a valentine’s day in the life

Posted on February 14, 2017 by marybethrew

rich came into the kitchen to put something in the sink over the weekend, and quinn was at the table watching us and when we comically both turned the opposite way and missed each other, i said to quinn, “i could have sworn someone came in here.” rich was now behind me in the kitchen as i asked quinn if he saw someone come in, and could he describe the person. quinn told me, “yes. it was a boy. i mean, a male. tall, with the beginnings of a beard….”

then rich bear hugged me from behind, and after a brief loss of composure, i continued my commentary to quinn, “hmmm, rear bear hug with arms free, that’s crashing wings, right? (that is the name of our karate self-defense technique for said bear hug attack) and quinn said, “yup!” and proceeded to giggle while i did crashing wings on rich (who was also laughing) in the kitchen.

last night quinn had a headache so he fell asleep with junior strength ibuprofin at 6:30, then woke up at 8:30 to eat dinner, draw and listen to a story, and then i turned his lights out at 10. i had been in the bath when he woke to eat, so he microwaved himself a tupperware of brown rice and ate the rest of a corn muffin that had been in his lunch. he’s getting to be pretty self-sufficient, my almost ten-year-old.

after i tucked him in the second time, i printed out his star wars valentines that i had downloaded from etsy last year for his class party today. print-our-own star wars cards were a good $5 investment, because star wars will always be relevant.

this morning i put a valentine card and reeses peanut butter hearts on rich’s chair for him to find after he got up from stoking the fire. i wrote mushy stuff in the card, which had owls and said something like “to tell you the truth i like doing nothing with you” so i ran with that theme and also pointed out that this will be our only v day as fiances, so we’d better savor it! for quinn i put a pack of pokemon cards (in which he was thrilled to find a blastoise ex) and a jar of capers on the table (the back story: in the series of unfortunate events books, the baudelaire orphans make puttanesca sauce in the bad beginning, and the recipe involves capers, which quinn has never tasted. we had discussed making the recipe from the book sometime, so it was a literary/culinary present.)
i cookie cuttered hearts out of the middle of two pieces of bread, made a tiny heart pbj for his lunch (with another corn muffin, and a juice box, at his request) and then scrambled egg and cheese in the middle of the outside pieces of the bread for his breakfast which he gobbled. the biscuits were heart blob shapes this morning too, for biscuits and gravy.

rich called up the stairs that i should look outside, and i ran out the door with my camera to photograph the sunrise, which was heart shaped. of course, my valentine would arrange such a thing for me. he also serenaded me with a fun medley of love songs.

me: heart biscuit blobs. rich: jedi atmospheric control. he always has to outdo me.

i drove quinn to school, then got back in my car, got a momentary flash of his valentines in a stack on the kitchen table, and drove home and back to school one more time for good measure. his class was all doing yoga with the lights off. so lovely to find the long frame of him folded like origami into eagle pose as i snuck his cards into his backpack.

as of sunday, the christmas tree now has only lights on it… it is still standing in the living room as of this morning, still with lights. my friend wedding boss tries to keep me on task, but today another deadline comes and goes and my save-the-date cards are closer to completion, but not yet sent.

i baked my fellas a cherry death star pie. i baked them heart-shaped pizza for dinner. i declined to carve each whole olive into a tiny death star, as requested by quinn, but i think he enjoyed his pizza in spite of it. they each gave me a valentine card (swoon).

i may be behind on life, but taking it one day at a time, my priorities set on making my guys feel loved today and every day, feels right.

advent affirmations

Posted on December 24, 2016 by marybethrew

for the two weeks that quinn was gone leading up to yesterday (and the start of our two weeks together! yay!) i sent him some advent notes to open each day… and i’m going to store them here for him to be able to look back on someday.

December 10: One thing I love about you, Quinn, is your laugh. It makes me proud that one of the things your karate teachers said about you early on is that you are the resident “smile-bringer” of the dojo. I love hearing your musical laughter when you hear, read, or see something that tickles you. Laughter is such a gift, because even as it helps the person laughing feel good, it is helping the people around him feel good as well. Here is a joke for today:

p.s. 10 is a great number! Can you believe you will turn 10 years old in just a few short months?!

love, mama

December 11: Dear Quinn, I admire your confidence. I think it was so cool to watch you stand up in front of your class and give a presentation about bearded dragons, and seem natural, like you were just having a conversation. You seem very confident when you do your blue belt forms out on the karate mat. One of my wishes for you is that you maintain that confidence in all you do throughout your life. You told me recently that you have at least four jobs you want to have as a grown up: 1. a musician 2. a famous kenpo teacher 3. a paleontologist and 4. a game designer. I have no doubt you will do so many amazing things! Glad I get to watch you soar.

love, mama

drawing by Quinn, 2014

December 12: Dear Quinn, I value your kindness. This world needs more people like you. It is so nice to watch you being friends with other people, regardless of their age, abilities, gender, or anything else about them. It’s obvious to me that all the people you come into contact with end up liking you, because you act with kindness towards them, and accept them for who they are. It makes a mama heart happy to see this in you. You are an example to people much older than you, including me. I did not always feel like I wanted to be friends with everyone in my school, the way you do. It has taken me a long time to realize that everyone has something to offer in friendship, even if they don’t seem like it at first. You are teaching me that lesson! You are a wonderfully kind human being, and I’m proud to be around you.

December 13:

Dear Quinn,

I love that you are in tune with your animal spirit helpers. You’re a guy who is in touch with the natural world, and I think that is so important. You’re one of the people who cares about the Earth strongly enough to make a difference. I think your owl spirit helper is a good friend. I’m sure you have your own things you know about owl, but to me, owl is stealth, flying on silent wings, going silently and subtly. Without a fuss, without reactiveness. Owl is watchful, with those big eyes. And of course, wise! Owl is like a ninja! Owl is also a bringer of healing and renewal. I see all these wonderful traits in you! (If only you could fly!)

Love, mama

December 14:

Dear Quinn,

You are brave! Like a Gryffindor. Like a rebel Jedi knight. I think you could do anything you set your mind to doing. I see a lot of courage in your character! I admire your bravery and courage. It’s just one more thing that is great about you!

Love, mama

December 15:

Dear Quinn, I wish for you this winter to have some snow! I have not always appreciated snow, but watching you play in the snow gives me great joy. I can deal with my face feeling like it wants to fall off and my fingers turn into icicles, if I get to watch you having fun.

I do not, however, wish for you to experience sleet. (Whatever sleet is!) Love, mama

December 16:

Dear Quinn,

I think you have the quality of Indomitable spirit in great measure. You are not a mean or imposing or intimidating person, and I think it can be misunderstood that indomitable (unbeatable) means you have to be a super tough guy. I don’t think so. I think it means you are resilient, and that you have a spirit that never gives up. And these are things I see in you in all different areas of your life. You are a positive person, you bounce back from disappointments with amazing resilience, and you are determined in a way that I think exemplifies indomitable spirit. In case you were wondering, I think you’re great!

Love, mama

December 17:

Dear Quinn, If there isn’t going to be snow, at least we have Calvin and Hobbes so we can experience it vicariously. Love, mama

December 18:

Dear Quinn,

When I look at you, I see a guy who has integrity, and a well-calibrated moral compass. That means you know what is right, and what is wrong, and you point yourself in the right direction. This is something I’ve noticed about you all your life. One thing I’ve observed is that you align yourself with characters in stories you love who are the “good guys.” You’ve been a fan of guys like Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker all along. You’re like a sunflower… they always turn their faces towards the sun (they’re heliotropes!) and you are like that when it comes to the goodness in the world. Integrity has a lot to do with that. Our choices have meaning. Harry’s aim to disarm even when his opponents are dueling to kill illustrates his commitment to keeping his own soul intact and aligned with the light. That is a way he has strong integrity. When you first started to do good guys and bad guys in your playing, it was easy to find the hero, and easy to put characters into one box or the other: good guy or villain. As you’ve grown, you’ve started realizing there is a lot of gray area and people aren’t always as easy to put in an either/or category. I am watching you absorb these subtle shades of gray in the stories you enjoy. One theme is that there is always a path back to the light, another choice to be made, no matter how far a “villain” has crossed over to the dark side. The dark side may tempt someone, but it is always possible to turn back towards the light. Sometimes, one who has turned dark comes back to be the most valiant of the good guys. But it is something I hold dear about you, that you have always identified through and through with the most light-bringing and life-affirming of characters. The ones who have always been on the light side, and never wavered. You are and, I trust, will always remain steadfastly one of the good guys.

Love, mama

December 19:

Dear Quinn,

I like your vocabulary. I think you are amazing at choosing the absolute best word for the sentence. You’re not one to take the easy route when it comes to finding a way to tell about something. You speak of captains “slain” and crew “perishing” when your stories of pirates come out. Then you’re onto paleontology, using words like “excavate” and “reconstruct.” You talk about pain that “sears”, and “loopholes” in a plan. Planes “taxiing,” “squadrons” battling, healers in an “infirmary,” a “dubious” character, a “pelagic” emergency, an instance of feeling “dumbfounded” or “rambunctious”. It’s also the way you weave words together that I love, because you’re very poetic. Last year you told me, “when you yawn, it puts electric needles in your balloon and pops it.” When you were 6 and learning to read silently, you told me, “I can just read it to myself in unhearable talking!” When you were 5 and we watched the Alice in Wonderland dance performance, you told me, “I liked it so much! it was like hundreds of toys, being painted out of a box!” When you were 3, you described the weather by saying, “the trees are making it wind and the wind is waving goodbye…” and you told me, “the rain comes out of the moon’s tummy!” And one of my favorites, the first time you went to the old dragon house (age 4) you said, “it feels good to me in here! I feel like I might explode with excitement, like I’m inside a box that’s full of pomegranates! With two mice!” I love you and all your words. Love, mama

December 20:

Dear Quinn,

You are a courteous dude. I think that you really embody all of the black belt principles, and courtesy is no exception. When I think of courtesy, I sometimes think of the Why behind people’s courteous actions. When some people display what are known as “good manners”, I think they sometimes do it more out of a sense of doing what they were told to do or to not get into trouble, instead of doing out of their own moral compass of integrity telling them to do it for the right reasons. When it comes to you, I see you treating others with courtesy out of a real sense of wanting to do the right thing, because you’ve internalized the golden rule and have put thought into what it means to treat others how you want to be treated. This is a much more deep and meaningful way to be courteous in the world, and it is a blessing to see you acting in this way towards your fellow human beings. You’ve talked about one of your strengths of “Being A Good Friend” and I couldn’t agree more. I think you’re terrific at being a friend! And you’re a friend a person can really count on, who won’t abandon them when the going gets tough, who cares about who the person really is and accepts them in all their uniqueness. You’re a really quull dude, I hope you know. I love you!

Love, mama

December 21: Happy Solstice!

“somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight, someone’s thinking of me and loving me tonight…” -Fievel Mouskowitz

a story from 8-4-2009 (Quinn age 2):

At bedtime, Quinn asked if I would call Dada on the phone… so I did and he told Dada “yeah” to whatever question he was asking Quinn, and then said, “I’m having milk” and then to me said, “I’m handing it back to you.” (ha!) Then I said do you want to say night night to Dada? Quinn said, “yeah.” He told Dada “night night” and handed it back again. Then we laid down again for more milk, but soon he said, “I know, let’s go to the beach!” I said, honey I think it would be fun to go to the beach tomorrow, but right now the sun has already gone night night….” and he was bummed. But then I said, “how about we talk to the ocean and tell it night night and we’ll see it tomorrow?”

Quinn asked, “can you call the ocean on the phone mama?”

Today I want to remind you that no matter where you are, you can always look up at the sky and it will always be the same sky that I can look up and see above me. when I look up at the sky tonight on solstice, I will send hugs and kisses on the moon and stars for you. that is one of the reasons I love our saying… “I love you as big as the sky! as big as the ocean! all the way to the moon and back again! 9 quintillion times!” because… it’s so big! and it’s there, no matter how far apart we are. I miss you and I look forward to seeing you soon! I love you! (you know how big!)

we’re never far apart, you’re always in my heart!

When you were 3, you made this observation of the moon, sometime around winter solstice: “the moon is pulling its cloud blankets up over itself.” I hope you are snuggly and warm when you pull your blankets over yourself tonight, under the moon that is shining down on both of us.

Love, mama

December 22:

Dear Quinn,

You make this season of magic and wonder so… magical and wonderful! I don’t know a lot of people who are so fervently excited about advent. It has been a joy to watch you take delight in the small daily rituals that we have invented (advented?) and adopted and evolved over the years of your life. You are SO much FUN! I have many memories of you at younger ages, positively impatient with how slowly the days were going by until Christmas or Solstice. You have mellowed out as you’ve gotten older and learned to enjoy the present moment more and more. But you’ve still retained your sense of magic and wonder, and it’s a wonderful thing! I love hanging out with you around this time of year, and catching some of the joy that bubbles up from you. I can’t help but join in the excitement! I love adventing with you. Love, mama

December 23:

Dear Quinn,

I’m overflowing with joy that you will be at my house again tonight! Here’s a boat load of “Quinn loves boats” stories to celebrate!

When you were almost four, you looked into the woodstove and said,“the orange is like the sea. There is dark orange below and light orange on top. The log is the boat, floating on the sea. The sparkles are the cleats on the boat. The steam is the lines on the boat.” One time when you were 5, you wrote a song that went like this:

“and so i set three crab traps
and went to another place
and set three more
and set three more in another place
and set three more in another place
and then there was only three crab traps left
so i went to another place
and set them…….”

Also at age 5, you used boat terminology to remember that “the letter E has 3 crossbars and 2 canoe cracks!” Also, “look at all the O’s on this page. They look like buoys marching in a line!” (of course you loved Q’s even better- they have a little bit of rope tied on, so they can be crab traps!)

When you were 3 and practicing drawing, you found it important to connect things- when you drew the eyes on people, you “attached” them with string to the skull. Or if the lines we use to draw the boat don’t meet up perfectly, you’d lash them together with some rope and then advise me to “keep your sure on you to never ever untie that line, ever!” You also liked to draw arrows so things knew which way they were going. “And here is an arrow pointing which way the little green boat is going. It’s going to the orange house with just mama because quinn is at the shop with dada.”

I asked, “did mama take quinn to the shop in the boat?”

You replied, “yeah. That’s the way some people do it. You poke a lot of holes in the road, and it makes water. Then you don’t drive your cars, you drive your boats and canoes.”

Love you boat boy! Love, mama

December 24: story of eagle boy and the baby bear by Quinn (12-24-2010, age 3)

“one day there was a boy who flapped his hands with his arms out wide as he was pretending he was an eagle, and FLEW off! one day when the eagle boy was playing in the forest he heared a voice saying HELP HELP HELP! and flew out of the forest- he stopped playing and flew out of the forest and ALL the way and landed on a beach and walked to the edge and saw a little bear on an isl- washing up on an island. and then he saw that the baby bear was safe and washed up on the island. he had to find the mama and dada for th bear. i was walking and i saw him in the water as he floated to the island. ‘that won’t do,’ said the boy. alright. and if that happened, i would have to build a boat for y- a canoe for you. and you can sail. so the eagle boy made uh a kind of sort of canoe raft and threw it right in SPLASH in the water. the baby bear pulled the island aboard… the baby bear jumped off the island onto the raft canoe and pulled the island on board. and the um eagle boy THREW a paddle down. the baby bear caught it, and paddled his way back to his mama and dada bear. and the eagle boy flew back to his mama and dada gir-l- his mama was a girl, his dada was a boy. ’cause it was time for lunch- ’cause it was time for eating- ’cause it was lunchtime. how’s THAT story?”

me: that’s WONDERFUL!!!

“yeah! for dessert. THAT story was good for eating for dessert. yeah. i could put lots of the story ice cream in a bowl, and put lots of dessert in there.”

Today I celebrate the stories in your heart, and I hope to enjoy lots more story ice cream in a bowl with you in years to come! Merry Christmas Eve!

December 25: Merry Christmas Quinn!!!

You are the biggest gift I have ever received in my life. You are a wonderful person, and I am glad I’ve had a chance to tell you that I think so, in detail. You are an inspiring, creative, caring, kind, courteous, courageous, fun-loving, joyful, wonderful guy. I am happy I get to be a part of your life, and so glad you chose me for a mama! I hope you have a very merry day today and look forward to a nice holiday week with you! And hanging out with you on the light side of the force.

I love you as big as the sky, as big as the ocean, all the way to the moon and back again infinite times! Love, mama

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ miracles

Posted on January 16, 2016 by marybethrew

the trouble with blog posts is, there’s no way to make them scratch-and-sniff. perhaps i can utilize some sort of jedi mind trick to make you smell this clove-filled orange while you read about our month of lifelong learning.

rich’s daughter and her fiance came for thanksgiving, and brought quinn a drone. the boys had fun flying it and rescuing it from the hedge with the apple-picker each time it got stuck. these two share a birthday, and i know q looks up to him, i mean, the guy has serious paintball equipment, c’mon. both daughter and son-in-law-to-be are very sweet with quinn.

since our own christmas ornaments were in storage, we decided to make some. then we ended up giving most of them away as gifts, which was a great way to spend less money and avoid giving people things they didn’t want. (because how could they not want a handmade owl from quinn’s pinecone owl colony?) hot glue and some craft foam from the dollar store… and we were cranking out little droid-esque owls in no time. quinn asked me favorite colors of family members he was sending them to, which i thought was very thoughtful of him. he thinks often of his new york family and i know it means a lot to him to do nice things for them and think of them smiling from far away when they opened his gift.

for yet another pinterest project idea we used dollar-store ornaments to make ninja turtles, some to keep, and some to give away to karate instructors and quinn’s third grade teacher, who used to do tae kwon do. quinn did research, and interviewed each instructor to find out their favorite ninja turtle so he could personalize their gifts.

who’s your favorite? q loves rafael, and i am a donatello fan myself.

with clay from our personal ceramics tutor and buddy, quinn worked at sculpting elf, dwarf, wizard, hobbit and ranger mover pieces for his d and d monopoly game.

pokemon card making experienced a surge of renewed interest this month.

the school book fair enchanted quinn, and i remember feeling that way myself when i was a kid, so i gave him some spending money to choose a few (overpriced and of questionable quality, but still) books. i was impressed with his choices: the next installment of diary of a wimpy kid (he had read the whole series up to that point from the library, and was very much looking forward to the next installment), a how-to-draw teenage mutant ninja turtles book (i used to come home from every book fair with a how-to-draw book of some sort), a set of star wars stickers, and a pokemon collector’s handbook. the pokemon handbook induced spin-off activities such as list-making and story writing. pictured above, he is working on quinn’s pokemon story using my laptop.

3 people went to new york for 7 days. they spent 8 hours a day at a hotel. how many hours did they spend at the hotel?

i pondered a bit this month about helping quinn catch his writing skills up to the level of his math and reading skills, but i don’t really think there is much i need to do. he is motivated to write now more than ever, and has lots of ideas: the writing force awakens. his teacher had told me he was less than motivated to write during certain assignments, such as writing his daily “math review” which entails explaining how he solved the math equation. he tends to space out and just not do it, his teacher said, and i nodded knowingly, thinking of how he spaces out and “just doesn’t do” things like getting dressed or putting on shoes. and yet, when it is something that sets him on fire, like making a game or sorting out a new pokemon deck, he has stick-to-it-ive-ness alright, and the space-out symptoms vanish. i liked how he took the make-up-a-problem assignment above and made it into something he cared about – traveling to new york. personalizing mundane assignments is a skill i don’t think i really made conscious use of until graduate school. i think he will learn to tap into that skill for completing assignments that make him want to stick his pencil in his eye, like math review apparently does, and i bet his math reviews will become the most enjoyable read in the stack.

music! quinn still routinely talks about drumming with special interest, when it comes to music, and i do think he is a rhythm-oriented guy, when i see him dance. also, based on the songs he chooses as favorites, i see a definite rhythm-o-phile in the making. he is also playing recorder at school, so we are doing a little at home as well (he said he has his b, a and g figured out). they don’t have music every week- each class has it for a whole week’s specials about twice a semester, but the teacher makes great use of the time, and we’re grateful for the little bit we do get. i have my eye on some star wars recorder music, as well as a cool curriculum for earning karate belts for mastering different songs on recorder that i came across on this mom’s hilarious and well-written blog. stay tuned for me wanting to stick a pencil in my eye as we take this recorder journey together.

speaking of earning karate belts…

a young jedi looks for the good in all people; keeps his karate covered like a treasure in his pocket; and prays he never needs to use it, or for forgiveness if he ever does. love the symbolism and lessons that reach far beyond the mat… karate really is well-rounded, if your kid is going to be a one-extracurricular-activity kind of guy like mine.

testing for his red tip (final step before being eligible to promote to the next belt!)

his belt promotion paperwork. question: how can commitment help you obtain a black belt in karate? answer: commitment is a kind of cowoperation that helps you. question: name two things that you have set goals to do in the past two months. answer: be a green belt by the time i’m 11. be tying bunny loops by the time i’m a purple belt. i will take a small amount of credit for planting that bunny loop idea as a goal, because q had already mastered every other step of getting his karate gear on and off, including tying his belt and folding his uniform after practice, but the ties on the sides of his gi (top) required bunny loops, and he wears crocs on his feet and has never bothered to learn to tie laces. still, in case he wears running shoes ever, it seems like a handy skill to have, and i wanted him to set a deadline so he’d actually work towards it. he decided on purple belt, and then set to work learning bunny loops. and he has indeed learned to tie them, and on the day of his belt test, did not even ask me for help with his gi.

bad picture of bunny loop tying

belt test, the big night. several parents complimented him on how well he did, and his instructor gave him a special shout-out at the end for how hard he had worked to become proficient in his orange belt curriculum. he acknowledged how serious quinn had been in class lately, that his tendency to be a goofball had been less prominent in recent classes, and dubbed him the resident smile-bringer of the dojo.

goofball time is built in, even during belt tests- here the kids are showing off their balance at the very end, wearing their new belts.

smile bringer

now that he is a purple belt, he is in the advanced class, and quinn has been dying to get into that class for one single reason: they get to run for warm-ups! boy after my own heart, with ribs and gangly limbs poking out every which way just like 8 year old me.

we had a fun play date with friends, and got to play with a cool snap-together building toy called lux blox. quinn took his new bunny loop skills on the road and helped with tying his four-year-old buddy’s shoes. (awwwwwww.) we puppy-sat for our ruby again (she was helping him learn more computer programming skills) and also had doggy friends of our housemate to play with this month.

we launched our winter break with a friendly game of uno between the three of us, and ruby helped. my sweet 8 year old boy in a 45 year old’s body (who was 8 when he watched the original star wars on the big screen) took us out on a family date to watch the force awakens. no spoilers here, don’t worry. but oh, the fun! we sure liked it. what i personally liked most were the quirky quinn-isms that were whispered into my ear: “ok mama, the weapon is fully charged. i counted 30 seconds.”

equally as awesome, i walked into his bedroom that afternoon on him trying to use the force. he wasn’t even remotely deterred by my presence, and kept right on trying, commenting on how he was trying to figure out if the force was really real.

i told him i was sure of it.

quintuple sharp tusk; woolly mammoth-inspired pokemon attack powers

while making his dad’s pokemon cards for christmas, we hit a snag because the marker he needed for the background color (“brown sugar” is what he calls it) was drying up, and we didn’t have another one. nor did the store, though they had a close enough for mama color. it was not close enough for quinn. it took him a while, and a lot of trying to get the dried marker to work before he relented, but relent he finally did. then he told me, “it must be a miracle, because my instincts kicked in just in time and i was okay with using the other marker.”

between newfound flexibility and actually finding the christmas tree stand in the storage garage, we most definitely received our quota of christmas miracles.

from the light(hearted) side of the force, always, mb

the force is strong with this one

Posted on June 10, 2013 by marybethrew

life is full of good guys and bad guys lately, what with reaching the end of the harry potter series, and quinn’s passion for all things star wars. while reading a section revealing new information about a character, quinn stops me to ask pointed questions about their affiliations: “so, is snape on the dark side then, or the light side?”

when he was very young, i wanted to shy away from good guy/bad guy play, and have always been uncomfortable with his interest in weapons, though i have tried to let him explore unencumbered by my biases. yet i realize now that this play is where he is learning some profound life lessons about the complexity of human nature; this is obviously where he is spending his time and focusing his neurons. the paradox of the good/evil dichotomy is that we can almost never categorize someone as good or bad without a long list of caveats. more often than yes or no, the answer to questions in life is “it depends.” even darth vader, (i’m loosely trying to avoid harry potter spoilers in here but if you’re late to the star wars party, my apologies) is impossible to pin entirely on the dark side, though much of his career was spent there. his youth and then the moment of his death belie other lighter aspects of his character.

voldemort presents a very dark character indeed, however, harry does a great job of noticing all the similarities between himself and the dark lord, and throughout the story we learn of points in his life where a choice was made aligning him with darkness. sometimes our path depends very much on these choices, but while there is evil in the world, not one of us is inherently evil.

there is always a path back to the light, another choice to be made, no matter how far one has crossed over to the dark side. (i am a believer that people can change; whether they will change is up to them, and i don’t let my life hinge on someone else changing, say for example, a coparent, but can people change? i think yes.) this is one of the refrains in harry potter. the dark side may hold sway for some, with its sibilant siren’s song. and though it would have been difficult for voldemort to show remorse, as harry urges him to do, other characters did reach epiphanies and turn back towards the light in various parts of the story. sometimes, one who has turned dark comes back to be the most valiant of the good guys.

the initial appeal of the good guy/bad guy play, i think, lies in the straightforwardness, the ease with which one can identify with the “right” ones, can neatly place each character in one box or the other, hero or villain. and yet, as with everything in life, there is so much more gray than black and white. i am heartened to see quinn absorbing these subtle shades of gray in the stories he so enjoys.

one of the dangers of an oversimplified good guy/bad guy mentality, to my mind, is the righteous justification of acts of a darker nature. so much war and slavery and rape and slaughter is deemed justified as long as these acts are directed toward the “right” target, i.e. the bad guys. i think the worst part of watching my son want to take up a make believe weapon and kill a bad guy is just that; i want him to realize that you can never really know, you can never be sure, that who you are fighting is truly evil. and no amount of evil on someone else’s part makes it right for you to commit atrocities. two wrongs don’t make a right, right? it is why i oppose the death penalty.

is anyone ever truly evil through and through? isn’t there always a person behind the evil, an adult who was once a child, was once a baby, as innocent as any other baby? i’m not saying evil isn’t real and ever-present, or that people should not be held accountable for wrongdoing. it’s just that i don’t believe one can ever justify committing acts of evil in order to thwart evil. this message is woven through j.k. rowling’s writing, and is one reason i find her books so compelling. harry’s aim to disarm even when his opponents are dueling to kill illustrates his commitment to keeping his own soul intact and aligned with the light.

if quinn’s constant humming of star wars theme music, punctuated by sound effects of explosions and light sabres swooshing through the air, is any indication, this stuff is a big deal to him, a dominant theme of his thinking. even the squirrels in our yard seem to join in, making their laser gun sounds: “pew! pew! pew! ack-ack-ack-ack-ack!”

we might spend an entire morning out tidepooling, ogling anemones and urchins, but the ongoing subplot is one of “which angry birds star wars bird are you now, mama?” (i’m always leia.) and “which power do you have?” (why, the force, of course.)

“i’ll be the red luke bird, and i’ll have a blue light sabre.” no matter how many times we have both defaulted to these choices, he will still begin this game again and again, and continue to ask me who i want to be now, and announce his decision to be red luke with blue light sabre, and we jedis will strike out yet again to fight the storm troopers, the game never losing its appeal, his eyes still sparkling with anticipation at the prospect of fighting evil.

we might be romping along the beach, enjoying the sun-warmed sand between our bare toes, and quinn will find a perfectly smooth piece of driftwood for a wand. “want to know what’s inside the core of my wand? a phoenix feather!” the better to fight the dark lord with, my sweet son.

harry potter and luke skywalker are not the only heroes who capture quinn’s awe. he finds the good guys in any context and identifies with them the most strongly. on mother’s day, our little family went to my parents’ church together as a gift to my mom, and after singing the first chorus, quinn looked up at me, beaming, and remarked, “i like jesus.” as convoluted as my relationship to that particular good guy and his organized religion might be, i could only smile back and say truthfully, “me too, buddy.”

it is this unerring positive heliotropism i see in quinn, like a little sunflower forever orienting itself towards the sun, that comforts my unease with laser guns and light sabres, and is the precious gem i wish to preserve when i worry over his self-image and his moral compass. as surely as anything, his moral compass is properly calibrated, he identifies through and through with the most light-bringing and life-affirming of characters. the ones who have always been on the light side, and never wavered. he is and, i trust, will always remain steadfastly one of the good guys.

mb

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