A little more about raising Mikey

To start it is funny to me to use the word raise, because when I was growing up, you raised animals but you reared a child. Language it’s quite the funny thing. For some reason this week I have been thinking alot about how I treated Mikey as a young child. I use the word treated because to me it’s more than just what you say or show children. I have told how at a few weeks old I would hold him and have a material thing he could touch, in one of his hands and the other would be on my throat, and I would say what the thing was. I did that everyday for about six months. Which is one of the reason why I think that by a year he was talking. As I have looked back I did other things in those first years to help him understand humanity. I am a firm believer in things are both nature and nurture. Yes and No not Yes or No. Things are always more than just one thing. We are all given to love, happiness, joy but it’s the nurture that lets that grow or wither. So I did things like give Mikey both of what would be traditional gender toys. He played with dolls, hell he had the invisible women with a baby, and a male by the time he was about 3-4,he played with make-up, he played with trucks and had his first riding tractor about the same age. He read books, colored, had stuffed animals that he named and played with. There never was this is a girl thing or this is a boy thing. He had long hair until about 2nd grade. He use to build on anything, he made a ladder in a tree at my parents cuz he was to small to climb it with out help and he wanted to be able to climb the tree when he wanted. I hope that give him a good sense on being a person, having a really wide range of experiences with out a gender attached. Mikey saw males doing what we think of as female things and females doing what we would consider male things, playing with both more traditional role things but not being treated as traditional. I have also thought back and realized I was not that good at giving him the tools to deal with rescuing people. You can’t save everyone or you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved. It was something I didn’t learn until my late 30’s and by then he was an adult himself. He was in the last year or so coming to the conclusion that he couldn’t save some of the adults he was involved with. We had a couple of conversations about how some of the people I had tried to help messed up something. We had talks about how what I didn’t learn early enough and he could learn from my mistakes and not to follow in my footsteps. He was working his way away from some. He collected baseball cards, drew pictures of cars, loved mazes. I never answered his questions with “because or I said so” until he was an adult and then it became a joke between us. Kinda like when he would tease me and say “Oh it’s so hard being you”. When he was little by about 2 I would tell him I’m not arguing with a 2 yrs old but I had giving him the why reason many times before that statement. The one that stands out for me is holding my hand as we crossed a street or were in a parking lot. He told me he could walk without holding on, I said “no, your to small for the cars to see”, he kept going about he knows what a car is and can see them, I replied: they can’t see you, I know you know how to look but your just to small for them to see. He of course wanted to argue more and I said I’m not arguing with a 2 yr. old. My mom still laughs about that she was there. He was a handful as a child and no less so as a teen or adult. As a small child he would never stop trying to get you to see his point or agree with him. By the time he was 8-9 we had several conversations about what is life. Why are we here? What do we do? What’s important? I use to tell him that somethings take time to develop and we would have the conversation when he was older. Some of those we had but there was still sometime when I would say we’ll have that again when your 35 but we won’t now. Wonder if he thinks or fells differently about those things now. The one main one that stands out in my mind is about abortion he was in like 4th grade and talking about how he thought it was wrong and people shouldn’t have sex unless they wanted kids. I told him we would talk again when he was 16, which we did, by then he had changed his mind and thought it was up to each person to decide for themselves. Well Thanks for reading. Thanks for supporting. Thanks for sticking with me. Love Kathy