Minecraft, Meghan Markle and Me
What the latest member of the Royal Family taught my autistic son about accepting defeat — and practicing safe sex.
This week, our family has returned to homeschooling — or more accurately, unschooling, because we’ve decided to give Peanut an extended stretch of freedom from school while he recovers from the stress of his school’s de facto implosion.
We’ve been here before, but not in a long while. For the past two years, Peanut has been at a private school, working towards the goal of integrating into a classroom with his peers. Before that, however, we had a brief and disastrous experiment with homeschooling. At the time, we didn’t know that Peanut was autistic, or that he was dealing with severe anxiety, so our whole approach to homeschooling was based on trying to get him to do challenging schoolwork — in retrospect, an approach that was just about guaranteed to fail.
There was one bright spot in that homeschooling experiment, however. In my effort to spend more Quality Time with Peanut, I looked for activities that he would happily engage in with me, and that didn’t involve a daily struggle What turned out to work was to play Minecraft together. And I mean, hours and hours of Minecraft. SO MUCH MINECRAFT.
Admittedly, I am probably happier than many people to spend hours playing a videogame, but still, I was finding it tedious. I’m a geek, but I’ve never been much of a gamer. I decided I really needed a TV show I could have on in the background while we played ALL the Minecraft.
I remembered that a friend had recommended the TV show Suits. Yes, that Suits: the one that is newly famous because its star, Meghan Markle, has just gotten engaged to Britain’s Prince Harry. At the time, however, it was simply a TV show set in the world of the law, and I thought a legal show was likely to be safe to watch in front of Peanut, and boring enough that he wouldn’t pay attention. I put on the first episode while Peanut and I were building up our respective homes in Minecraft. It was enjoyable enough and it made the whole Minecraft thing much more tolerable.
We got to the end of the episode and I switched off the TV. Much to my surprise, Peanut asked if we could watch the next episode — he had enjoyed the pilot. Soon Sweetie started watching the show with us, and over the course of a few months, our parent-child ritual was to hang out for a couple of hours each afternoon, playing Minecraft, and watching a couple of Suits episodes.
This had a few major benefits, in addition to gifting me with the power of being Cool Mom Who Plays Minecraft. One was that Peanut got really into legal argumentation. I know that might sound like a drawback, but he was already a big arguer; this just gave him a framework, and most usefully, introduced him to the idea of a judge.
That spring, whenever he and Sweetie started bickering, I would convene a trial. I would appoint one side the prosecution and the other side the defense. I gave them each a minute or two to make their case. Then they each got to cross-examine each other, with a few questions thrown in from me. I would make my ruling. And amazingly, Peanut actually accepted it — even when I ruled against him.
This was nothing short of miraculous, because Peanut had never been a kid who could accept a defeat in any form. He couldn’t stand to lose an argument. He couldn’t stand to lose a board game. If he asked for anything — a treat, a new app, five more minutes of TV — and I said no, the best I could hope for was a hostile counter-argument, and it was not unusual to see an outright tantrum. Losing anything felt like losing everything.
But watching Suits modelled the “win some, lose some” part of the legal system. Peanut saw the show’s on-screen protagonists (occasionally) lose cases, and he soon found that in our at-home judicial system, he might lose some cases, too. The chance to make his case meant everything to him, however, and he loved using the same kinds of legal terminology (objection! sidebar! I plead the Fifth!) that he heard on the show. In this very specific context, he accepted defeat without complaint…and soon, that acceptance started to bleed through into other aspects of our family life. Learning to accept defeat is just something you have to practice, and Suits inspired him to get that practice.
There is another Suits memory that I cherish even more than our courtroom re-enactments, however. It’s one of my my all-time prize parenting moments, and will endear Meghan Markle to my heart for all time.
One afternoon, as we were enjoying our daily dose of Suits, things started to get a bit steamy. At the time, Peanut was only 8, and he’d never seen a sex scene on screen — in fact, I don’t know if he’d even seen a kiss that wasn’t a Disney animation. But there we were, watching a pivotal episode, and suddenly Meghan Markle was getting hot and heavy with her co-star. There wasn’t much in the way of actual skin, but the vibe was very much a spontaneous, here-we-are-just-tearing-each-other’s-clothes-off type of sex scene.
I watched the show with one eye (to see how racy it was getting) and Peanut with the other (to see how he was taking it.) He seemed mostly un-phased…and then, suddenly, very concerned.
Peanut turned to me and said, in a tone of horror, “But Mum! They can’t have sex! They haven’t taken their sex pill.”
“What sex pill?” I asked.
“The sex pill to make sure she doesn’t have a baby!”
And there you have it, people. At age 8, while watching his very first sex scene, my son knew to object to the lack of birth control. I have never been prouder.
Now that the subject of this childhood trauma is going to be in the royal family, and in the public eye for many years to come, I have high hopes that Peanut will never recover from a sense of nagging discomfort at the thought of unprotected sex. But just in case…maybe I’ll refresh his commitment with another binge-viewing of Suits.
