where the wild things are

Super-Exclusive We’ll Eat You Up, We Love You So Swag

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Yes, the blog has swag! Except that it’s so exclusive that I’m the only one that has it. While I would love to say that t-shirts are here, in reality, it’s a single, amazing t-shirt. For my birthday, my friend Teresa designed and hand screen-printed the most thoughtful gift I’ve received in a long time. She captured so many wonderful things: Max riding on a Wild Thing’s back, the bicycle with a kid’s trailer, and even a baby in the trailer! And the shirt is my favorite color. (Weirdly, it’s much brighter in person.) I was flabbergasted when I opened it.

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Astonishingly, it wasn’t the first time I was flabbergasted on this specific birthday. On the actual day of my birthday, I had to be into work a bit early for a conference call. Opening my door afterwards, I almost walked into crepe paper hanging down from it. Then I saw the same someone had brought in brownies and scones. While I was on my call, my friend Natalie had snuck around so quietly that I didn’t hear her at all! It reminded me of the other girls getting their lockers decorated for their birthdays in high school, except no one ever did that for me. So to have someone do it as an adult was terribly sweet and unexpected.

Feeling that support and love from my friends was actually one of the reasons I was so hopeful and confident in the post about my birthday. Especially in a time of big transitions, we’re so blessed to be surrounded by people who love us so much.

Reading Where the Wild Things Are as a Parent

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 8 Comments

"Re-Reading Where the Wild Things Are as a Parent" Some books resonate with you as a child and then again in a totally different way as an adult. (Photo: Young man reading Where the Wild Things Are to a baby under a baby gym.)

When my husband was three, my mother-in-law was convinced he could read. After all, he flipped through the pages of Where the Wild Things Are as he spoke the words out loud with perfect timing. But it just happened that he loved it so much that he memorized the entire thing, word for word.

While I never memorized it myself, Where the Wild Things Are too holds a special place in my literary canon. As a teenager, I remembered it fondly, along with Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland.

But then a series of events illuminated how much the book still speaks to me, especially since I’ve become a parent.

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We’re All Stories in the End

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Today is the 50th anniversary of two of my favorite pop culture icons: Where the Wild Things Are and Doctor Who. What I love about both of these creations is their intense cultivation of wonder without shying away from its dangers. Because of this dualism, they capture the experience both of being a child and being a parent.

I came to the two properties from opposite ends. Where the Wild Things Are has been a favorite of mine since I was a child, which I then rediscovered as an adult. I remembered it fondly, but never really understood how insightful it was until I recently reread it to my newborn son. Like most Americans, I came to Doctor Who as an adult, already in my late 20s. While I didn’t find the first few episodes compelling, I fell in love half-way through watching the first season of the new series. Since then, I’ve been a head-over-heels fan. Between one of my favorite blogs, TARDIS Eruditorum, and other critical analysis, I’ve also found depths that I would have never guessed upon the first viewing of the episodes.

Somehow, both of them communicate eternal truths in a package appropriate for children. They both express a combination of fear and beauty, anger and creativity, hurting and healing. They are both about creating worlds in your imagination and the people who help you save this one. Perhaps most importantly, both are about the radical power of stories, the ones we tell about ourselves and others.

While my five-month-old son (nicknamed Sprout) is too young to understand one and too young to experience the other at all, I know that this book and show both embrace values that I want to pass on to him. That philosophy of awe and love in the context of parenting (and sometimes pop culture) and how that plays out is what this blog is about.

One of these stories is about a time-traveling madman in a box. The other is about a child who creates entire worlds full of magical creatures but returns home to his mother. And they’re both the same – they’re about us.