Every night I open this Firefox window where I plan to sum it all up in a great snappy post with a happening beat. There are so many words, so many ideas and memories of this time to solidify. Developmental jumps forward and back. Hilarious squabbles, wonderful projects, huge, wonderful questions that teach me everything about these boys, crazy mixups and cooked-up schemes, and oh there are fart jokes. I always think I’ll definitely write about this because it is so good that how could I not? But then when the house is finally quiet and I’m ready to type a new post, there are too many words and the bigness of the day swells up and I can’t even start.
So instead of writing, I consume things. I hop over to hulu or netflix or TED or NPR or YouTube. I hit Reddit a thousand times in the one hour after the boys go to bed, like that dazed chain smoker at the 7-11 video slot machine. I read about things I will never need to know about, things that really no one needs to know about except for those few focused people whose job is knowing all about that one thing.
Ping ping ping I go all over the internet like a little hummingbird, nature’s most iridescent sufferer of ADHD not counting the rainbow trout — which, screw those guys.
Anyway.
Nicolaus spent the first eight years acting as though we were failing him. In between his gleeful piles of words, he glared, he griped, he sighed and looked soulfully out the window because these really were his real parents and we suck at everything from keeping schedules to answering his many dirigible questons to basic 8-course meal production to early morning reveille.
But it turns out that eight’s an easier crowd. Eight tries to go easy on us, and when he forgets to remember that we are doing our defective best, he comes back and apologizes.
Once in awhile, in the middle of nothing at all he will sigh, “I really love our daily routine.”
The first time he said it, Kevin and I looked at each other. I gave him a look like this O_o which means “Wha-? Where in the lovely heck did that come from?” And Kevin’s look to me was this O_O which means “what kind of crappy teacher are you that he is eight and he can’t use the word Routine correctly in a sentence?”
We asked him to tell us what he likes about it, hoping for details, fascinated by the idea that anyone who lives with us might think we have one of those.
But it turns out that he’s right, we do have a routine. Grown up life takes shape so gradually you might not even notice. One day you’re making dorky, date-night visits to ridiculous places like Linens N Things (where things turns out to be more linens. And consumer debt.) just to walk around and make fun of all the crap that people like and before you know it you are telling each other that you need to run to Bed Bath and Beyond to return some utilitarian thing you bought and exchange it for another, more appropriately sized kitchen utensil or toothbrush wrangler or floor mat because you know? This is how it happens.
And somewhere in between trips to big boxes we not only developed a routine, but we somehow shaped young Morrissey into a kid who will spontaneously express joy and gratitude. Heck, I’ll say it. I’m proud.
So envision us driving, and it’s hot outside, and the boys are in their booster seats in the messy back of my little car, and they’re eating the mostly healthy lunch I packed for them and we’re talking about ecosystems. It started ten or fifteen minutes ago when I watched the garage door close and Graham asked a question. I thought I would remember the question because it was so good! But I don’t. But that question led to other, bigger questions until we were talking about balance and ecosystems and unbalancing things like tiger mosquitoes and kudzu and everything else that gets imported and causes a ruckus.
Graham asks me to stop pointing out kudzu along the road because the amorphous blobby edges of the woods upset him. He likes trees and seeing them in the throes of being devoured in slow-motion is “just too sad.”
Then I’m waiting to turn left and the boys are quiet and then Nicolaus says, “Humans are so weird. How we – how they just. People work so much and so hard to figure everything out and that’s why they do things like bring kudzu on purpose somewhere. Even though it didn’t work like at ALL, people were thinking thinking to figure out how to feed their cows.”
“That’s true,” I say.
I’m out in the intersection, waiting for an opening. He isn’t finished, “I mean, think about math. How does anyone know that counting works for sure? How did they ever really prove any of this like one plus one equals two… like, how? Until they were completely positive that okay THIS is what’s really happening. And then! Then! We have all of these different languages that we use to talk about everything with so much detail. Isn’t that weird? Like birds just have bird language. They might have different accents but there’s only one birdie language.
And do you think that all the different human languages kind of like came from just ONE basic human language?”
I started to say something about how mathematicians and scientists and everyone has been working to fact check every idea for thousands of years, but then it was my turn to go and someone ran the yellow light and I had to pay attention to where we were going. I tell him he’s right, humans are very devoted/obsessive problem solvers, and promise myself to revisit this thought.
But the animal language thing sets him off. “I mean, you know what else is funny about people? I mean think about them thinking thinking for hundreds of years and learning and studying everything and they are *just now* starting to understand that mmmmaybe animals might actually be intelligent. MAYBE some animals can communicate or care about their babies or use tools or whatever it is, they always think Oh! Humans are the ONLY ones who — uhhh oh wait. I guess not! But that’s so obvious. How did all these smart people think and think and never realize that?”
I’m following my little blue dot on the google map and trying to focus on the conversation.
“Well,” I told him, “You know, it’s just that for a long time people didn’t really understand that we are just animals on a planet somewhere. It never occurred to them that other animals might be smart because humans thought they were the center of everything.”
“Yeah but come ON! Is it not super obvious that animals can figure things out?”
“Remember though,” I tell him, “– until pretty recently in history humans thought that we were literally at the center of the universe. Like they thought that everything else orbited around Earth. So they assumed that meant that humans must be very unique and special in the universe. Because they were at the exact center.”
“Well… technically they were right about that.”
“About what?”
“About being at the center of the universe.”
“No — I mean they thought that humans are at the literal center.”
“I know!”
“What do you mean?”
“I was thinking about this. The universe is infininite. So if you are standing on the earth, how far is it in that direction? Infininite. How far is it in the other direction? Infininite. EVERY direction is just infininitely far from the edge of the universe.”
“Huh.”
“SO! Every place, no matter where you are in the universe you technically ARE in the exact center. Every blob. Every little atom — that exact point has to be at the exact center of the universe. You get it?”
“Where did you hear about this?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinking about it last night and I started laughing about that because you get it?”
Well no wonder the kid has hell falling asleep. And no wonder I drove two miles past my turn before noticing. And no wonder my brain is too buzzy and scrambly by the end of the day to write.
