Mama-Come-Lately

  Lately the Boo has wanted a story after books at bedtime instead of a song. If I had a bigger ego this would upset me, because I was a teenage opera major after all. Mais non, I am happy to be spared another round of “birdhouse in your soul” — which is a great song, but tedious when you’ve been on duty for fourteen hours and long to collapse on the couch. 

Anyway. The first time he requested a story, I asked him what he wanted it to be about. He said he didn’t know, so I started talking about a guitar, since he’d been really into playing with mine. It was an electric guitar with about three strings who lived in a dusty, smelly junk shop with a bunch of other electric guitars and desperately wanted to be bought and played. Long story short, one day someone did buy him because they could see how fabulous he was under all the grime. And naturally, they gave him to a little boy as a birthday present, but not before cleaning him up and hiding him in a closet, which the guitar found terribly sad, disappointing and confusing. 

You know, pretty standard stuff.

I spun roughly the same story for about a week and I was getting bored with it. And then one night the Boo interrupted me. 

“No, Mama! The electric guitar has 18 strings! And it’s unpainted! And the junk shop is not so dusty.” He spoke with urgency, gesturing with spread fingers as he does when he’s serious. 

“Oh, okay,” I said, and incorporated his details, plus a few new ones of my own. A friendly doll to repaint the guitar, several people passing it by before it finally gets bought. High drama. 

Weeks later, we are still telling a version of this story together every night, and usually at rest time too. The Boo often takes over, so excited his words tumble out faster than logic, changing the guitar’s home to symphony hall or giving a new name to the doll who paints it or getting the grownup to hide the guitar under the bed because the boy is coming upstairs OH NO!

One thing never changes, though: the boy always gets the electric guitar for his birthday.