My mother wanted to be a horse, she wanted to be a beatnik, she wanted to be an American Indian. How disappointing it must have been as she got older, as her hips emerged and her legs lengthened (barely:  she’s five foot two and slight) to see that there were no hooves, that her skin kept its human qualities, never turned a dusty shade of Palamino. By the time she was a teenager, beatniks were out of style and she had given up on the Indian thing, but she never quite let go of her animal spirit.

Summers when I was a little girl we would drive past the horse farms owned by the Duponts, would pull our rusty Datsun over to the side of the road and tiptoe up to the fences, holding hidden handfuls of Dominos sugar cubes. Two cubes in each flattened palm, we would wait for the horses to whinny and walk over, for their soft lips to graze our hands as they picked up the sugar.

The memory is faded now. I hold the fact of it rather than any sensation, and what I see are long grasses and dark, tall fences, a blue sky with clouds raked across it, the vague sense that we were getting away with something.



Image by Jane Underwood. The image was the prompt.

Tags: I want to be a horse when I grow up, Dupont horse farms, Maryland, childhood, feeding horses sugar cubes, Round Robin, writing prompt

Here was the scene: my four-year-old son wearing a pair of old high heels, a canary-yellow birthday party hat on his head, grasping a sword in either hand. It was another one of his many guises, a funny mix of feminine and masculine, underpinned by the dark potential for violence. He gave my husband a birthday hat and a sword (we have a large supply of both) and they began a battle, two "spirits" hashing it out. Soon after, the kid swapped out the swords for a stick turned gun. If you are my Facebook friend, maybe you saw one of the resulting photographs, which I put up with the heading “The Low Spark of a High-Heeled Boy.” It was one of those annoying isn't-my-kid-clever-and-cute posts. But just look at him. Isn't he?



Every day at preschool, my son dresses up in costume. It might be as basic as a police officer hat. Sometimes he adds bat wings or an elephant nose. At home he puts on his batboy costume and flaps his wings as he takes flight in the living room. Playing with the concept of name and identity, he uses aliases at our Music Together classes. The alias used to change weekly depending on his book-obsession of the moment -- Art Dog, Mrs. Grizzle, etc. -- but now his chosen identity lasts for months. After weeks of singing "Hello to Chipmunk" one of the summer session parents had assumed that was his name. "You know, Berkeley," she said with a shrug after I set her straight. "You never can tell here." Last week he went to class in full pirate regalia, from scarlett hat to skull-and-crossbones vest to sword. "Nobody will know who I am," he told me with a sly smile.

Part of his dressing up and taking on identities, his love of costume, has something to do with shyness. These are ways to be in public with being totally seen. But I also think he has a bit of the dramatic in him. Like all children, he has a rich imaginative life. He makes a set of bike wrenches into a train, builds a boat out of a pile of sticks, creates robots out of spare toys and junk. My son truly believes that if he runs and jumps fast enough, he can fly. I remember flying, too, that heady moment of lift as I raced across my grandparents' family room and landed in the dark green chair in the corner. It happened. I can't deny it.

I worry about the future of his imagination, about the coming imposition of what it means to be a boy. When he goes to school full-time next year he will be immersed in the culture of the group, where rule-happy children and adults start forcing kids into slots. I remember school as a place where creativity isn't valued and anything different is quashed. I want to protect him, to take his imagination and cover it in gleaming armor, to let him know that flying will always be possible.

The change will happen. It is inevitable. But I hope that he will hold tight to his creativity, protect himself when he needs to without smothering his imagination. The further he gets out in the world, the less control I will have. All I can offer is my love and support.

Image: The high-heeled boy at home, October 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.

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Tags: imagination, childhood, death of imagination, pretending, make-believe, groupthink, school