Hudson and Legos

"I like them because you don't have to worry about the laws of physics or science or anything."
-Hudson

For a whole summer Hudson and I sat at the coffee table in our living room and built Lego houses with expansive floor plans on green tile, because we didn't know how second stories worked. When he was little, before he knew how to put the pieces together, I assembled the sets Santa or the Easter Bunny brought him, not really caring what the final product looked like. I liked following step-by-step instructions. I was a surrogate worker for Anglerfish, dump trucks, Deathstars, a zoo. He reached a certain age where fine motor skills and concentration kicked in, and he didn't need me anymore.

Even now the instructions are irrelevant to him, and he has become the sole architect. I just get to watch. He builds me a house of pieces left over from what looks like a monster truck. I live in a small green and red roofless house where the kitchen and bathroom share a faucet, and the bedroom has glass walls that used to be truck windows. My sofa is made out of old tires. It is a sparsely furnished house. In the layout though, I see remnants of our own house, the real house which we are living now, and this gives me a sense of security. This is where Hudson has grown up, this is where he gets his ideas, where he creates.

For Christmas, Hudson received a Lego Star Wars Trade Federation Multi Troop Transport. It was 1,000 pieces, looked like a giant brown slug, and I wanted nothing more than to put it all together. It didn't really matter what I was building, just looking at the end product, feeling some sense of accomplishment is what I get out of piecing together tiny Legos. As Hudson pieced it together, I sat back and watched for a little while, like I was supposed to, but then as Hudson lost stamina/interest, he let me take over and finish the contraption, running back and forth to the kitchen to get more peppermint bark for us to share. We watched Food Network. It was just like our old agreement—I put it together, he gets the end product. I feel protective of this agreement, because I feel a reliance on me, but then I think of my monster truck house and I don’t think the alternative is all that bad.