"Car? Car?" came from his relentless desire to sit in one of our cars and pretend to drive while one of us sat in the passenger's seat and pretended not to want to bang our heads against the dash board. "What's your name?" was the question he heard most often from others. I'm not sure he even knew what the question meant - he just knew that it was something you said to someone when you wanted to engage in conversation. And bless his heart, he wanted so much to engage in conversation, but the only conversation starter he had in his arsenal was, "What's your name?".
I finally banned him from the question, "What's your name?" I mean, there are only so many times you can answer that question in one day without really, seriously, beginning to doubt your identity. I tried to encourage him to expand his conversation skills. When I could see him struggling to start a conversation I would talk about anything, "I see a blue car driving in front of us. It looks like there is a woman in the blue car and I think she is going to the grocery store to purchase tomatoes and lettuce so she can make a salad for dinner, not that it's her responsibility to make dinner because if she has a husband he is as capable of dinner making as she is ..." Anyway, this was exhausting for me because I am an introvert (an extreme introvert) and, frankly, conversation is a huge effort for me. No one ever accused me of being afraid of long silences.
So when he was five years old and we got our weekly call to come talk to the Principal (sometimes more than once a week) I was a little surprised that the topic d'jour was, "Dakota is asking inappropriate questions." On this particular day I faced an impressive gathering of school staff: the Principal, his teacher, the school psychologist, the special ed teacher, and I don't remember who else.
"What kind of inappropriate questions?" I asked, because while "What's your name?" is an inappropriate question when he's already asked you the very same thing 172 times, I didn't think it warranted this kind of response.
"He asked me," his teacher sniffed, steeling herself before she could continue, "if he could see my breasts."
I looked around the room. Seriously. Seriously? This is the question that precipitated the need for a five person crisis response team? "Well," I said, "I told him he couldn't ask 'What's your name?' any more, so I guess he found a new topic."
Please - like there was a five year old boy in that class who didn't want to see her breasts. He was just the only one with the chutzpah to ask!
I think we need to start a new therapy group called "the headbangers". I bet we could come up a laundry list of situations we find ourselves in with our kids that want us to charge into plaster walls, head first. Martin's repetitive language is probably up there at the top of my list. The other is getting his shoes and socks on when I need to get out the door. Our most "interesting" meetings were 1) being told he had to wear "sturdier" shorts because the "gym shorts" type allowed his erections to be visisble. 2) being asked to explain to Martin that watching your penis swing back in forth while you danced in the boys' bathroom was not allowed at school,like we engage in this frivolity(well,at least Martin and his Dad could)at home on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteYou seriously need to write a book! I can't stop laughing.
ReplyDeleteWe got an email from a 2nd grade teacher when Sport wrote in his journal that we went to the "Fiji Islands to surf" over Spring Break. "You might want to teach him the difference between truth and creative fiction" she told us. He knew, but he said his real life was so boring. But we've never had the "show me your breasts" kind of excitement!
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