The snow was falling lightly, gently refreshing the thick layers of recent snowfalls. Pulling into the driveway, we noticed a stork and letters spelling “It’s a Girl!” stretching across the front yard, as three snowmen welcomed us. The magic continued inside as we entered the quiet of the warm entry, soft light greeting us from the kitchen beyond the next threshold. The voices of children playing echoed in the halls as we walked toward the light and sound, noticing the aroma of something delicious being prepared deeper in the house.

Moving toward the family room in the back of the home, we saw mommy and her new baby, sitting quietly on the couch. A picture of serenity, she smiled with the knowing glow of joy at her beautiful arrival and the turn of the calendar reflecting this new beginning. Baby’s big sisters, wearing pretty dresses and big smiles greeted us with the tender beauty of happy little girls, “See our new sissy?” Our faces hurt from smiling so broadly.

Walking toward mommy and her new bundle of joy, I suddenly felt the jarring awakening of a four-year-old cranial battering ram across the back of my knees and the weight of a seven-year-old wrapping me in an NFL-style tackle. The peace of the moment before was broken in total war, “Poppy!!” Noticing the bright blue receiver’s gloves now locked in front of me, I absorbed the hit(s) with all the grace of a stone statue, trying both to stay on my feet, keep the two attackers from falling into one another, and protect innocent bystanders from collateral damage.

Now on my knees, the battering ram was pressed into my neck as those little four-year-old arms closed across my throat, pulling backward as the life-saving Heimlich maneuver was repurposed to crush my Adam’s apple. I could feel the gut punches from the seven-year-old as I held his precariously balanced brother flailing upon my back, feet dangling as he gripped harder to hold on. Caught somewhere between breathless gasps of laughter and the real danger of passing out from my occluded airway, I rolled onto the floor to reposition my attackers in a more properly defensive attitude for my counter attack.

Moves and counter moves. The battle raged-on as I realized there was no end to their energy and mine would in fact suffer a shorter shelf life. Rolling, standing, ducking, diving, I noticed that all is fair in love and wrestling as I worked to protect my most vulnerable assets while simultaneously trying to safeguard these two brawlers who were clearly oblivious to any sense of danger. The berserker attack wore on and I discovered that everything was fair game: eyes, ears, legs, fingers, etc. Looking around, I wondered if the melee appeared more “Three Stooges” than “Rowdy” Roddy Piper… recognizing that perhaps those two examples might not be as different as one might first imagine. Please forgive the old-school references.

The love language of boys is a curious thing and it became clear that the sucker-punching, eye-gouging, throat choking, and de-pantsing, that appeared in our scrum was the most profound reflection of affection that I may ever receive from these two. The will to dominate the old man is both an act of joyful boyhood and a necessary testing of those physical limits that some of us never fully outgrow. My own weakened state from laughter, shock, and awe, notwithstanding, I held my own with these two warriors, eventually subduing them in the necessary lessons of old age and treachery. This is how we learn.

There is beautiful rawness in such play. When the boys start tumbling, it almost always goes too far. The battle can’t really stop until there is some kind of injury. This is how it has to be, the fun is had in the exertion, the effort, the abandon, but the lessons are learned at the edges. We can’t know ourselves fully until we find our limits, and boyhood, like most everything else in life, is a process of testing, finding, growing through, and adjusting to, those limits. Just how far can we push it and who will flinch first at that edge? That is such a boy thing. Some of us never really outgrow it.

Growing up is a rough business. We’ve put a relatively civilized veneer on our most animalistic tendencies but that rough and tumble beast still lies just underneath. The process of becoming requires us to pass through the instinctive, reactive self, to a place of self-control in the lifelong challenge of mastering our will. The sometimes maddening need for boys to be boys is a necessary part of that growth process. We have to live in the tension of our limits, sometimes colliding with them violently, before we can become fully what we’re made to be.

After apologizing to their parents for the ruckus and working to help them downshift, I found myself sitting on the couch with my two attackers, now converted to docile little boys. Spent and worn with the bruises and bumps from the battle, they now curled-up to share in the joy, and safety, of a knowing togetherness. The bond of the battle lives on and the intimacy of the physical confrontation reveals itself in boyish affection. Like all of us, it is in the time and effort they discover how they are loved. It is living at their limits that they find themselves and going there together that they find us loving them.