Predator and prey

     I watch the playground, wondering if it was so fraught with landmines when I was a kid, wondering when it became, in my mind, a war zone. It looks completely innocent with brightly colored plastic play equipment and smiling children running around. Everything seems fine on the surface.

     I watch deeper. For those of us that always look deeper, that have to look deeper, that are forced to look deeper, it is a far more sinister place. It is perhaps the most dangerous place at school except possibly the bathroom. It is the place where our kids, our very vulnerable kids, take the most abuse at the hand of the other kids.

     I watch C try to initiate play with a group of four kids who were particularly mean to him last year. I watch, as though from underwater for as long as it takes me to make myself believe their mean-spirited play is what I think it is. Not mean enough so that C will know, but mean enough that he doesn’t even realize - which is somehow even worse. The level of sophistication of their teasing and their awareness of C’s own obliviousness is incredible to me.

     I watch these children and marvel at their cleverness on one hand, while silently urging C to move on to someone else on the other. When I realize he’s playing along with them, I sit back to see what he will do. After all, I can’t be there every day, and I hope he’s learned from last year that these kids just aren’t nice. But when I see the one girl in the group start kicking sand at C’s face, I head on over to them.

     I watch the little girl walk away as I remind her she shouldn’t be kicking sand at someone. After she throws a remark to me over her shoulder in a sassy tone of voice (one I wouldn’t have dared use with my own mother as a child, much less someone else’s mother), I fight the urge to give her The. Look. Reminding me of what we called “crusties” in high school, The. Look. is a penetrating stare that conveys all the wicked thoughts in one’s head to the person on the receiving end. I resist. She is 8. They are all 8, I remind myself.

     I watch these children, and I’m not sure what disturbs me more: that they remind me of a pack of hyenas, so conniving and ferociously social, or that C didn’t even realize he was their prey.

No middle ground

     In C’s black and white world, there’s not much wiggle room; things either are or they aren’t, they will or they won’t, they do or they don’t. What I’ve realized is that for C, they mostly are, will, or do. He’s incredibly kind hearted and seems to forgive even the worst transgressions.

     This year especially, I’ve tried to explain to him how a child who is mean to him might have had a rough day, or maybe all they know is how to pick on someone else. Ever the bleeding heart, I am reluctant to attribute the word “bad” to a child, any child, even the one being unkind to my own.

     But in the last few days of school, I was pushed over the edge. Between one child calling C a “d&*k,” another shoving him repeatedly at morning line-up despite C’s sobs, and yet another birthday party to which C was not invited, I gave up. I figured it was time to explain to C the facts of life. Some people (and therefore some kids, I suppose) are just mean. I told him there would always be people that were unfriendly to him, and the trick was to get as far away from them as possible. 

     Finally ready to give in to C’s black and white world was I. It’s okay, I told him, to not like people. We don’t have to try and explain away their behavior and give them the benefit of the doubt. Yet C, in his effervescent generosity, reminded me he just is who he is by saying, “But Mom, I like everybody.”

World View

     I don’t think of C as having any “deficits,” for lack of a better word. Like any kid, he has areas of great strength and areas of challenge. There is absolutely nothing wrong with him; it’s the rest of the world that has a problem. I consider myself blessed and lucky to have such a wonderful kid, and sometimes catch myself thinking how boring typical kids must be.

     Yet my view on C has hit a wall. There is a skill that is completely and utterly absent in him, and it’s definitely a problematic deficit. He struggles, like many kids like him, to interpret and understand his own feelings. “Sad” and “worried” are used interchangeably in his vocabulary. I try very hard not to tell him how he should feel about things, and most of the time it doesn’t present that much of a problem. Most of the time, anyway.     

     Yesterday when C told me a boy in his class told C he would stop being mean to him only if C gave him one of his erasers (they’re all the rage at the moment), I couldn’t help myself, and my own anger flared. C thought it was a great deal and quickly complied. “C,” I said incredulously, “do you understand that what that boy said was mean?”

     His reply, heartbreaking in both its simplicity and its future implications, was “But Mommy, it didn’t feel mean to me.”

But once a year

     I hate birthday parties. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, I’m sure. I hate them when C doesn’t get invited, and I hate them when he does (a rarity; today was the first this school year). I dread them, know they are going to be terrible, and know that I’ll come home feeling sad, frustrated and angry. The birthday party has, for me, replaced the park in terms of my least favorite thing to do with C. It represents all his challenges rolled into one – large groups of boys running around mostly unfacilitated, unsupervised as long as they aren’t killing each other, and doing unstructured activities. You know, everyday life with a typical boy.

     When C was about a year and a half old, and not walking yet, the differences in him were so apparent at the park, each time I took him the pain threatened to burst through. I’d often stand at the playground, tears leaking out, being thankful for sunglasses and that I didn’t know anyone there. Now birthday parties have taken over the bad spot, only it’s a bit worse because I actually do know people there. I expected the worst today, so I was moderately prepared, but it still feels like a ton of bricks crashing down. At least now I’m starting to grow a helmet and don’t expect much.

     Yet I always come away with the same frustration. What is it about kids being mean? Why do we accept that being mean and hurtful is just part of growing up? Is it really a necessary developmental stage? I even think it myself, and find myself explaining away a kid’s bad behavior. “Kids are kids,” I hear myself saying, and I try to remember that most of them are good kids. I know even my kid has done things that seem unkind, but when I watch a child consistently exclude C throughout the party, taunting him and teasing him, and calling him “stupid,” I can’t forgive it or get past it. I just don’t get it.

     While other kids have an ability to slough things off, I’m not sure C does. He’s not wandering around tonight, crying that someone said he was stupid. Yet I suspect that there’s a chink in his armor, even if he doesn’t recognize it for what it is, and how many of those can he take? How long before all the good things the people who love him say to him are broken down by the bad things he hears elsewhere? And what happens then?