Some of the kids’ drawings fall into the “I don’t want to recycle this, but I can’t see keeping it in a folder,” and those often get pasted into my notebook. Funny thing is, I have a hunch that these collaged scraps will mean more to me in the future than some perfect, saved drawing. (“Oh, this is when J was into drawing Kraftwerk and O was into playing waiter…”)
Dad comics
Sometimes when the 5-year-old is being really annoying I’ll draw a comic of him to snap him out of it. Then sometimes he’ll ask to draw, too:
I often draw his one-liners as a little single panel comic in my diary:
Sometimes our conversations warrant multiple panels:
Some mornings he will hover over my diary and ask to read all of them. As Camus said, “One has to pass the time somehow…”
Easy as 1-2-3
After we put the boys to bed, my wife and I clean up the 3-year-old’s dozens of drawings he leaves all over his drawing space, deciding what to keep and what to recycle. The figures above were all drawn on the same piece of paper and I thought they could tell a story, so I cut them out and had my 5-year-old letter the speech balloons. They’re still too young to (peacefully) jam together, so I like doing these little orchestrated collaborations. (Previously: “What do you know?”)
Increasing complexity
One of my favorite things about Tibor Kalman’s monograph, Perverse Optimist, is how much he talks about his kids. He dedicated the book “for my children who have made me change my mind about everything.” Later he writes, “Your children will smash your understanding of knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You will miss them forever.” The greatest benefit of having children, he said, “has been to look at the world through their eyes and to understand their level of curiosity and to learn things the way they learn things.”
Some friends of ours are about to have their second kid, and I was thinking about what a leap it is between 1 and 2, how many parents say “it’s exponential,” but how I never really understood why until I drew the diagram above and was able to really see all those relationships mapped out.
“We chose to increase the complexity of our lives by having children,” Kalman writes. That’s really it. With each kid, your household becomes increasingly complex.
It’s not lost on me that when you switch “complex” from an adjective to a noun, it means a network, or “a group or system of different things that are linked in a close or complicated way.” In psychoanalysis, a complex is “a related group of emotionally significant ideas…that cause psychic conflict leading to abnormal mental states or behavior.” In chemistry, a complex is “any loosely bonded species formed by the association of two molecules.” All of those things sound like my family.
More moving parts, more complexity.
Collaging with a 5-year-old
I’ve been trying to get my 5-year-old interested in collage. Turns out the answer is fart jokes. So now we’re “collaborating” on this very important project. His Bernie Sanders collage is delightful modern dada:
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