collections

When we were kids, my sisters and I each had a collection, which lived on the shelves that our dad had constructed on the walls of our bedrooms. We treasured the little porcelain figurines of our selected animal. Mine were dogs, Jane had frogs, Julie had ... turtles, I think. Ellie... did you have one? Horseys? Ann? Mar? Shit, here I go again with the hazy childhood memories. Sigh.

Anyway, as I was saying, we girls had collections, and they were sweet and unassuming and tidy.

This weekend, I did some cleaning in my boy's room, and although his shelves were constructed by the same man in the same style as those of my girlhood, his collection is ... different.

The middle shelf holds a mish-mosh of oddities:

But the bottom shelf boasts his collection:


It's creative, it's original, it's boisterous and fluid. It is entirely not girly.

Look at this guy - some class of skelator indy jones, inexplicably hauling a medieval vehicle:

Here we appear to have a traveling band of ninja executioners:

A mad whirlygig driver:


An epic battle between soviet land and water forces:

Those water forces need a closer look:

It's disturbing, yes. but not just because of the weaponry or the fear that this is the work of a clearly deranged preadolescent mind. It's just so different from the collections of my youth. It's not simple. It's not tidy. It's not sweet.
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Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the mere fact of my boy's boyness, and I worry that the piece of me that lives in him is going to get smaller and smaller as he gets bigger and bigger.
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But then I notice something in the corner that I had not seen before. A scene that clearly represents my influence, and proves that my boy is still my boy:
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Cheers, buddy.