A scene from "Peter Pan," the most violent film of all time.
Island Packet — Do all 5-year-olds spend their time running around and hitting things? Things like couches, cars and their fathers’ valuable, delicate faces? Because we’re running smack into a hitting problem with the Little Man, and I’m not sure how to deal with it, other than do what I usually do when a Serious Parenting Issue arises, which is trap the boy in the cage suspended over a pit of tumultuous monkeys until he straightens up, I stumble across a solution online or DCFS comes by (“Oh, you’re the guy whose kid went running around the neighborhood at 2 a.m., a week before you were ticketed for speeding in a school zone?” they’ll usually say first, making things awkward for everyone).
Hitting me isn’t so much the problem. Frankly, I’m sort of used to it, and it doesn’t hurt very much, with the exception of the one time that he accidentally connected while holding a wooden and brutal Gordon train in his right hand, which made one of my eyes travel to an angle for which it was not designed and, for just a split second, bestowed upon me the ability to see through time.
No, the hitting that worries me is directed toward the other kids. Several times in the past few months the Little Man has come home with what his school refers to as something innocuous like UH OH REPORTS or OOPS SLIPS, light, deflective-looking sheets of paper (usually pink or daffodil-yellow) that you would usually expect to hold something like a invitation to cupcakes or a worksheet on which you practice writing V’s over and over again, but actually contains news of some recent episode of violence involving your child, such as the one that said, “Today, Your Son hit one of his friends in the face on the playground during a game of ‘Peter Pan.’ ”
Bear in mind I have absolutely no idea what the game of “Peter Pan” entails, but I don’t remember any scene in the movie in which two 4-year-olds beat the stuffing out of each other. Whoa, wait, actually I do. Jeez, actually there are like a HUNDRED SCENES where kids beat the stuffing out of each other. THAT’S IT, NO MORE “PETER PAN.” Thanks, Walt Big Fat Jerk Disney.
Anyway, a while back we received an OOPS REPORT that began innocently enough. It read and I quote, “Your son said he didn’t like how one of his friends was putting away toys, so he hit her lightly in the” and yeah right now you’ve probably stopped paying attention to whatever came next because you stopped reflexively and went back and went, ‘Uh, did that say ‘her’ did my son pop a little girl in the head today because he disapproved of her preferred cleaning routine which of course leads into something like dear holy God what have I taught this kid has he learned nothing of basic human interaction and am I the single most abhorrent father figure in southern Beaufort County, to say nothing of being a guy who can write a single punctuation-free sentence without so much as a second thought to the people who are going to have to read it?”
Needless to say, both UH OH REPORTS resulted in Jake getting reasonably epic time-outs at home, and, in the case of the girl one, the revoking of pretty much every privilege he was planning to enjoy for the next eight years, including ice cream, sunlight and college.
But these were not the most troubling developments, tragically. That would be the one that was different, the one that came not on the pink paper that I’ve come to fear so desperately but on a white one, a regular one. And it was a BOO BOO BULLETIN. And in this one it was Jake who tasted cold fist, as someone had clocked him on the playground, leaving a little red bump on his face.
Now, we tend to be pretty lenient with such things; 5-year-olds are known to bump into things and each other a lot; it’s part of the Code of the Schoolyard. So we didn’t think much of it when we started asking him what happened, but started to grow a little more discomforted when it became apparent, reasonably quickly, that he had started this particular skirmish and did not seem entirely displeased with the idea that some other dude ended up taking the fall for it. It was his first experience with Injustice, and I think he liked it. If anyone has any ideas about to untangle this particular fatherly granny knot, please let me know, because I’ve got nothing right now, and I can’t keep the monkeys in here forever.
