Six many years after the age when most individuals do, I’ve develop into obsessive about Lego. My gateway drug was a set harking back to an ice cream truck. Like many dad and mom, I used to be attempting one thing new as a option to join with one in every of my youngsters. In contrast to many dad and mom, in my case the child in query was an grownup, and I used to be constructing a set that he had designed.
My three boys had been infatuated with constructing blocks as kids, and my husband would play with them, educating the idea of a “secure base.” However I used to be the one alone with the children day after day, enduring interminable and soul-crushing afternoons on the ground of the playroom. I bear in mind when the boys had been about 3, 7 and eight, feeling prefer it was an eternity till my husband would get dwelling, and I used to be considering: “Lego once more? Didn’t we simply do that yesterday?” These hours appeared to go on eternally, however sooner or later, impossibly, I blinked, and so they had been immediately driving, procuring pretend IDs and heading off to school.
Of the three, my center youngster, Aaron, was the enigmatic one, the one I couldn’t at all times perceive. We moved from Ohio to the Bay Space when Aaron was in fifth grade, and the transition was virtually an excessive amount of for him. He’d at all times been change-averse; once I rearranged the furnishings in our Ohio household room when Aaron was about 6, he was disconsolate, wailing for days like King Lear within the storm: “Why is the whole lot totally different?”
The transfer to California brought about him horrible angst; like a tragic outdated turtle retreating into his shell, Aaron lived 24/7 in hoodies with the hoods pulled all the way in which up for nearly a yr. I look again at household images from this time and my coronary heart breaks to see his face, usually full of consternation relatively than pleasure.
So how did Aaron discover his equilibrium?
Initially, he found musical theater. As a teen, he was in a dozen musicals at our local people theater. He and I noticed Broadway exhibits collectively each time we might: “Hamilton,” “Something Goes,” “Expensive Evan Hansen.” To see Aaron discovering pleasure via musical theater was a delight (and a reduction).
Secondly, Aaron continued constructing with Lego at the same time as different youngsters his age outgrew it. Throughout center faculty, he discovered a bunch of equally infatuated fans on-line who shared their unique designs with one another. By the point he was in highschool, he had found the “grownup followers of Lego” neighborhood, and that was it for him: He’d discovered his folks.
Throughout faculty, he began accepting fee work (“Are you able to design and construct a life-size Nike Jordan shoe out of Lego?” “Why, sure!” “How about making a Balrog, the demonic monster from ‘The Lord of the Rings’?” “You betcha!”). After graduating, he continued with bigger and better-paying commissions, cobbling collectively a burgeoning profession.
Aaron’s dream, just about ever since he developed positive motor expertise, was to work for Lego as a designer. However that may additionally imply shifting to Denmark. After faculty, he’d begun to show himself Danish — the child had his eye on the prize — and, a number of years after he graduated, he was employed by Lego.
He and his spouse now dwell in Billund, Denmark, 5,368 miles from our dwelling within the Bay Space.
Final fall, via a fluke of timing, Aaron and I acquired to spend a number of particular days collectively in New York, going to Broadway exhibits and to a bar in Greenwich Village for a giant drunken show-tunes singalong. Nevertheless it was after we went to the Lego retailer at Rockefeller Middle that I felt like I acquired a glimpse into the middle of his soul. We noticed units he’d designed, and he instructed me about fellow designers after we checked out their units. This was his place, these had been his folks, this was his life — or, no less than, it was his basis.
Interested by it now, I understand the idea of the “secure base” that my husband taught him all these years in the past has develop into a metaphor for Aaron’s life: This world of interlocking bricks is the place he feels probably the most calm, joyful and competent. He wants issues to make sense in the way in which Lego is smart.
As a lot as these after-school hours all these years in the past felt monotonous, I’d love to return in time to after we all lived underneath one roof and once I, the boys’ mother, was the large love of their lives, sitting on the ground of that playroom. Not eternally, however only for a short time, armed with the insights I’ve now.
The time has gone too quick. Within the meantime, I’ve a brand new and profound connection to Aaron, my sometimes-elusive one. After I dump out a bag of the little plastic bricks and begin sorting via them, simply the mere sound brings me again, to recollect and to really feel the essence of my son, nonetheless far-off he is perhaps.
