There has been a lot of boredom happening around here lately. Can we blame the January blahs? A lack of sunlight? The fact that we’ve all been trapped inside for a week? Likely all of the above, and more.
School is boring. Home is boring. Dinner is BORRRRRR-INGGGGG. And don’t even ask about sleep. Could there be a more torturous parental edict?
Of course, I tried the old stand-by adult responses:
1. If you’re bored you can <insert any one of umpteen chores>.
2. Someone who owns as many toys as you do can’t possibly be bored.
3. Go read a book.
4. Good! All the best ideas come from being bored.
Unsurprisingly, these don’t work, at least not for long. But I am tired, lacking vitamin D and yearning for the feel of fresh air in my lungs and am therefore not a fountain of enthusiastic redirection. I am also bored, not of life but of its current lack of lustre. And so, here we are, struggling together. Parent with dinner to make, homework to police, a dog to keep out of trouble. Child of six wondering how the hell he got stuck in this hamster wheel at such a young age.
Boredom is one of those trigger words for a lot of adults, myself included. Our defences shoot up. We scoff at the idea that a child surrounded by books and toys and a sibling and a dog and the great outdoors (well… not this week) could possibly feel ennui. All of this, I have provided, and you dare to tell me life is not rainbows and lollipops??
I think we also have an assumption that kids come with a built-in trouble-seeking program that allows them to circumvent boredom and go straight to mischief. Our daughter, for example, can find endless things to do with her time, not all of them washable. One time, when she was quite little, she decided to tape all her alphabet cue cards on the wall. By the time she got to N, she either ran out of tape or ran out of patience with the dexterity the dispenser required, so she finished the job with a marker.
Honestly, I’m not sure if this kid has ever been bored and, if she has, she likely conjured up a project to fill the void within a second of uttering the word. In that way, she and I are alike. Boredom isn’t the problem, it’s the lack of time to do the 103 ideas we came up with in the last five minutes.
So this persistent issue of boredom is both new and perplexing. I suspect it may be the only word he has in his internal dictionary to express whatever is really going on. A classic miscue, as the books like to say. We fell so quickly back into the relentless routine of life that there has hardly been a moment to think. He could be mourning the directionless, lackadaisical days that peppered the Christmas holiday, when pyjamas were the uniform and no one talked about math. He could be longing for parental proximity. Or he might need some lessons in self-directed play. Lego can only take us so far.
If I can take it one step deeper, he may be at some developmental stage that has him realizing his individuality. By that I mean he’s realizing he has individuality, not that he realizes what it is. We are all such unique individuals in this house. We all have our thing that we like to do in the moments in between. Perhaps he’s just a bit lost, searching for what’s his and not yet finding it within these walls. I’m eager to help him find it, excited to see what brings him joy, and praying to god it isn’t hockey, violin or video games.