September 17 2024

My boys, when wounded, need stories swimming in the currents of their bodies so that rather than becoming the wound, becoming a woe-is-me victim of the concrete world that causes their knees to bleed, instead they can reach into those river currents and pull out a story they heard at bedtime about a boy whose finger was cut and when he dipped his sore finger in a pond his finger turned to gold. Or a story about an orphan boy who was deaf and rejected by the village and then received his hearing after he took a hard fall and knocked his head against the ground.

They won’t recall these stories as they are bleeding on the sidewalk or after they are mocked on the playground by that dumb jerk kid Rusten that every parent wants to bop on the head hard enough to instill a little fear but not hard enough to involve the cops. Sorry I lost the plot here a little.

Those stories and images and ancient wisdom teach my boys what to do with the wound. If they don’t have stories then they become the wound. The wound wants to ravage them, tell them they are weak, that they have no agency. Story, however, plants the seeds of something so magical and mystical that when they are grown men they will know how to weep over and love their wounds.

That is enough to get my tired and sometimes lazy ass into their bed and tell them a tale as they drift into sleep.