My nine year old is a Pisces. That means that he’s emotional, and that he’s conflicted, and that everything in his life is driven by his feelings. My eleven year old is an Aries, which means nothing goes further than his thick head. He finds reason for everything, he thinks everything through, and emotions run about a 2 on the Importance Scale in his life.

I was born 15 minutes off the cusp of Pisces and Aries, so I’m about as close to both as you can get without having an evil twin growing out of your throat. This just means that I get both of my kids pretty well. This also means that we all have birthdays in the next 44 days; just sayin’.

*ahem*

The differences in my children make my life totally complete, absolutely fascinating, and consistently inconsistent. They need two totally different styles of discipline, affection, encouragement and socialization. My oldest son can (and does) get lost in design and programming and science. My youngest son needs people. He needs physical interaction just to maintain his sanity. He needs friendships and he needs love.

Conveniently enough, he found both this weekend.

He’s been fairly epically in love twice before, which is saying something since the kid hasn’t been alive for an entire decade just yet. His first One True Love was Sam. They were five and she taught him how to french kiss on the playground at school one day. She was a troubled little girl from a troubled little home and he was, well, him, and those waters run deep. They were soulmates, best friends, two halves of a whole and he still refers to her as the great love of his life, four whole years later.

The second girl was Natalie. Natalie looked almost exactly like Sam, but didn’t have the troubled-childhood thing under her belt. She was older than him, popular, athletic and smart. She was the girl that every little boy wanted to have the attention of, but my son was determined to win her over. We talked a lot about how to treat a girl, how to win her heart, and he agreed that it would be best if he was just nice to her. He went out of his way to include her in their playground games, but didn’t treat her like “a girl”….he just played with her, like she was every other kid. He didn’t nag her, but he didn’t ignore her, either, and he didn’t tease her like most of his friends did. And then one day, once the groundwork was laid and she knew who he was, he wrote her a private letter. He told her that looking at her was like looking at angels, and that when she was near him, it was as if he was in heaven.

The boy’s good, yo.

Aside: I only know about this letter because he left it at his friend’s house and that friend’s mom found it. It was so adorable, she actually hand-delivered it to Ms Natalie. After she called me to read it to me.

But then we moved, again, and 2of3 has been reluctant to make new friends here. You move a kid far enough away from everything he loves enough times, and he starts sheltering his heart.

He’s got a few buddies here; not anyone close enough to get into really good trouble with, but just enough to have a kid or two to eat lunch with. 2of3 is the kind of kid who needs one person, just one, that is all his own. He needs that soul-crushing, all-consuming connection with someone, and without it, he’s just not the same kid. Which sucks, because he’s manically awesome when he’s whole.

When we had some friends over for dinner on Saturday, we assumed their daughters would be friends with our daughter. She’s 4, they are 6 and 7. We figured our 11 year old would lock his door and hide in his room the whole night, and we figured that 2of3 would spend the night showing the grown-ups how far he can shove his fingers up his nose while the girls all played together.

Wrong.

By the end of the night, their 7 year old and my 9 year old were in a tent out back with a flashlight, a board game and some popcorn, just hanging out. They played video games together and played tag with each other and had juice boxes together.  They met, they wooed, they made exchange of video game cheat codes.

He absolutely adored her. Admittedly, she IS pretty flipping adorable, but after they headed home for the night, I went up to the boys rooms to send them to bed. I found 2of3 on his brother’s floor, slowly and deliberately pushing a little skateboard up and down a little Tech Deck ramp, and I asked him if he had fun. He sighed. I asked him if we should invite the girls to his birthday party, and he didn’t even look up at me when he said, “Mom, I think I have a crush on her.” I said I thought he did, too, and he said, “But she’s only seven. I’m going to have to be really nice to her, huh?”

Yes, kid, yes you are. I have a feeling it won’t be all that hard for you to pull really nice off, though.

I was born with the ability to play the piano. This is no surprise; my parents are, and I’m not kidding, two of the most gifted musicians you’ll ever meet. My father taught Jim Croce’s brother to play guitar, not kidding. All of us are musically inclined, whether or not we choose to use those skills. And hell, have you ever seen my fingers? They’re like pipe cleaners sticking out of dough, I tell you what. They’re made for three things….guitar, piano and masturbation. Thankfully or unfortunately, I can’t decide which, I was so indoctrinated with cultish visions of damnation and hellfire that one of those three was forever ruined for me.

As for the other two, I taught myself how to play guitar with a book full of Janis Ian sheet music and my 4th grade music teacher realized one day that I could just play piano. He taught me basic notes and chords and sent me home, and my mother handed me the sheet music to The Incredible Hulk and a dry erase marker for the piano keys and told me to have at it. A year later, I could really play the piano. It’s the ugliest thing in the world, watching me hammer away on the keys, but it sounds right and hell, I’m sure that Beethoven looked like an asshole when he played, too, but no one’s smacking him down for form today, now are they?

I am no Beethoven. I am no Elmo on a piano, but if I wanted to be, I probably could rock that shit.

For a while, I wanted to be. We had two player pianos in our house, side by side in our tiny living room, donated to us by our church in what I can only guess was a misguided attempt at keeping our little fingers busy with anything that didn’t involve our naughty places. I used to BEG my mother for lessons, but she refused on the grounds that we couldn’t afford it, which was probably true seeings how we only ate a few times a week, and no amount of the Rainbow Connection and church hymns filling the air would also fill our tummies, but it didn’t make me want them any less. I was very understanding of the whole situation, though. I’d sit while my bat-shit crazy grandmother who thought she could channel George Washington and make the dog levitate tried to teach me how to play the score from Oklahoma with her squeaky little voice that wasn’t completely unlike that shrimp from Poltergeist’s demon voice. I’d hammer out Suicide is Painless, which maybe wasn’t exactly the smartest sheet music to hand a suicidal pre-teen in hindsight, but bygones, until I got it right, and I still fall asleep with Ted Cassidy’s voice in my head, telling me about science gone awry and Dr David Banner’s struggles with elastic waist bands, muscle shirts and finding a nice shade of lipstick to compliment his earthy skin tone. Or something like that.

And then one day, after spending the better part of a year teaching my little brother to play the Pink Panther theme, my mother announced that she was getting him piano lessons because he was clearly gifted and deserved the extra help.

Cue head explosion.

I swore, SWORE, that no matter what my kids wanted to be in life, I’d make it happen. If they dreamed of being a world-class marathon runner, I’d put down the cigarettes and strap on the Nike’s and train with them. If they wanted to be carpenters, I’d hand them a hammer. And a bandaid. If they wanted to be starving musicians, I’d buy them their first Les Paul.

Of COURSE I ended up with the kid who’s only goal in life is to beat every level of Guitar Hero and then become, not just a professional, but a sponsored skateboarder. I have a really hard time asking my husband for $8 when I need milk and bread, but I’m supposed to figure out how to get Element to pay my kid to skate? Christ on a goddamn cracker, yo.

The boy is dead serious. He will skate for someone, and well, and he’s not going to stop until this happens for him. Or he breaks his legs. Or he starves to death under a half pipe. Or he falls over backwards at the skatepark and hits his head so hard he cracked his Bell helmet all the way up the back. Oh, wait, that already happened, and it really didn’t stop him. It did stop any number of parts on me, however, but I think I’ve started breathing again and I seem to have a pulse, so I think I’ll recover. He thinks it’s pretty cool. Bastard. Bastard who now wears his helmet everywhere he goes, though, so I win.

Of course, I have these dreams of my boys winning Pulitzers and accepting Nobel prizes and graduating from Ivy League colleges but maybe that’s not in their cards. Do I want my kid to put everything he has behind skateboarding? Honestly, a little. Skateboarding is awesome. But there’s that grown-up in me that wants to tell him to have a “fall back” career, some “real” skill, something “substantial” to base his life’s dreams on. Because I didn’t even go to college and it’s taken me 34 years to even find a job that doesn’t require an apron. And if I want anything in this world, it’s for my children to know more than I did, to live better than I ever could have.

But my baby wants to skateboard, and I can’t deny that. I mean, look at that shit. It’s poetry.

God shield I should disturb devotion. So tomorrow, I’m packing these boys up and, under the guise of testing out the new Tony Hawk video game Ride, I’m lugging them down to San Diego to spend a weekend with His Holiness himself, Mr Tony Fucking Hawk. Because maybe I’d also like him to have a law degree, but I’d really much rather watch him have his dreams come true. And of all the things that matter to me, the fact that my kid knows I support him, in whatever, is the most important thing to me in this whole world.

Besides getting to meet Tony Hawk, of course. I’m kind of flipping out about that one.

Today, my husband and I fought in front of our children for the first time ever.

EVER.

Like, in 11 and a half years ever.

I don’t mean to say that we don’t ever fight because god knows we do. If you’ve ever dared to dip your toes in the murky waters that are my archives, you’ll know what I mean. And Christ, I met him when I was twenty. I’ve gone through no less than 10 variations of myself between then and now, and so has he. Our shit, it is hard sometimes. But coming from two spilt families, me with my history of domestic assault and him with his abandonment baggage, we’ve worked really hard to keep our crap between us.  Sure, we fight, but we don’t do it often and when we do, it’s over as soon as it starts.

Usually, I will start being an insane asshole and he’ll tell me to go take a five minute walk and sort it out. Or he’ll open a big, fat can of jerkface and I’ll tell him to check it before I am forced to wreck it and that ends it. We’re actually really good at mitigating each others mood-swings, and because of that, our kids have never once born witness to anything more than a long scowl or a stern, “Other room, NOW.”

It would seem that my Mercury was firmly lodged in his Uranus today or something, because while I was trying to get 2of3 to clean the damn bathroom, he decided that at that very second, 2of3 needed to take the vacuum to his brother. And I was so sick and tired of trying to get that kid upstairs to the bathroom, I told him no. And The Donor told him yes. So I told The Donor no, and he told me to fuck off and I told him to shove it up his ass and the threw the vacuum and I told him to get the fuck out.

Because we’re five, that’s why.

Meanwhile, my nine year old was just standing there watching this whole parade of lunacy unfold before him and as soon as dad walked out of the room, he started to cry.

Because we’re fantastic parents, that’s why.

And he told me he was scared, and I held him and told him that he fights worse than that with his brother every day and reminded him that I am a pain in the ass and his dad is an overbearing know-it-all and we’ve lived together for 14 long, long years and told him that of course we fight sometimes.

And now I don’t know if I’m sad that my kid had to see us acting like three year olds or if I’m secretly a little glad that he witnesses an argument that resolved itself within ten minutes with a big hug and two unprompted and very sincere apologies that I made sure happened right in front of that kid and then ice cream, because ice cream cures all evils. Am I wrong to think that I should be teaching him that it’s okay to have conflicts and that the world doesn’t end when you have them? Because I lived thirty years thinking one raised voice meant the End Of Civilization as we know it, and I never learned how to fight and get over it until I had to learn the hard way.

There’s really no point to this at all. I just worry sometimes that they think their parent’s marriage is the perfect, happy go lucky thing and because of that, when their time comes, they will have no clue how to deal with the reality of marriage and the reality of marriage is that bitches, on occasion, be crazy, and you love them through it anyway.

Right?

Yes, yes, we totally live in Vancouver, and have for years, but A) I am not over Denver yet and B) for the purposes of this post, we are from Denver. Someday, I’ll actually move here all the way.

We are from Denver. Not ‘just outside Denver in the ‘burbs’ Denver, but Denver Denver. LoDo. Cap Hill. The city of. 80206 has always been the kids’ zip code. And when you live in 80206, there are things you do like walk to school and ride your bikes to the park and there are things you don’t do, like any of that alone.

Right before we moved to Vancouver, we were just starting to toy with the idea of letting the kids be home alone. We’d give them 10 minute spurts alone while we ran to Sevies for milk, but not much more, no matter how ardently they plead for it. Because Denver is awesome in the same way god is; you totally dig him, but you’re kind of scared shitless of him at the same time.

Case in point? A year after we moved, our old next door neighbor shot and killed a 2 year old right in front of the house we lived in. Like, on our old front steps. Like, right here.

And we lived in the really burbish, hippy neighborhood. A few years before that, one of our neighbors decided he would go rape a bunch of the women in our neighborhood. Like, 80 year olds and 20 year olds. At the same time. And he lived at the end of that block I lived on, and two houses to the right. But at the same time, we had mom & pop ice cream parlors and yarn shops.

My point is that, for the most part, we kept our kids within arm’s reach, just in case.

But since we’ve been here in sunny Vancouver, the boys have gotten used to a little more freedom, mostly because my neighbors actually scolded me for hovering over the kids too much. We were reminded that this wasn’t Denver, and that in our little community the kids enjoy and appreciate a bit longer leash.  That it is good for them, and I ought to relax.  So we gave this whole pre-teen freedom thing a shot, since they are quite a bit older now, and they’re quite a bit over being smothered, and so far my neighbors have been proven correct.  At first we’d let just them go outside all by themselves, and then we tried leaving them for 30 minutes or so while we ran out for something. And then I started coming home just a little bit after they’d get home from school.  And then I upped it to an hour.  And then we left the boys for one whole evening.  And then we let 1of3 babysit for a night, and it’s all gone beautifully.  Viva la Canada, yo.

They lock the extra locks when we’re out, they know to not answer the door or the phone unless it’s mom or dad on the caller id; they get it.  They like it, and they don’t want to blow it, so they’ve been really careful to abide by all of our rules while we’re not here.  Or at least they were.

When I told them about the BlogHer get-together we had on Sunday, their eyes did Gold Medal Worthy backflips into their heads and they said there was no way in Bikini Bottom they were coming to that thing. We agreed that they’d stay home and do some last minute chores (which have yet to be done, for the record) and that they could each have one friend over.  Two neighbors were put on mom-alert to peek in my windows occasionally and make sure they weren’t burning the joint down, and 3of3, Angella and I headed off without them for the whole day.

We came home to a fairly decent house, two living, breathing sons who were fed and didn’t smell like anything I’d want to put on a petri dish, and two smiling neighborhood kids.  I counted the day a success and told them both how proud I was of them, even if they hadn’t answered the phone when I’d called, but erring on the side of caution is always a good choice in my book so high fives all around.

The next day, my sister in law called.  She asked if 2of3 had told me she’d phoned, and he hadn’t, and then she giggled and told me about the call they had.

He told her I wasn’t home because I was at a work thing.  He told her dad was at work, too.  He told her that he was trying to not watch tv because it would rot his brain, and that he was duelling Pokemon cards while his brother was downstairs on the computer.  He told her he was going to skateboard out front in just a little bit, and then he’d have a snack. And then he asked her just one, simple, little question…

Um, who is this?

Needless to say, they’re coming to the next everything ever again with me.

I’ve talked before about the craving we as parents have to mold our children into little mini-me’s, to see some glimmer of ourselves behind those big, beautiful eyes.  I’ve talked about how hard we both have strived to avoid doing just that thing, for the sake of our kids’ sanity.  We were both pushed and pushed perhaps a bit too hard as children.  We both spent most of our lives trying to live up to some unattainable ideal of perfection that our parents had laid out for us.  We both had an absent parent who we alternately tried to garner the love of and spite with our over-achievement.

We both have parent issues.  We try to not share them with our kids.

For me, not pushing them to be me is simply a matter of not letting them slit their wrists and not pushing them to get straight A’s all the time and reading them something other than Douglas Adams.  For The Donor, it’s a bit more complicated.  He was that kid.  I have scrapbooks on scrapbooks full to the brim with newspaper clippings and accolades.  I have cases of ribbons and pins and trophies in my basement.  I have a wall full of plaques and a closet full of uniforms waiting for a child who needs them.  For a child who will follow his father’s footsteps.  And I have a very tired father here, too, one who never got his childhood because he was too busy being pushed to be the fastest, the hardest, the leanest, the best.

And so I’ve read them other stories (thank you, Dan Brown) and he’s let them dip their foot in a pool with an instructor rather than with him, and he’s put them in soccer lessons with any other coach, and he’s sat back and waited.  I’ve seen him dream.  I’ve seen the hope well up inside of him like a fire and I’ve seen that flame extinguish time and time again, mostly because he’s an athlete and I’m a nerd and nerds don’t push their kids to hit balls for a living and athletes don’t buy their kids Mensa Mind Challenge books for fun.  Our kids will be neither of us, it seems.  At least not by our doing.

He’s actually been trying his hand at their sports of choice a little lately, and let me tell you that a 37 year old man on a Ripstick is damn near the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life.  Especially when he does a double-backwards-aerial-somersault and lands flat on his ass.  That man was never a cat, in any life.

Our boys are both athletic in their own rights.  1of3 was born with Perfect. Fucking. Balance. The kid walked at 8 months and rode a 2 wheel bike, without training wheels, at 2.  Not kidding. 2of3 has an arm, oh my god does he ever.  He’s buoyant enough to swim well, but not focused enough.  1of3 is like a brick in the water, just like his momma.  They both love to skateboard and ride BMX bikes and I think one of them may be eyeballing motocross, which should make their godfather about explode with pride, but none of that does their father a whole lot of good.

See, I think dads really crave that thing they can share with their kids, maybe more so than moms do.  My bond with them is easy; I can close my eyes and still feel them stir inside of me, I can feel the measure of their brand new bodies wrapped around mine, suckling themselves to sleep, if I just concentrate enough. But it’s not so easy for their dad.  He didn’t carry them and he didn’t nurse them and now that they are growing away from us, now that we’re struggling to hold on to the last little bits of them before we are gone and they are complete, I see how he yearns for something of them them, something uniquely theirs, something he can share with them and give to them and be with them.

And then this happened:

They’ve always played golf with him.  They’ve always had clubs and they’ve always gone to the range with him and they’ve always watched the Master’s in his lap, but they’ve never truly learned to play his game before.  And it just turns out that my little 2of3 has found his authentic swing.  He is a golfer.

The Donor was there with them for the first half of their lessons, and I met him at the course for the second half. He kept saying to me, “Honey, just look at him.  Watch this…” and I saw the flame begin to spark in his eyes.  I watched my 2of3 focus, I watched him swing away and I knew that he’d found something that spoke to him.  This is kind of a rare thing in his world.  Before his dad left us to head off to work, he leaned into me and whispered in my ear with stifled excitement, “He’s our golfer.”After The Donor left, I was busy chasing 3of3 on the other side of the fence, trying to watch my sons and failing miserably.  I mean, really, can you blame me?

And then I heard it.  I turned and looked through the fence and I saw his teacher, all of his fellow golfers, his brother even, and they were all silent and still. The sound was still resonating through us, and for a moment we were all speechless, helpless against it.

I don’t know if you follow golf, if you play or watch or understand it at all, but there’s a point in everyone’s golf game when you find it.  Yourself.  Your core. There’s a point in your game when you let yourself go and trust your own intuition and you swing that club and it hits the ball exactly perfectly and you feel it like lightening running through you.  You feel your center.  The sound the ball makes, the sound the shaft of your club makes, it’s not just impact…it’s perfect balance.  It is a sound that anyone who is near you when it happens feels, too.  The vibration, the wave, the ping, it comes from inside of you and for one perfect second, time stands still as the ball soars out from you.

If you think I’m overthinking things slightly, you’ve never hit a ball like that.  Try it.

We all stood and watched my son’s ball tear though the air.  It was like watching Monet paint, or Beethoven compose, but mostly it was like watching my husband swing his clubs.  And my son, he felt it.  He turned to me with his mouth wide open in awe of himself.  His instructor looked at me, looked at him and just said, “Wow.”  And all I could do was smile.  My son, he has it.  He has a piece of his father, a piece unique to them that none of the rest of us truly have just yet.  It’s the most beautiful thing in the world, seeing the man you love in the child you love.

The next day, the two of them sat outside together, just the two of them, and they talked as they scrubbed their clubs.  They came upstairs a whole lot later and together they barbecued for our whole family.  My son forgot his DS for the day, my husband forgot his Sunday afternoon Sports Channel shows, and they remembered each other instead.  Later that night, 2of3 came up to me and said, “Mom, me and Dad cleaned our clubs together all day today, just us!”  Even later that night, as The Donor and I sat on the porch in the dark of night, he looked at me and said, “I can’t tell you how much I’ve wanted something of ours, something to share with them.”

And what I didn’t say is that I couldn’t tell him how much more it makes me love him to see that now he has it.

Oh, and yeah. FlickR has the rest of the day’s pictures, if you’re into that sort of thing.