The Unforeseen Pleasures of Watching Boys in Motion

When I was young, I never thought that I'd be the mother of three boys. If I did imagine motherhood, I thought of it as something that would happen in the distant future, maybe in my 30s, and that I would, of course, raise a strong, intelligent, self-confident young woman.

But chance or fate had other plans for me, and I found myself with first one, and then two little boys under the age of three. Finally, some five years later, I took one more shot at conceiving a daughter.

It was not to be. Soon after I realized I was pregnant, I found myself looking at an ultrasound that made the technician laugh out loud. There was my Nico floating around, legs spread in such a way that the outline of a tiny penis was visible on the screen. “You're definitely having a boy,” he said smiling, and for a split second, I felt a wave of dismay sweep over me as my dreams of a little girl dissolved into what might have been.

Yet the realities that have replaced those dreams have given me so many experiences I would never have envisioned when I was simply thinking of a future daughter. I've had the chance to play with Legos and Matchbox cars, to run under a swing as I launched the boys skyward yelling, “Underdog!” and to watch two of them (Alejandro and Tomás) grow tall enough to rest their chins on my head and look so pleased that they had outstripped me in height.

But one of the most striking things I've learned is an appreciation for the sheer grace and power of the male body in motion.

As a young mother, I soon realized that boys seem to have some innate compulsion to push themselves physically and to express themselves in physical ways. Beanie babies turned into artillery; pillows were always flying across the family room, and the cushions spent more time as part of an obstacle course than they did on the sofa.

I was neither athletic nor particularly graceful as a child, so it always took me by surprise when I witnessed my boys doing back dives into the pool,walking across the top bar of a play structure, trying out parkour stunts, or performing an especially intimidating kata, all the while explaining in gruesome detail just how it could incapacitate an opponent.

Part of my general klutziness certainly stems from a deep-seated fear. My mother was always warning me about getting hurt. “Remember your cousin's boyfriend went down a pool slide the wrong way and broke his neck,” was just one of the cautionary tales she used to share with me.

I remember trying to run off a cliff that is about 20 feet above Lake Villarrica in Chile, where my husband's family has a farm. Since there is a ledge that juts out just below, you can't stand at the edge and jump; you need a running start. But I've never been able to work up the courage to launch myself into what looks like a sheer drop from the top. My cautionary instincts are just too strong.

As a result, my kids think my childhood was fairly boring, especially when they hear about their dad making a homemade rocket by scraping the sulfur off the end of matches or running through an abandoned Colt factory in New Haven carrying bottles for recycling and trying to get away from the security guards.

I have nothing on these exploits. On the other hand, I've never been the kind of mother who tells her kids, “Don't do that because you might get hurt!” As long as they used safety belts in the car and wore helmets when they were riding, rollerblading, or skateboarding, I've never worried about them.

And I spent a lot of time not watching what they were doing and hoping none of them would earn a Darwin Award after uttering those fatal words, “Hey guys, watch this!”

Yet I have to admit I get a vicarious thrill when I catch one of them at the top of a 30-foot tree or see the footage on the video camera that one of them took when he lay at the base of a skateboard ramp so he could catch his brother flying overhead.

We had just moved back to our house in California for a few months in 2008, when I came back from a Costco trip and noticed that the neighbors were giving me funny looks, the kind accompanied by head shaking, and a clear insinuation that I had failed all their expectations of good parenting.

“All right,” I told the boys as I entered the house. “What were you up to?”

“Nuuuuuthing,” they both answered with silly grins on their faces.

After a little prodding, they confessed that they had been jumping off the roof into a pile of leaves they had raked up in the front yard, and of course, had commemorated the occasion with photos.

Now that the two oldest are almost out of their teens, I don't see quite so many scrapes and bruises. But Tomás, who is 18, still exhibits the same kind of infectious excitement I saw when he was five and used to tell me, “Mami, watch can I do!” And Nico, who is 12, adores his older brother in part because he takes him to the skate park and commiserates with him when he gets in trouble at school for climbing on things.

Yesterday, when I came home, Tomás called to me from his bedroom to take a look at some photos he and his friend had taken while they were skateboarding at a nearby bowl. Tomás has a passion for all kinds of skateboarding, street skating, bowl skating, and vertical runs, including the long board, which he would like to see in professional competitions.

When I asked him what he loves about skateboarding, he told me that “it's a freeing experience.... In a bike or car, you're strapped in, but with skateboard, you're standing on a piece of wood strapped to wheels” and then he added, “I skateboard now for the same reason I did when I was six. Because it's fun.”

Watching my boys in motion, I realize that it's not just their agility and grace that I admire. It's that they are so clearly having the time of their lives, and that's something I hope they never grow out of.