A mother's reflection's when looking at her toddler and seeing his desire to acquire. Oh My Goodness, my son is just like me!
We all love our bits and pieces. In our society, whether we like it or not, the things we accumulate form the basis for who we are and how we are viewed. "Don"t judge a book by its cover,' some of us tell our children. These words come out of our mouths and all the while when we first meet someone we look at their clothes, their jewelry and their shoes trying to sum them up. "Fine feathers make fine birds," my Nann used to say, and on first impression the fine-feathered birds do get the best marks whether we like it or not.
This desire to acquire is somewhat innate to most of us, a vain attempt at security, a stockpiling of things for later, as is evidenced by my son's behavior with his favorite objects, toy vehicles. He will bring every one of his trucks, and every variation thereof, wherever he might be playing and pile them up just to have them close by if he wants them. Now, he can only really play with three maybe four of these prized possessions at a time, but insists on keeping the others around just in case, and woe to the person who actually touches his stockpile.
The other day while he was busily working with his digger and backhoe, I walked over to see what he was doing, without missing a beat, and without my saying a word, he turned around and said, “No, no, don't touch them.” Then immediately began picking up his pile and moving it to another location closer to himself and further away from me.
Being a horribly curious person and having a child who has no qualms about expressing himself, I repositioned myself so I was again close to his treasured pile of vehicles and could touch them easily, just to see what his reaction would be. It was swift and predictable, “Mommy, I told you, don't touch. Go away,” he said shaking his finger at me and trying in vain to move his pile again. A statement which, although not acceptable, is not unusual for a three year old.
After I told him I wasn't going away and it wasn't nice to tell me, or anyone else, to go away, he resigned himself to my presence keeping an ever-watchful Pinkerton eye on his invaluable pile. Eventually, he looked at his pile his forehead furrowed in reflection of the intense and conflicting thoughts, which seemed to be bashing their way around his head. Finally he reached a decision, picked up a yellow dump truck with a big smile on his face and said, “Here, Mommy, you can have this one.” He carefully gave me the truck as if it was a delicate object of immeasurable value before crashing into it with his tow truck.
Every child has a phase of mine, mine, mine, in which anything you touch immediately belongs to them - the old saying, "what"s mine is mine and what's yours is mine too' comes to mind - along with this ever present mine is the enormous ability to pile their belongings, a phase, quite frankly, few of us ever grow out of. I myself am a packrat of huge proportions, mostly of papers containing half written ideas and stories, along with a lot of fully formed and articulated ones as well. It's a constant battle to keep the piling of and moving of the accumulated bits and bits from taking over my life. But, I can see from my son's reaction to his bits and bits, that it is a fight that is fought from the beginning.
Bits and bits can be anything and everything and whether we like it or not we do judge others by their accumulated wealth. Where people live, what clothes they wear, what their house is like inside, what job they have, are all measures we lay next to others and ourselves. We gather these things up like precious bits of multicolored fluff, and when we have what seems to be a somewhat sufficient pile, we become protective of it and making sure that only a few chosen others can share in it too.
Maybe one day there will come a time when we won't be so attached to our bits and pieces, and we won't need to drag our piles from one place to another to make us feel secure, but I don't look for it to come around any time soon. Until then, I'll keep on piling my paper and moving it from place to place, all the while trying not to trip over mounds of trucks.
