I’ve come upon a dilemma. The other day my mid-kid etched his name into my car. I was outraged and considered forced adoption, sale into slavery, etc. Then tonight I was rearranging the boys’ room and discovered a few more tags with his name on it, but these markings weren’t the nascent scrawls of a budding graffiti artist. They were the marks of a kid who wanted to be noticed. See, these markings weren’t just his name, they were also scribbles professing his relationships to things–never people. His art on paper was much of the same. I rewound the last year in my head, thinking about all of our conversations about his friends. He never was able to count past more than one–maybe two kids as friends and that list shifted based on the sports he was playing ad who he spent time with at school. Everything pointed to the same conclusion–this is a boy with a dearth of friendships.
The more time I spend with my kids the more I start to pick apart the relationships they have with each other and with the outside world. It is through this analysis that I discovered my mid-kid is completely isolated from the social world. I don’t come upon this realization lightly. I know he interacts with kids at school and such, but the boy has never been invited to a play date or ever even talked in terms of best friends or potential sleepovers. This may all be normal for the age, but taken in conjunction with his home situation, a great shadow of sadness crosses my soul. You see, even at home he is the odd man out in a trio of brothers who more often than not like to play the role of a pair.
Part of this is on me. The boy leveled up a grade, leaving behind the kids he grew up with for an older set of children who occasionally like him and occasionally don’t. Six year old second graders are a rare lot, and having the emotional capacity of a six year old and the smarts of a much older kid. It leads not only to disillusionment but to the delusion that you don’t really belong.
So now comes the understanding and the efforts to make it right for the kid. When I think about all the ways he tries to be noticed and be heard, even when they drift way past the realm of acceptable behavior, I know that he’s not merely doing it to be an asshole, but he’s doing it because he’s got nothing else.
Part of being a good parent is understanding what your kids are going through. You can’t fix every problem, but identifying with it is the first important step towards building the kind of relationship a father ought to have with his kid.