BuhbuhbuhbuhBAD....BAD to the BONE

Here's a conversation that I overheard the other evening, between Jon and Zephyr.
J: What do you want to play?
Z: I want to play that I'm a bad cowboy.
J: What does a bad cowboy do?
Z: Doesn't like cows. Doesn't know how to take care of them.
J: Doesn't know how to fix a fence?
Z: Yeah. Makes cows sick. Makes them throw-up.

I think his interest in being "bad" started when he became aware of super heroes, thanks to his buddies Jonah and Grady. At 6-8 months Zephyr's senior, and slightly more wordly (meaning they have watched movies with more tension than Baby Einstein, Bob the Builder, and Barney), they occasionally introduce Zephyr to characters and ideas that are hard to come by in our household. Jonah graciously loaned Zephyr a Batman doll- I mean, action figure- which Zephyr played with constantly for a week or so. "Batman likes to steal things and hurt people," he would tell us. "Um, no, Batman is actually really good, and likes to help people who are in trouble," we'd gently state, trying not to be too concerned with the nature of his fantasy. "Not my Batman," he'd inform us, matter-of-factly.

There have been several instances of his interest in, but not real understanding of, other adventurous presences in our society. When a few of his friends started talking about Transformers, Zephyr would come home and say he was a "transfarmer." Then, after attending Jonah's Star Wars-theme birthday party, Zephyr was directing Jon in yet another game of pretend, "You're a star wars and I'm a star wars..." Jonah's mom, and my close friend of many years, Sara told me about a conversation they had during a play date. Jonah was warning Zephyr that the Battle of the Syths was really quite scary, too scary for Zephyr to watch (since we don't even think Disney movies are appropriate for him yet, I think it will be a number of years before Zephyr has to gird up his courage for viewing this scene!) Zephyr became very serious and told Jonah, "Yeah, it's like in the book How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when the Grinch steals all the Christmas presents? That's really scary. It's just awful. It's terribly scary."

You might not think that two parents who met in a martial arts class would be so prudish about exposing our progeny to violence, and I really can't justify or explain it. All I know is that when Zephyr and Jonah wanted to play "hunter" and Jubilee was the animal they were hunting, I insisted they change the game. And I love that most of the time, all Zephyr wants to do is play that he's either fixing something, rescuing abandoned cars with his tow truck, or working out the complex relationship patterns of his trains. I can handle the occasion that he and Grady play "On Guard" with toy swords, sticks, or swim noodles, but when he put a makeshift gun (a rubber tube) to his back and said "I'm shooting myself," I felt faint. There is a large empty space on our wall where the sword rack used to hang, perhaps symbolic of the large empty space in my brain where the knowledge of how to deal with my son's imaginative weapon play should reside. I've read enough about boys and testosterone to know that forbidding this interest could make him feel shame about his natural tendencies. But I also fear that emphatically promoting it might mean there's less time for him to engage in activities that are more inherently pleasing to me- things like quietly paging through books, helping me cook, painting with watercolors, and chasing bugs in the sunshine.

In the meantime, his "badness" sometimes finds an easy scapegoat. On the way home from a birthday party yesterday, he experienced, for the first time, the pleasure of eating a tootsie pop. "I'm going to damage it up with my tooth!" he growled.