Attitude of Brad-itude
By Molly Flinkman
@mollyflinkman
On Valentine’s Day, my nine-year-old son, Sawyer, came home from school with a little mouse finger puppet. He’d gotten it from another student during their class party that day, and he wore it on his finger all the way home from school. At some point during the drive, I asked him if the mouse had a name, and he did not skip a beat before answering: “Brad.”
(Sawyer has always had a knack for naming things.)
I didn’t think much else about the mouse until a few weeks later when I started noticing worksheets in his take-home folder with “Brad” written on the name line instead of “Sawyer.” My curiosity really piqued when I found a folded piece of paper in his backpack that had clearly been passed around the classroom. The front said (with third grade attention to capitalization and spelling), “if your’e on team brad, read this!” And then inside the fold, Sawyer had written “JOIN TEAM BRAD” in block letters above a drawing of Brad himself.
I held up the paper and asked Sawyer to tell me about Team Brad.
“It’s a team I started,” he said. He went on to tell me that there were a bunch of teams in the third grade: Team Capybara. Team Ragweed. Team Take Down Brad because some of the girls were apparently getting fed up with all the antics.
“Team Brad is at war with Team Ragweed,” he continued. “But we have an alliance with Team Capybara, so we’ll definitely win.”
We talked a lot about Team Brad over the next few weeks—mostly because I found all the world building hilarious and also because I wanted to make sure the whole thing was friendly and inclusive and not disrupting any of the actual learning his teacher was trying to accomplish. At one point, I asked Sawyer where Brad was. He went to his backpack and pulled him out. He was the same little finger puppet I remembered, except he’d gotten a bit of a glow-up: two beaded friendship bracelets were wrapped around his base. One was orange and pink and the other was black with BRAD spelled out in letter beads.
Sawyer recounted all this tomfoolery to me without a hint of reservation. He had built a fun thing and then fully owned and embraced and expanded that fun thing until it involved, in some way, his entire classroom. There were drawings and fliers and maps, and Sawyer just fully embraced the silliness of it, like fairy dust he was sprinkling all over his classroom.
He does this in our home too. Just the other day, Sawyer came and found me in the kitchen and asked me if I would call his younger brother by a different name—Dennis—the next time I saw him.
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Why?” I asked.
“I jinxed him and instead of not being able to talk, I told him his name is Dennis now.”
(Like I said, he’s got a knack for names.)
It was such a funny little game, but for some reason, when his brother came into the kitchen moments later, I couldn’t bring myself to call him Dennis. It was on the tip of my tongue with a laugh, but sheepishness overtook me. I just couldn’t quite figure out how to say it. Sawyer sidled up next to me a couple of times and whispered, “Do it. Call him Dennis,” but I just … didn’t. I couldn’t seem to get the words out of my mouth.
I feel a similar feeling when a kitchen dance party breaks out or when my husband, Jake, sings an old 90s song in the minivan with abandon. I am usually on the outside of these moments or, at the very most, only halfway stepped into them, and lately I find myself wondering, “Why?” Why, in my own home of all places, am I so uptight and reserved? Why does it often feel so uncomfortable to let my kids see me having fun?
More importantly: Is playfulness something a person can learn?
The question feels like the beginning of a new story I haven’t yet written for myself but would like to. It’s a summer manifesto of sorts—a proclamation to choose whimsy. To sing in the car and dance in the kitchen and say yes to silliness. It’s, more or less, a decision to have fun in front of my kids.
Brad is still around to remind me. Even though the hype is fully in the rearview, he has become a bit of a staple in our home now that he’s been freed from Sawyer’s backpack. Sometimes I find him by the microwave and other times he sits on display underneath the vase of wildflowers on our kitchen table. Sawyer and I were talking about Team Brad again recently, and he told me he had made up some sayings for the group.
“What kind of sayings?” I asked him.
“Like, ‘Brad is Rad’ or “Have an attitude of Brad-itude,” he told me.
I considered asking him what it means to have an attitude of Brad-itude, but then I realized I already knew.
It’s the title of my summer manifesto, and it feels perfectly fitting for Sawyer to be the one to have named it.
Molly Flinkman is a freelance writer from central Iowa where she lives with her husband, Jake, and their four kids. A lover of houseplants and good books, she loves to write about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life and hopes her words will encourage and support other women along the way. You can connect with Molly on Instagram, through her monthly newsletter, Twenty Somethings, or on her Substack, Common Stories.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.