My six-year-old son has recently taken to wearing shirts that he can transform into tunics by cinching them with a belt just at or above his waistline. When I see him do this, especially in anticipation of going to school or to a social event, I bite my tongue. Depending on my mood, I am tempted to stop him in his tracks with a variety of snide comments, such as, “What in God’s name are you wearing that for?” or “What is this, King Arthur’s court?” As you can imagine, the biting of the tonuge is preferable. In our house, we try, desperately at times, to pick our battles. (Apparently, my son’s type of battle involves armor, dragons and medieval weaponry. Wait, sorry, biting fingers.)
Reflecting on my kids’ fashion sense, I can’t exactly say any of us in the family is exempt from wearing silly-looking things sometimes. Above all, isn’t comfort and a dignified sense of self the overriding important principle?
Yet, when I hear our neighbor tell my son that a girl he is very fond of thinks he is a “loser,” I can’t help but remember that he does this tunic thing fairly often, and he loves the color pink, and the Lyme disease caused his face to be lopsided for a while. Just lately, he lost one upper front tooth, and then weeks later, finally the other one. In the interim, one of his upper permanent teeth came bursting through.
He is the very picture of asymmetry, which is how he was born into the world as well: acynclitic (head cocked to one side, presenting widest exit of the head), a ten-and-a-half pound baby boy with the build of a weight-lifter, an a large head that had been crushed to the shape of a biker’s helmet during labor. (We have the photos to prove it.) This kind of birth does not make him a loser; to the contrary, he is quite the winner, and we made a very winning team at 3:00 am that day.
All the same, I reflect on his funny ways: he idolizes Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and is known to act these out dramatically at the drop of a hat. Ordinarily pencils and flashlights transform into light sabers or magic wands, while other children his age are glued to the TV set affixed to a Playstation 2. He expresses himself with crayons and paper, or with originally composed ballads, or with Legos.
He is large for his age (always has been) and therefore has coordination issues from time to time. He favors pink anything, including his sister’s hand-me-down clothes, the used girl’s bike he rides and got sensitive about this summer after someone down the street laughed at him, and he’s extremely tender and sweet and talks about a list of about a dozen girls he has crushes on. He writes love notes to these girls despite my warnings not to do so (I have no good reason). In many respects, this child is a large, geeky teddy bear, not unlike his father.
When he had a chance to pick a book to buy for his classroom Scholastic books purchase, he opted for the “Pretty Pony” set of two books that comes with a silver pony necklace. His older sister teased him, “That’s for girls,” and he retorted forcefully, “I don’t care!” and bought it anyway.
In the photo above, that’s him wearing it, with his tunic, a cinched dragon shirt we bought used.
If nothing else, my kids are learning to be themselves. Or to be more accurate, I am learning how to let them be who they already are.