I returned from a trivia night on Thursday (a rare instance of PLAYING rather than HOSTING) with a prize for Miles. The questions had been nature-themed, and one of the prizes was a wooden snake and some paint to decorate it. I promised Miles I’d get some brushes for him to ruin use as soon as I could, and this afternoon we both sat down for some arts & crafts (& snakes) time together. While I stayed close and monitored to help mitigate potential messes, Miles took the lead with the painting, working with a level of precision that surprised me.
“You must have done this before!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, at school,” Miles said, not looking up.
While he initially set out to use every color of paint available to him, creating a rainbow pattern, he eventually decided to scrap this approach entirely and repaint the entire snake blue. While I briefly lamented the erasure of all his previous work, I quickly stopped myself. Who was I to get in the way of artistic intent?
Upon finishing, Miles said he needed to let his snake dry, then rose from the table to wash his hands. I was stunned. This was the first time in a long while that Miles has presented himself as a creator rather than a destroyer (and a clean one at that!).
The Perils (& Pride) of Paternity 