Watching Star Trek with Dylan

Between Mothers and Sons
by Patricia Stevens

(Page 2 of 3)

Deborah Galyan

Upstairs on the bridge my husband, the first officer, is at his station cooking up that brand of boxed macaroni and cheese inexplicably yet consistently preferred by the human young, and slicing bananas under the steady gaze of his commanding officer. The captain has friendly brown eyes and a deep dimple that appears like a Cracker Jack prize each time he smiles. He is guzzling a cup of apple juice and jiggling both feet. He is five and one half Earth years old. The captain is, in my opinion, exceedingly handsome in a big-cheeked, humanoid way. One sock on. One unaccounted for. He is Captain Dylan Walker, commander of our starship, whom I sometimes still think of as my son.

"More juice, Number One," he says to the first officer. (It is a tradition for the commander of a Starfleet vessel to address his first officer affectionately as "Number One.")

"One moment, sir," Number One says. "I'm receiving a macaroni signal."

Number One has earned his position between the cutting board and the range in this, the high command center of our ship. His macaroni-boil-over training has served him well. He performs the chemical bonding flawlessly, blending the secretions of lactating mammals with the garish orange powder our young perceives as cheese sauce. I slouch in the doorway between the bridge and Sector I, waiting for my cue.

"What species are those bananas?" the captain inquires.

The first officer regards the sliced bananas with uncertainty. "Sir, I am inclined to say they are of Vulcan origin. I am uncertain of the species."

"If you don't know, ask Data," the captain prompts.

"Data!" my husband shouts. "What species are these bananas I'm slicing for the captain?"

I walk in stiffly, regard the bananas with androidlike curiosity, I hope. "Sir," I say. "These bananas are genus Overripus, species Chiquitum. A Romulan variety, grown only on the twin planets Norzac and Prozac."

Number One winces. "Now he won't touch them. Romulans are bad guys. And that makes these bad-guy bananas."

I'm prone to such mistakes. I feel miscast as Data, the opal-eyed android who is basically a super-computer in pants. I'm reduced to scatting gibberish spattered with malapropisms, changing the Ferengis into Ferraris, reaching for Cardassian but landing short on Cardamom.

We turn and face the captain, who scowls at us.

"Romulan bananas are against Starfleet regulations, I want Betazoid raisins with my lunch."

Number One hesitates. The evil Romulan bananas are already arranged in a pleasing spherical pattern on the rim of the captain's plate. But, wisely, he concedes.

"As you wish, Captain."

"Make it so," the captain says.

Dylan is having his first love affair with Star Trek. I am having my second. I watched the original series when it aired in 1966. I was eleven that year. I remember praying after each episode for NASA to somehow accelerate its timetable, so that I could have Lieutenant Uhura's job in real life, and hopefully her uniform and mod dangle earrings, the likes of which had never been seen before in the vast midwestern interior. Three decades later I haven't a clue what Star Trek meant to me back then, beyond the fact that it was immensely pleasing to spend an hour each week in a world where no person or alien life-form dressed or talked or behaved like my parents or teachers.

This time around, watching Star Trek is a more urgent experience. To watch it with Dylan is to watch someone in the throes of intense epiphany. I am not so much watching Star Trek myself as I am watching Dylan watch Star Trek, and I see in him a kind of deep recognition that suggests the presence of a paradigm encoded in the brain before birth. He sees something he recognizes, something he has been waiting to see for most of the two thousand days he has lived thus far on Earth. A world where life, as far as he is concerned, has recovered its one true objective, and therefore, its majesty and worth.

As every TV-acculturated American knows, Star Trek is a drama about people who navigate magnificent starships through our galaxy's outback, and possess cool technology and wear, as Dylan once put it, "excellent uniforms." In Star Trek, a person can be blasted with a laser and brought back to consciousness with another laser that looks eerily like the laser that blasted him in the first place. The crew go about their business with weird nonchalance, seemingly oblivious that they are hurtling through space at unfathomable speeds toward God knows what. The point is, after all, to go, and boldly, where no one has gone before, to explore new worlds, to discover new civilizations, perhaps — though this part is apparently too bold to include in the series's prologue — to map the shape of creation itself.

I hope I never forget the expression on Dylan's face the first time he saw the opening frames of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a late fall evening in 1996, toward the end of a busy work and school week. Tired, we had abandoned our dinnertime decorum for plates in our laps in front of the tube. Dylan, sensing acquiescence in his weakened elders, commandeered the forbidden remote and clicked it only once. And there it was, the good ship U.S.S. Enterprise, cruising majestically past an orange planet with lavender moons. Until that night, I had harbored a sort of high-minded idea of the countenance of rapture. I thought it must resemble a painting by Gustav Klimt or a poem by Rilke, but as it turns out, it looks like a little boy in baggy overalls, a half-eaten cheese sandwich in his fist, watching Captain Jean-Luc Picard command the bridge of the Enterprise.

That night I watched Dylan maneuver, in openmouthed awe, one limb at a time around the coffee table and across the floor, until he was in immediate danger of bumping his nose against the screen. If it were possible, he would have passed through it and taken his adventure inside, like Alice through her glass.

"What is this show?" he asked.

"Star Trek," I answered. "I'm not sure we should watch it."

"I need to watch it," he said.

My husband and I commenced secret communication, as all parents forced to negotiate in the presence of their children must, using a highly evolved series of shoulder shrugs and facial twitches. My twitches indicated that I wasn't sure what to do, since, technically, Star Trek qualifies as a "shooting show."

A shooting show is our private nomenclature for any television show in which people (morphed or otherwise), animals, robots, aliens, or mutant turtles engage in the use of weapons, no matter how poignant their reasons might be, or any show in which the accoutrements of violence or engagement therein is made to look awesome or cool. Shooting shows are not watched in our house, and the rule is so strictly observed that one need merely shout "shooting show!" once to justify a change of channel.

But that night, my husband's facial muscles argued, Oh, what the hell. Nobody is shooting right this minute. Let it go, at least for tonight.

So it was, on a night of lax parental discipline, that Dylan discovered the ultimate metaphor for his five-year-old boy life. What else had we deprived him of, I wondered, in our fevered efforts to make him a peaceable creature?

There is a great movement in contemporary parenting to prevent children from watching violence on television. This means millions of parents must deny their children access to approximately half of all network programs and nearly all cable television programs, according to the National Television Violence Study. There is something oddly omissive about this strategy, for it amounts to withholding from our children an ugly truth about their culture: that it equates violence with entertainment. I'm not sure that this collective effort will save them from it, particularly the boys, who, in my observation, are plenty capable of generating entertainment violence without the assistance of television.

My son has, thus far, been sheltered from television violence and seems no more or less aggressive than other boys his age. Yet he thrives on rough-and-tumble engagement with other boys, a karate contest or a round of sword fighting with sticks. As a toddler he astonished us with his compulsion to hit, which continued long after he developed the verbal skills to mediate conflict, and now it's his demented genius for transforming the most benign playthings into dangerous weapons. And so, we remind him constantly that playing at fighting is a rehearsal for the real thing. He listens and clearly understands and goes off somberly to his room, where, we later discover, he has quietly fashioned a laser gun from a fistful of Legos and is blasting everything in sight. It's something buried deep in his bones. A thing he must do.

As luck might have it, of all the action-adventure shows Dylan might have fallen in love with, Star Trek: The Next Generation is the least likely to resort to entertainment violence. Starfleet officers of the United Federation of Planets take great pains to avoid war in intergalactic relations. There is a great deal of talk about conflict resolution, many peace conferences, much counseling of prudence. But every other episode or so, and much to Dylan's delight, diplomacy breaks down, and the crew of the Enterprise find themselves with no other recourse but to destroy a Klingon Bird of Prey, or to blast away at some murderous crystalline entity or other. When that point of crisis finally comes, they make it look both awesome and cool with phasers, improvised warp weapons, and the ultimate: photon torpedoes. And to this day, on our particular starship, whoever engages the garbage disposal must first shout: "Firing photon torpedoes!" We have learned to wash dishes in the shadow of war.

I used to worry that our decision to let Dylan watch Star Trek would unravel everything he learned during his days at a Montessori preschool run by a goddess-worshiping, multiracial women's collective on Cape Cod. The school was a place of peace and wonder, a liberal parent's dream come true, where the children began their day sitting on a huge canvas floor cloth of Mother Earth, saying a pledge to protect and nurture Her and each other. The children baked whole wheat bread for their daily snack, made sculpture from recycled junk, composted with earthworms, and took turns feeding Sappho, the school guinea pig. Each child had a designated task of the week, one of which was peacemaker. And while Dylan benefited from these lessons and applied them where he could, he clearly loved the school less than I loved the idea of the school.

Something about it did not honor his boy soul. I think it was the absence of physical competition. Boys who clashed or tussled with each other were separated and counseled by the peacemaker. Sticks were confiscated and turned into tomato stakes in the school garden. And much to the dismay of their benevolent guardian-teachers, the boys worked out ingenious loopholes to bypass the ban on competition. They organized a daily tournament of extreme playground sports, including ant races and digging contests in the sand pit. It finally came to me that the school was a kind of utopia, based on a dream I harbored for Dylan. I wanted him sheltered from a competitive, narcissistic culture that teaches the wrong lessons to children, but more than that, I wanted to protect him from the dangerous excesses of his gender. I thought if I could keep him long enough in a place inhabited by a feminist guinea pig and a peacemaker, he would never develop the behaviors for which boys are often maligned and often guilty: excessive aggression and competitiveness and arrogance. And, until I saw him there, day after day, thigh-deep in wet sand, furiously digging a hole that would soon strike the water table, I didn't completely realize what I had done: I had sent him there to protect him from the very circuitry and compulsions and desires that make him what he is. I had sent him there to protect him from himself.

After much discussion, we all agreed that Dylan should attend public kindergarten the following fall, and I set about to answer certain questions. How could I be a good feminist, a good pacifist, and a good mother to a stick-wielding, weapon-generating boy? And, what, exactly, is a five-year-old boy?

A five-year-old boy, I learned from reading summaries of various neurological studies, is a thing that has a lot more wiring on the fight side of the brain than on the left. This condition develops during a crucial stage of fetal brain growth, during which the brain is busy sending out nerve bundles that connect the right and left hemispheres. It turns out that girl fetuses get busy right away making lots of these connections, equipping themselves to access both right- and left-side functions equally well. For some mysterious reason, boy brains aren't quite up to speed when this process begins. When the nerves venture out from a boy's right brain hemisphere to connect with the left, they discover that there's not much there to hook up with, so they turn back and connect with one another on the right side of his brain. Upon learning this, I had to resist the temptation to suspect that the boy fetus is somehow already goofing off in utero, already not listening, not even to his own biological imperatives, while the girl fetus gets the job done and earns a star for neatness, too.

That boys have more elaborate neural networks on the right side of the brain accounts for their propensity for spatial relationships and problem solving. Girl brain functions are more generalized; boy brain functions, more specific. A boy's big, lopsided brain sends him one clear message: "Your job is to explore the world by Moving Objects Through Space." Of course, some of the neural fibers in a boy fetus do eventually cross over, connecting the right hemisphere with the left. This explains why boys are sometimes capable of answering a question or performing a simple task of personal hygiene before returning to their primary mission.

For a five-year-old boy, moving objects through space could mean playing with blocks, working puzzles, drawing pictures, playing soccer, mixing cookie dough, riding a bike, playing a computer game, making a bed. But because of that other biologically determined gender marker, testosterone, it also frequently means moving Power Ranger/Batman/Hercules/Masked Rider/Beetle Borg/Beast Wars/Star Wars and/or Star Trek action figures through space, or moving the self through space while performing excellent karate moves on parents and/or cringing siblings, or, even more gratifying, the combination platter: hurtling Power Ranger et al. action figures toward cringing siblings while performing excellent karate moves on parents.

This is what a boy is: he is a beautiful, fierce, testosterone-drenched, cerebrally asymmetrical humanoid carefully engineered to move objects through space, or at very least, to watch others do so.

Just to make sure the theory had depth, even in the most abstract of circumstances, I once asked my husband how the proclivities of right-brain dominance assert themselves in his not-exactly-action-packed life as an academic administrator. What could his job possibly have to do with the mission to move objects through space?

"I move degree programs through vast, uncharted stretches of bureaucracy," he said without a moment's hesitation. "And e-mail enables me to shoot dozens of information missiles through cyberspace each day."

Copyright © 1999 by Patricia Stevens

About the Author

Patricia Stevens has written essays that appear in Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul as well as in The Healing Circle: Authors Writing of Recovery. She has received the James Michener Fellowship and the Nelson Algren Short Story Award. She is the mother of two sons and lives in Portland, Oregon.