Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde

My son plays the heart strings like a virtuoso. In the past few weeks, he has begun testing his boundaries more and more and often takes it one or two steps too far. For example, last night in Sears, as we were having him try on jeans, I found a cool pair of boxers with the batman logo on them and he was going to try them on. As my wife and I were chatting just outside the changing room, several wierd squelchy/raspberry sort of sound came out of the room. I told him to stop with the noises please went back to talking to my wife. The noises started again. I again asked him to stop. A few minutes later, it happened again. My wife told him that he had been asked to stop making those noises and if he didn’t stop now he would not be able to get the boxers. About mid-way thru her comments a small sound was heard and once she finished talking she looked at me and asked if he had made the noise again. I wasn’t sure because it was pretty quite but then he did it again while I was telling her that. I went in and took the boxers.

What followed was a yelling, crying, kicking tasmanian devil who looked very similar to my son. The worst part was the constant repeating of the phrases, “I’m a stupid boy” or “you should just get rid of me because I’m stupid” or my personal favorite “you don’t love me.” He knows just the right things to say and to do to get under your skin or into your heart and those last two are like daggers thru my soul.

So we went home. I tucked him into bed, read him a story, and then a bible verse. Within minutes he was fast asleep and I was left wondering where I had gone wrong.

I know in reality, this is just part of his growing up but deep down, I can’t shake the feeling that I am failing him somehow. That I am not being the parent he needs or that I am not giving him the love he needs. I can’t shake the insecurity.

In the morning he wakes up with a smile on his face and tells me today is going to be a better day and that he loves me and all I can think is whether I will have time at lunch to run to Sears and go buy those boxers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 7:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.