sellicksThere are lots of things about being a father that hurt my heart. Not the least is watching Boy Z try to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis that are human social interactions. I know he’s only 19 months old and at this age, he isn’t really going to establish meaningful relationships with his peers.

In fact, as a friend put it over the weekend, at this age they’re like particles – bouncing around happily doing their own thing. Every now and again, by chance, they’ll collide with another particle. That collision can be accidentally cooperative or accidentally explosive, but it’s all random and transient.

Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better. Nothing hurts me as a father more than seeing confusion and fear in my boy’s eyes and I see a lot of that when I watch him struggling to sort out the appropriate reponse to another little boy or girl.

When I picked him up one day last week from his new day care, I found him huddled together with another little boy. I briefly thought that things were going well, that he had already made a friend. That burst of pride sagged when I saw that the other boy was trying to prise a little train out of Boy Z’s clenched fist. The look on Boy Z’s face  – confusion, frustration and powerlessness – just cut me to the quick. The worst thing? I couldn’t do anything to make it better. You just have to let them work these things out.

This weekend, we had friends over who have a little boy a few months older than Boy Z. The two little particles went about their random bouncing and on two occasions collided. In the first, Boy Z shoved our guest square in the chest in an explosive collision over a balloon and was duly scolded. On the second, Boy Z responded as he did in day care as the guest boy snatched something away from him. And both times, I was just crushed. You could see his little mind trying to process the right things to do and coming up empty. Clueless.

These are little things. But what makes my heart ache is that I recognize my own struggles with the same things.

rainy3I’m sensitive to all this because I have always struggled in interacting with my peers. I spent much longer than my first couple of years being clueless about how one gets along with his fellow man. Growing up, and even now, I’ve always spurned my peers for someone different – older, younger, female, different racial or ethnic background. I relished being different and sought the different, it helped to assuage the bitter recognition that I did not fit in. All this really did for me was made me constantly uncomfortable in my own skin. It has only been in the last few years – in my mid-thirties – that I’ve started to figure it out, started to enjoy the company of men my own age, started to enjoy spending time with people who I share a common experience. You know what? It’s better that way.

Boy Z will probably learn, that’s what these early years are about. That’s the advantage of day care. And hopefully he’ll get to the place where he is comfortable with himself a lot quicker than I did. I’ve said it before, and I don’t mean it in a bad way, but I hope he has the ease and protection of running with a herd.

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Speaking of social awkwardness, I’ve made a decision to do a cull of my Facebook “friends”. Facebook is pure evil, but I’m unwilling or incapable of closing my account. What I am going to do is ‘de-friend’ anyone with whom I haven’t had a conversation (in person, by phone, e-mail or online) in the last year. Let’s stop kidding ourselves, if we went to high school together 20 years ago and the only contact we’ve had since then is the barrage of Facebook shite that you keep spewing my way, we’re not really friends are we? It isn’t that we inadvertantly lost touch, it’s that we weren’t friends to begin with and we certainly aren’t now.

The impetus for this probably excessive action is that I’m building up the confidence to get a little more honest around here, to reveal a little more. I consider you, my readers and especially commentators, friends. We interact in a way. I don’t consider people that I haven’t spoken to in 20 years friends. I don’t really want them reading my personal thoughts now any more than I would have twenty years ago. Yes, I recognize the idiosyncrasy of being just fine with virtual strangers reading them. Yes, I know I could take the link to my blog off of my Facebook page. But I choose dickishness.

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This track has nothing at all to do with this post, but I was reminded over the weekend what a goddess Ella Fitzgerald was. I would totally be her Facebook friend. Check out Ella’s “Get Happy” from Ella Fitzgerald - Get Happy!.

 
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