look "right."

At his school, they often ask him about his feelings and put them in a note. I started writing one to him. He watched my hand and circled me.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm writing you a note to tell you how I feel," I told him.

"What does it say?"

"Dear Declan,

Every time you write, it does not need to be perfect. Whatever you write is something I love because it is perfectly Declan. I love you. I want you to be kind to yourself.

Love,
Mommy"

He looked at me calmly, unmoved.

"Let me have that for a minute," he said.

I handed him the notebook and he carried it into another room, grabbing a marker on his way. I heard it flop onto the floor. I heard the sound of the pen on the paper. He came right back and handed me the notebook, a big pink X over my entire note.

"I didn't like it so I put an X on it," he explained. "Because I want everything to look right."

I fought back feeling hurt by his x-mark and wrote what he said down on the note. I told him that I understand that feeling. I do.

I understand that feeling so well.

Then he went and got another piece of paper and asked me to make a heart that he could look at while he drew another. I made a small one and handed him the marker, reminding him of the advice his teacher gave us about trying to hold a pencil steady: "Pinch it."

He took the notebook behind our piano and brought a new heart back to me. It was puffy too. Puffy and curvy and beautiful and, to my eye, not terribly different than the ones he had rejected.

"This one looks right," he said. "See?"

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Tyger, tyger, burning bright

My blogging has been lighter than usual because a couple of weeks ago, I saw my doctor and she told me that my right shoulder is so much lower than my left, she would have thought that I had a severe curvature of the spine. My typing has been slow, my sleep has been poor and and my breaks have been many. Unless today's snow dump somehow derails it, I'm going in for an evaluation with a physical therapist early this afternoon.

The last couple of months have been a revolving door of reminders about mortality and health. We've been second-hand witnesses to the passings of three people, one far too young, the other two simply too young to die. I've interviewed young people who know too much about things like homicide and psychological abuse (for projects I am working on). I felt helpless as I stared at images of the fields of bodies in Haiti, keeping the television mostly silent because my boy already spends too many bedtime hours resisting sleep, trying to solve the puzzle of death.

In a little over a week, the Year of the Tiger begins, and it feels far more like a ritual time of reflection and reassessment than January 1st this year. I'm making lists, trying to finish projects and clearing away clutter. I'm ready to do whatever it takes to bring my physical, personal and professional carriage back into alignment. I want to be on the tiger's side.

And I would be oh so grateful to see her clear our collective house of fire, thieves and ghosts.

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I hate art scavenger hunts

We had an hour or two to visit an art museum in another city the other day. No sooner had we hung up our coats than one of the volunteers asked my son, "would you like to do a scavenger hunt in the museum today? If you finish it, you get a prize!"

Being four and generally highly motivated by reward systems, he looked at me eagerly for permission to say yes. I gave it to him. If I deprived him of that kind of offer, I might as well have kissed my chances at a fun museum visit goodbye. (This scavenger hunt basically asked you to find particular pieces of art in the different galleries, then answer a question about each one.)

For the first several rooms, I tried to balance the tasks of the scavenger hunt with more meaningful conversations about the art and history we were looking at. Every now and then, I could get him to stop and ponder something like how a particular piece of art was made, how it might be used, the story it might be telling or what it even was. But as we pushed on, the tasks of the scavenger hunt became more and more pressing, pulling us away from other things we might have been able to talk about.

We saw another dad looking completely beleaguered as his 9-year-old son ignored his requests to talk about any of the 18th-century European paintings he wanted to share with him. The kid was just too far into the throes of his primal push to finish his scavenger hunt and earn his prize.

As far as I'm concerned, scavenger hunts are the equivalent of worksheet learning in the classroom. They don't invite any real depth of understanding, and do not create a particularly meaningful relationship with their subject. They are more cheap marketing gimmick, something that seems to be designed for children to pass time while parents are supposed to either help, or meditate on paintings in solitude or something. In this case, they actually seemed to be depriving more than one family of an organic museum experience.

On Sunday, a friend of mine and I took our kids to the local museum, which is under construction, so all that is open is an illuminated Dale Chihuly exhibit and a couple of rooms with highlights from its permanent collection. We led our four-year-olds through and asked them what they thought the abstract glass forms were.

"That looks like an upside-down turkey!" my son said about a glumpy shape slumped over in a forest of spears.

"That's like a shoe, all opened up," said his friend about a floppy, shell-like piece.

We ventured past the people watching a movie smack in the middle of the gallery, which seemed like an unnecessary obstacle with this inherent message: "shut up and don't talk about the art." We squirmed out of that room. My friend's daughter peeked around the corner, and then ran back to grab my son's hand and pull him in, howling - "come look! It's SPACE!"

Their imaginations and curiosity ruled the rest of the visit. A chandelier was an erupting volcano from another planet. A sphere was a "giant Jupiter that's all dead." In the permanent collection galleries, my friend, who grew up in Holland, had her daughter jumping up and down with excitement over her obvious connection to Dutch paintings. We all sat on the floor in front of a George Segal sculpture and talked about what plaster is and how you might go about making a person out of one.

Of course, there was a room with the dreaded reward-based scavenger hunts, which just seem to be everywhere kids may show up now, but thankfully, no one bypassed us and offered them to ours. When my friend's daughter asked what all the kids with clipboards were doing and if she could do it, her mother dismissed it with a smooth "you have to be able to read to do that." We sidestepped the issue and took in the grandeur and mystery of a ride back downstairs in the giant elevator instead.

Granted, I'm the daughter of an art educator, so I was raised with a particular love and appreciation for art. But I didn't find that love via lectures or gimmicky games. I was simply given the room to respond to and be inquisitive about it - to use my brain to make of it what I may before getting down to the facts of who made it and what they thought it meant or why it might be historically or culturally relevant.

If you want a child to love art, don't make him or her whisper about it in a gallery or do some glorified word search to earn some 3-cent superball or a sticker. I also had a total blast on Sunday... and it was the interpretations and questions of our two four-year-olds that made it so much fun for all of us, pure and simple.

At a time when there are endless books out there espousing the value of "creative" people to the richness of our lives - even our economy - why are museums, of all places, bent on such ordinary engagement with kids, who are by nature some of the most innately creative people in the world?

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