The power of imagination, and other parenting lessons from Calvin & Hobbes
MY THEN seven-year- old son hurried into snow pants as he eyed the somersaulting flakes outside the window. “Are you going to build a snowman?” I asked him sceptically. Though only a couple of inches covered the ground, I knew from experience that scant accumulation was no obstacle to a determined child.
Otis nodded. “I’m going to cut a big hole in middle of his body. Like he was shot by a cannon. But first,” his voice revved with excitement, “I’m going to build him in the driveway so that when you back the car down, he’ll decapitate!”
My son, contrary to appearances, is not a sadistic murderer. He’s a reader. Late the previous night, I had caught him with a flashlight, scouring “Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons” under the covers.
One day recently we had found a stack of Calvin & Hobbes books in the “free” bin outside the local library. It had been years since I had read the books. I couldn’t recall specific story lines, but I remembered the strip as one that reliably made me laugh. I grabbed the entire stack, chuckling at the ingenuity of the titles as I slid them into a cloth bag. “The Revenge of the Baby- Sat.” “Something Under the Bed is Drooling.” “Weirdos from Another Planet.” “Scientific Progress Goes Boink!” “What is baby-sat?” Otis asked. “The ones being watched by the babysitter,” I replied. “You know, you and your sister.” Did I see a glimmer in his eye? Otis picked up “Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat.”
“What does ‘homicidal’ mean?”
I snatched the book out of his hands. I definitely remembered how inappropriate some of the content could be. The violence Calvin inflicts on snowmen could alone earn it an R rating. “These are for me,” I said evasively. Classic parenting mistake. The non-answer answer. The disguised “no.” I’d just done the verbal equivalent of cordoning off the evidence with yellow police tape. Do Not Enter! Absolutely Forbidden! What could be a more tantalising invitation? I wasn’t too worried though. Surely the intimidatingly advanced vocabulary and amorphous philosophical ideas would be a natural barrier for such a young reader.
Of course, my son proved me wrong.
Within the week, Otis had transferred the pile of books from my nightstand to the cavity under his bed. He walked around, ignoring everyone, splayed book in hand. He read at the breakfast table. He read in the bath. He read in the car on the way to school and then on the way home. “Do you remember what our son’s voice sounds like?” I joked to my husband.
In the weeks that followed, I watched as my son’s brain caught fire. The books boosted his vocabulary and pushed him into the highest reading group at school, but, perhaps equally as importantly, they transformed his pretend play. Calvin inspired Otis to dream bigger. Galactically bigger. Otis improved on the many methods Calvin used to murder snowmen. Otis spent days fiddling with string and boxes, constructing and rigging booby traps. He suspended one, a cardboard box filled with confetti, from the roof of the front porch, and laid in wait for someone to ring the bell. The contraption misfired, but I was so impressed with Otis’s industry, I left it hanging. (I would not have blamed the poor postal worker for skipping our house.) Then it was on to the next prank. Unbeknown to me, he had been sneaking around after bedtime, placing bubble wrap in strategic locations. On my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I became the first victim. Otis peeked out from his room. The look of satisfaction on his face at the sound of my scream sent chills up my spine.
Though Calvin often walks a precocious line in the strip, my child, like many children, clearly got the jokes. “Calvin agrees with you that kids should play outside,” he informed me during a particularly long stretch of days off from school, “But if it’s raining, then the best thing to do is drive your mom crazy.”
More and more often, I found myself saying my son’s name in a strangled tone, my patience thin, and I realised that, at some point, my empathy and allegiance had distinctly transferred from Calvin to Calvin’s Mom.
One day, I asked Otis what he
Within the week, Otis had transferred the pile of books from my nightstand to the cavity under his bed. He walked around, ignoring everyone, splayed book in hand.
thought of Hobbes. “What do you believe? Is he real or is he stuffed?” In a tone that connoted my knucklehead status, my son answered, “He’s a real tiger, but for some reason grown-ups think he’s a stuffed animal. I guess they just don’t know any better.”
His explanation silenced me. I realised I’d made a grave mistake. I was one of the (stupid) grown-ups. Never once had I considered that Hobbes might be real, because, well, he isn’t. But, belief does not come via verisimilitude. It is a house without struts, a bird without wings, where the former stands and the latter flies. Whether Hobbes was live or stuffed was beside the point.
To believe in Hobbes is to believe in the power of imagination. Perhaps a stuffed Hobbes is the symbolic representation of parental limitation and inadequacy, the depth and degree to which we lose sight of what it’s like to be a child. Hobbes is real because children’s feelings are real. — WP-Bloomberg