On The Budge who is almost six and

loves like we all wish we could love.  With abandon. With his whole heart and mind and soul from the tippety tips of the hair on his head all the way down to the dirt under his fingernails. The Budge is awesome. He is amazing.  He's like a normal person turned up to 11 and captured in a 4 foot high body. If you took a pinch of honey badger and tossed in the sound phones used to make when left off the hook and then shook it all up with a bottle of honey you'd get something resembling The Budge.  He's a light-saber and zombie junkie who wears white socks in the garden (no shoes! too restricting!).  He's a defender of bugs and a tamer of moths.

Oh and being nice to bugs and valuing life and gardening.  Can they fit that all in one sign?

Last week in the wake of the day, he crawled into my lap and wept because a year ago he found a cocoon in the garden and he opened it to find a not-quite-ready-for-the-world moth.  This year his classroom raised Painted Lady butterflies - so he watched the entire life cycle from egg to caterpillar to butterfly.  The day they let him go was the day he was overcome by sadness, sobbing in my lap about a year-ago bug death.

I explained to him that it was okay.  That when we know better we do better.  And we will do better.

I don't know how I managed to have a son who came out so amazing - who loves and honors the world - who wants desperately to practice empathy in a a culture that expects less from him.

I've worried and I've written about worrying about raising my daughters in this culture - about body image and feeling good about themselves and being smart and pretty and geeky.  But I also worry - a lot - about raising a boy that will grow into the loving and empathetic young man I would love to set out upon the world.

Again I am lost in this wilderness of parenting, fumbling through a world where other children mock my son's courageous dressing (he once spent a year in a rainbow silk cape but now he prefers tuxedos and top hats) or try to squash the bugs he so values.