Feelings
What are little boys made of?
By Emmanuelle
Of little tin cars, plastic pop pistols, bicycles and skates, bugs and bloody noses. Pretty little girls in pretty little frocks do not belong to their league, unless the little girls come themselves with little tin cars, plastic pop pistols, bicycles and skates, bugs and bloody noses. What do you think little boys are made of?
This mother has the most disarming way of answering her kids’ questions about everything and nothing: her answer comes first before the question is asked. Or as the song goes in the musical classic Lost Horizon: answer me a question, question me an answer.
No one ever took those two lines seriously at heart, except her, and she must have been four or five years old when she first heard the song.
Little boys and little girls start with life practically wearing the same sorry sack. A push and a wail and out comes a he or a she or maybe even more of the lot. Their embarrassingly red faces so profuse with their excuse for their being: am sorry am sorry I do not mean to clutter the world with my wee presence, but make way make way am coming am coming do I have a room to breathe to grow to live? And their faces grow redder still. Whoever said each infant is distinctly a personality from the start?
And so on and so forth. This mother goes about her motherly business matter-of-factly but with a twist so cute so lovely. She hums, she sings, she tells a story, she gives a lesson. At the same time, she picks-up soiled bottoms by basketful, she hooks out ancient pizza pies wedged among dolls on perpetual diet, she rescues a child’s grubby but still beloved teddy bear drowned in waves and waves of ocean-blue sheets.
Her three kids, all girls, follow her progress, from room-to-room, from floor-to-floor, from house to yard. When she picks-up, fluffs out, straightens, dusts, her deed is copied three times behind. She swirls, and three forms swirl. She bends and three backs bend. They keep up the fun doing this game. And they love the patter or the notes in her voice as she answers them a question or she questions them an answer.
Little boys become big boys, and if fed enough and hugged every night and taught right and reminded every so often of what is good and true, they become men. And not necessarily big men. For being big need not mean being man enough, and being a man need not mean growing up big and towering over all others. When little boys grow up, they can be as little when they were this high, or they can be as big in our eyes as the Big Man Himself. So, do you still think when little boys grow up big they can not be called little anymore?
Three tow-heads shake and nod one after the other in answer to her question of an answer. Three little bo-dies glide, and sway, and hop, and jump. Three tiny voices echo the melody that floats in the air.
And when the mother suddenly stops, three small bodies pile up behind in one big hump of a bump. She kneels down and makes them face her, her wide eyes wild, and young, and merry.
Remember this, you dwarves and elves and fairies. You are all so loved, so wanted, so needed as you all were when you were still dreams in our hearts, your father’s and mine. And if everything were to go wrong from hereon, and all you ever knew in your lives went old and weary, and the world stopped to smile and it frowned and growled at you ever so frighteningly, remember this moment. And every moment like this one. So, do not ask me anymore, will we always be this happy?
To this moment, the daughters remembered. One of them, so very well, to have written and shared with us a mother now gone.
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