Bricks In The Wall

Family is really important to me. I don’t much care if I never make the history books, win the Nobel Prize, if my modeling career takes off or not…but family is something I want to build properly.

Today Ezra is on R&R, and we spent the morning building with Legos. I’ve been wanting to write this story, or one like it, for quite some time and decided today was as good a time as any.

I built two walls. One of solid bricks tied together structurally soundly, but with imperfections here and there. I started with the strong one, and let Ezra play with it while I built the second wall. I asked him to get a good feel for how strong the wall felt in his hands, how much effort it took to break it or even chip away a brick or two. He decided to expand that thought to include attacking minifigs, which is more than a little fitting, given that your wall is always under attack of sorts, whether you realize it or not.

By the time I finished the second wall, Ezra was very comfortable with handling the first wall. I handed him the second and asked him to handle it the same as the first. It quickly crumbled. It’s approximately the same size, made from similar pieces, of approximately the same number of blocks. But it was built poorly. And it crumbled before it was even under attack.

So we went back to the first. Every brick is a memory, or time spent together as a family. This one our trip to the beach, that one the day we spent at Hanging Rock. Even evenings spent at the kitchen table struggling with homework. Solid blocks tied together soundly by countless things done together as a family. Ball games, soccer, gymnastics, cooking class…many thing the kids probably don’t even realize are "family times." I do. I don’t care whether we’re at the park down the street, at the kitchen table, or on a Caribbean Cruise…as long as we’re doing it together, we’re building strength into our family.

The wall that crumbled could represent countless things. What is right or strength-building for my family may be different than what’s right for other families. Families that never talk or spend time together will probably find it hard to bind their bricks together, even if they do have some solid bricks in that wall. A gaping hole in any wall might represent a death in the family, or otherwise trying time that could shatter even the most solid bricks or walls. I suppose the trick for all of us is knowing which things bind us and which things divide us, as they may be different for everyone. In any case, the most devastating things are not always the most obvious ones.

I tried to explain much of this to Ezra while we were building this morning, but not much of it made any sense until the shoddy wall crumbled in his hands. Then he said, "Oh. Wow, I get it Dad! It makes sense now." Making sense of Dad’s ramblings is often a challenge for adults, let alone children. And it’s not even obvious to me. All those nights spent singing "Little Deuce Coupe" as a 3am lullaby to a crying baby, sitting up all night to check the fever of a child with the flu, even those times that seemed "wasted" spending the afternoon waxing the car for the upcoming Cruise-In…all solid bricks that bind us tightly, even it was not clear to me at those times. The evenings spent (and don’t get me wrong, often *needed*) vegging out in front of a movie or mindless sitcom? Not so much with the binding ties. Again not all that obvious at the time, although in hindsight now I can see that I don’t get to "redo" those bricks. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, and those bricks are laying somewhat loosely in that part of our wall.

No wall is without some solidity, and no wall is without some weakness. Even the strongest walls have imperfections, whether by design flaw or cracked here and there from attacks. Even the weakest wall has some solid foundation in it somewhere that could be built on. Make no mistake though, no indestructible wall occurs by chance. The strongest walls are consciously built.

I learned a lot just from building the walls for this story. It took a long time for us to find exactly the right pieces to build with. Given the mountain of potential building blocks, many solid walls could have been built with the same materials, many different ways. I just had to find the ones I wanted to use to build mine the way I wanted to. Someone else may have built a very strong wall very differently. We all have to decide what materials we want to build our families from, and how to tie them together.

It took twice as long to build the shoddy wall as it did to build the solid one. I spent more time repairing areas of the wall that failed during construction than I did actually trying to build the wall. I believe the same is true of family: If you spend no time attempting to build a solid foundation, you’re likely to spend twice the time doing damage control that you would have spent just doing it right in the first place.

And so many unspoken things happen while building your wall. If I spend a lifetime building a solid wall with my children's help, they will grow up knowing nothing other than how to build strong walls. And therein will lay the foundation of their own walls that they will build long after I am dust. If I skimp on the time or materials I teach them to use in their buildings, they are likely to be buried under the rubble of many fallen buildings throughout their lives. If I do it right, maybe they’ll even learn from the design flaws I erred with in building our wall, and therefore avoid those imperfections in their adult walls.

One thing is for certain though… if they grow up in rubble, they will never know what it’s like to live with stable walls. And if they grow up with stable walls, they will be far more likely to build solid foundations throughout their own lives. If I fail to show them how to build a solid family, they are very unlikely to stumble upon such a thing through blind luck. No pressure, Dad.

I think both Pink Floyd and the Three Little Pigs would agree. I think. No pressure, Dad… No pressure at all…


Author: Scott Ridgon