Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

My son is beginning to make small acts of defiance. He’s late to the defiance game, judging by most other families of similar-age kids I’ve met over the years. He’s polite, hates to make mistakes, wants to start his homework even before grabbing an after-school snack. He wakes up on his own, goes to bed without much of a fuss. He still wants hugs, thinks it’s OK to be seen in public with me, and feels comfortable having friends hang out with us. He has yet to slam a door, scream he hates me, or tell me I’m stupid. He has been in the Principal’s office a few times in elementary school, but not what you might think when you hear of a student in the principal’s office: once he interviewed the Principal, once he worked with him to put on a classroom presentation, and once he went to arrange a time to make a presentation at an assembly.

 

His earliest and most consistent acts of defiance have been his resistance to put stuff away. Or maybe this is actually compliance, acceptance of the family norm, as the grown-ups in the house may have set in motion the behavioral patterns of obtaining too much stuff, having too few places to put the stuff, and having few visible flat surfaces – counter tops, floors, desk tops, night stands. He does not like to hang up his clothes, and prefers to leave clean clothes stacked on his desk chair as if it’s an ancillary closet. He leaves his wet swimsuit and towel in his backpack awaiting parental reminders. He puts his day’s clothes directly in the wash machine each night, and his pajamas in each morning, without any attention to whether a pants leg is inside out or his underwear are balled inside them. He will not eat a meatball, and doesn’t want much chocolate. He doesn’t brush his teeth without being told. But when told, he does.

 

Some parents joke with me that my son is perfect, placing an impossible demand on him (and me) that we can only respond to by publicly announcing our failures while minimizing our successes.

 

This is the extent to which I can complain about my son’s behavior. His compliance and rule-following, positive demeanor, graceful handling of difficult situations, good manners and easy rapport with adults are an embarrassment of riches.

 

This morning, after breakfast, when it’s his job to wipe the table, the banter between us was slightly different than usual:

Me: “Would you like to wipe the table?”

Son (sotto voce): “No.”

Pause, one second, two.

Son, broadly smiling (voice back to full volume): “JK!”

Pause, one second, two.

Son, popping into the kitchen to pick up the sponge and a towel: “Just kidding!”

 

He added this last bit to soften the potential affront of defying me. As if I didn’t know what “jk” means. As if I am as generationally different from him as I actually am, even though I know a few things about youth today. As if this is a gulf that awaits us, even though we’re not quite there yet. As if his insistence on his world view needed to be softened. As if he’s being raised by someone unfamiliar with defiance.

 

In my childhood, I was simultaneously a tenacious rule-follower, especially at school, and a defiant, sassy, know-it-all locked in battle with my parents, themselves tenacious rule-followers who dabbled disastrously later in life with rule-breaking. I had attitude and lip, sass and sarcasm. I would have never softened a single “F___ you” message (never, of course, uttered out loud, just radiated from every muscle of my body locked in the armor of willful opposition) with something as kind as a “jk.”

 

My defiance stemmed from what I now have come to see as the pain of being misunderstood and insufficiently known. Not much to complain about either, yet without understanding what these experiences meant (and what they didn’t) I filled in the blanks with painful self-denigration. Self-protective anger and self-promotion became my flimsy cover-ups. I continued to misunderstand myself and limit what I allowed others to know about me. Still do, really, so the past tense of this last sentence is a bit misleading.

 

That’s how easily I can slip off track, my own defiance braided tightly with compliance, a twisted but unlucky genus as far from the truth of me as “Lucky Bamboo” is from being a Chinese form of bamboo. (I just learned this – lucky bamboo is not native to Asia; it’s related to water lilies, not bamboo; it’s claims of attracting good fortune as a feng shui cure remain unchallenged, believing to increase the flow of health, happiness, love and abundance).

 

Human psyches twisted and trained in a double helix produce no such luck. So I set out to make my own. My bamboo stalks were strained into a perpetual Misunderstood Warrior pose: arms-folded-across-chest, one hip jutting forward, eyes glaring, head tilted contemptuously, lips twisted into a sneer. I held it for as long as I could before I began to tilt and veer off the mat.

 

My son doesn’t have that pose. He has grown healthy and strong in an enduring braid of being sufficiently understood and known and enjoying himself. He is the feng shui cure, releasing the positive flow of chi all around him. Even his first forays into defiance – his daring to imagine that one day he will not wipe the table – are held in place with a primal desire to preserve the good will between us. His exchange was one that increased harmony rather than decreased it. That’s what his “jk” means, taking the fire out of his desire for independence and placing the need squarely in front of both of us. Where we can both see it. Honor it. Attend to it so that both our stalks keep thriving. And keep going, chugging along until the next pile of stuff has to be put away.