Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Shakespeare is everywhere. He is in the fabric and phrasing of what we think and do each day. He is, in many senses, the culture’s OG. He–more specifically his historic and lasting phrasing– is also the inspiration for today’s blog.
I am watching my kids go through a major change. This has a lot to do with the shift in living conditions, but it has more to do with how their personalities are morphing as they age. All three are very different and separate creatures with ideas and personalities that do not necessarily gel. They don’t even get along terribly well once disagreement strikes. Disagreement strikes all the time, because these three boys are about mental dominance over each other. They want to be right and they want to be right first. I used to think, egotistically, that this was about vying for my attention and affections. I believe now that it is more about patterns of behavior that have not been corrected (leading them to think that this behavior is simply how it is), as well as a need to escape from each other’s shadows and cast one of their own.
It is a tough thing to live with boys who could be cooperative and wonderful but instead spend the majority of their energies being competitive in every possible way. I love competition and have created specific areas for that intra-family scuffling. We have Beyblade (houseofbeys.com) and board games, and several video games. Maybe we have too much competitive energy between each other and not enough outside competition.
As a result of these behaviors my boys are starting to become very mean. I am starting to get very upset about the status quo.