Common Creativity

When Thing1 was still a pea-picker, he hunched over his Matchbox cars for hours, watching their wheels and gears as he drove them around carpets and vitas he created and telling them their stories. I wish I had written them down because sometimes I think he needs proof as to just how creative he is. I think a lot of people do.

Thing1 is about to turn twenty. He knows how to fix cars and program computers. Anyone who watched him studying the movements of cars as a toddler would say it pretty accurately predicted his mechanical aptitude. 

His love of discovering how things work, however, often translates him putting high value on common sense and things that can be proven. When I tell him of the spaceships he conceived and drew, of the stories he told, he answers, “I’m just not all that creative anymore, Mom.”

Yesterday proved him wrong, and this time I got the photos to prove it. 

When Thing1’s college closed, his first action, over our strong objections, was to go job hunting. He received two offers as soon as the state closed down both businesses, but his employment history from the previous year earned him the ability to collect benefits during the pandemic (he wasn’t eligible for the stimulus because he’s too much of an adult and too much of a dependent to fall into any category the government considers visible).  He’s saving some of that money but, still a teenager for another two months, money can burn a hole in his pocket. 

Thursday he announced he was buying a hammock to use at school when it reopens. Then he announced he’d like to test drive at home. He asked the Big Guy and then me if we could think of any appropriately socially distant pairs of trees from which to hang it and, despite being surrounded by trees, we just scratched our heads.

Friday, Thing1 and Thing2 traced our normal route around the house, making incursions in to the forest when this or that pair of trees sparked their interest.  They showed us a few ideas, but the Big Guy and I just couldn’t see the right trees for the forest.

Saturday, Thing1 disappeared again and then took his machete and power saw to the woods behind the house. We heard some hacking and then a familiar buzz. Thing1 came back to assure us that the tree he’d taken down had been punky and about to fall anyway and then to invite us to the clearing he’d made. The Big Guy and I started our usual afternoon route and went to where the boys were waiting, Thing2 dancing from foot to foot to show us Thing1’s work.  

The boys had found a perfect opening into the forest and created a more defined path to a pair of trees that, somehow, the Big Guy and I had missed the day before. Thing1 had felled one tree and cleared some rosy bush between the two that would support his hammock. Then he indicated the tree-filled slope leading down to the river that will be the view for anyone sitting in the hammock.  

Thing1 had pulled a paradise from the mass of trees and rosy bush. When the hammock arrives, he’ll assemble it and give credit for the completed project to his common sense. I’d like to think that it was actually good old fashioned common creativity that helped him identify the perfect spot to meditate on the question.

Walking to Paradise

Commando Parenting

I always said if any kid of mine where is the teeniest bit artistically inclined, I would encourage the heck out of that inclination. Thing2 is, and I do, but I swear that if there is a God up there, he or she has finely honed sense of humor.

I was a slob as a kid. I collected everything and threw away almost nothing. I had drawings on little scraps of paper and stole my mom‘s scissors for drawings and creations. She never expressly said she hoped I’d have a kid just like me, but I think in the back of her mind she must’ve known that it be a pretty good revenge.

She’s getting it.

Thing2’s room has gone from being inspirational to hazmat training ground. His creativity has gone high-tech, so boxes of pencils, markers, and half-filled sketchbooks share space with a DIY Recording studio where he swears he’s going to make animated films to make George Lucas drool. It’s also filled with empty popcorn bags and scraps of paper and – you guessed it – Mom’s stolen scissors.

I have drawn several lines in the sand to get him to clean it. Carefully delineated boundaries worked beautifully with Thing1, but, despite his volcanic colon, he can be pretty obsessive about keeping his space organized. It took only one full-scale clean out of his room to help him make the jump from messy tween to fastidious young adult.

One thing I’m finding about artistically-inclined offspring, however, is that simply bulldozing the room doesn’t get the point across. It just creates more canvas. So I’m taking a new tactic today.

As I carried out a little clutter control this morning in the rest of the house, I noted that my creative kid had left “his” iPad and ten-year-old computer in the living room, presumably after shooting footage for a fan-fiction movie he’s been scripting. The iPad is old, but it still works so it wasn’t going into that sty of a room where we might invent the first human to iPad virus. I decided to hide it in ours until the room gets clean.

Hiding precious objects gets rooms superficially clean quickly, but today I mean business. I want it actually clean. On my next trip back to the living room, I picked up the laptop to find a hiding place for it. I had almost passed his room when I thought of the perfect place. I went into his room and moved some of the carnage away from the bunkbed. I put the laptop in the safe little nook behind the bunkbed and then put the carnage back.

I figure about 4PM, I’ll either be up for parent of the year or getting a visit from child protective services — right after he hears he can the laptop back when he can find it.

How to Raise a Parent


Thing2 is sitting across the couch from me right now tapping on an old laptop my parents bequeathed him when they upgraded theirs. He’s working on a project, talking through the lines as he taps and proving I know nothing about parenting.

I’ve worked in some sort of IT for the better part of the last 25 years. I’m the last person to tell a kid they shouldn’t play on a computer, but Thing1 got sucked into Minecraft in middle school, torpedoing his grades for over a year. It’s safe to say, the Big Guy and I are wary of Thing2 acquiring a tech addition.

Thing2 missed a fair amount of school this winter due to severe pain from inflamed lymph nodes. The pain intensified with each bout of flu or strep he contracted in the petrie dish of elementary school, and we were worried he would fall behind.

Most sick days he rested on the couch with an iPad or Harry Potter book while I worked on support tickets. I’d check during the day to make sure his latest YouTube obsession was PG-11, but for most of the day I let him take responsibility for his own amusement. They weren’t my finest parenting hours.

Thing1 got into video games about the same time, solely on the strength of his test scores, that he also got into a middle school accelerated program. He’d coasted through elementary school math, aptitude compensating for apathy. Except for mathy-science stuff, he needed serious prodding to stay on track.

When he started the more challenging program, I asked the program head how I could help him stay more organized. Her answer surprised me.

“I don’t want you to help him. He’ll learn to rise to expectations.”

So we took the hands-off approach. Bad report cards led to loss of privileges, but when he failed, he failed. When he did well, the success was his. That experience guided him like a river winnows out earth and rock to find the best route. It’s helped him learn to stand on his own two feet and, even if he stumbles, to keep trying.

I know telling the world that I let my kid spend two months playing on the iPad is inviting slings and arrows from parenting experts. Left to his own devices, however, Thing2 scurries from couch to boy-cave, moving laundry hampers and draping sheets over his top bunk to create a movie set between naps. The iPad was soon burgeoning with special effects app and ‘screen tests’. By the time he got back to school full time, he had written a script for a Star Wars fan video, complete with a mental cast list consisting of his classmates.

It’s almost Thing2’s turn to apply to that program, and, watching him create and rise to his own expectations, I’m pretty sure we’ll use the same approach. We’ll call it good parenting even though he’ll be doing most of the heavy lifting.

Date Night

Last Friday night Thing1 had a hot date, and the Big Guy had a gig playing guitar with his Québécois band at the local country store, so Thing2 and I decided to have Mommy-Thing2 evening.

We got to our favorite pub in Manchester, VT and, after ordering our drinks and appetizers, I pulled out my sketchbook and started sketch the candleholder.

Right on cue — as he does at every art museum or any time I’m sketching on the road — T2 asked if I had an extra journal. For once, i had thought to pack an extra, and the two of us sketched together in silence until our food arrived.

We came up with with wildly different pictures and spent the rest of the meal talking about art, architecture on Mars and art supplies.

It made for a different but quietly wonderful kind of date night.