Time

It has been eight months since my last post. Time passes differently for adults and children. What is eight months for me is a lifetime for my son. M-ito has finished third grade and will begin fourth next week. We have passed through most of a summer. The weather has changed three times with each of the seasons and it is just starting to change again.

I haven’t written on this blog because of the time it has taken to market my novel, write the blog for that website, and keep more balls floating in the air in front of me. But this season of school I don’t want to miss recording. I don’t want my son to miss out on a year when he looks back at this. Really this is a record for him more than me.

What has happened in the last 8 months? Everything.

M-ito is now nine. For his ninth birthday he saved the world with a group of close friends from the infamous Ratzso – once again.

My debut novel Open Wounds has been published.

M-ito has read all the Harry Potter books, seen all the movies, and as of last week experienced most of Universal’s Harry Potter World in Orlando, Florida. He loves them. We just watched The Sorcerer’s Stone … again… last night.

This summer M-ito figured out that baseball camp was the same as school only you learned only about baseball all day. He would like not to do baseball camp next year. He wants to be free.

We have two dogs now – Spike and Gracie, both Havanese. They wake me up at 6am to be taken out. Ugh.

Being a father is still the hardest job I have and the hardest job I know. And I still love every minute of it.

Lacrosse Camp – Day One

9:15am

Momita and I are driving out to Long Island for lacrosse camp – day one. M-ito is in the back seat all geared up. We’ve got shoulder pads, shin guards, cleats, helmet, stick, and mouthpiece. We hear a knocking sound, like a knuckle on wood. It’s the sound of M-ito knocking on his cup. It’s his first one and he’s been fascinated by it ever since he put it on.

“This is so cool. Can you imagine if you got hit super hard with a ball right here?”

“It would hurt,” I say from the front seat.

M-ito ignores me and keeps knocking on his plastic cup.

I can’t remember the first time I wore one, but it was probably when I was seven and played my first year of football. I don’t remember it being anything fun to explore. But for my son – it is.

Knock, knock, knock.

9:55am

All the parents have pulled out, the moms, the dads, the aunts and uncles. There’s thirty kids and three coaches, and me. M-ito goes with the older kids, sixteen in all and one of the coaches. the younger group goes with the two other coaches. I talk to one coach about my son and how new he is but the coach assures me they’ll figure out his skill level and put him in the right group soon enough. M-ito’s friend from school is four months younger and goes with the younger group.

I last sitting on the sidelines for half an hour, watching the young man with a lot of energy but not a lot of skills when it comes to keeping sixteen rambunctious kids of all different skill levels occupied, try to coach them through some drills. He’s young enough to still try and show off, doing back flips to impress the boys. He yells a lot and is constantly trying to get the kids in line. But he’s alone and doing drills with one boy going at a time leaves too many idle. That means fifteen are waiting around looking for something to do while they wait on line. That’s trouble waiting to happen. The temperature is high, already over ninety degrees. When he ends a drill I yell, “Water break,” and the coach says, “Good idea. Go get some water!” As he passes me I offer to help. “I’m going to be here all day so if you need any help, I’ll be glad to. Just tell me what to do.” The young man hesitates a second, then says, “Sure.”

I walk on to the field and I hear my son say, “Why does it have to be you?”

I know he’s talking about me and it stings but a Dad-dito’s gotta do what a Dad-dito’s gotta do. I get placed on a line and tell the kids to shoot on goal when they get to me while they’re doing drills. I tell kids to chase the ball they threw past the goal. I ask kids to get in line. I help them put on helmets , snap chin straps, put on elbow guards, put on mesh jerseys, hand out oranges to the kids who want them because I brought extras. I tap each one on the helmet when I’m done helping them with their equipment and tell them to “go.” One boy makes two comments about girls that are as old and sexist as they come. Some of the kids laugh. The coach asks him to watch his mouth the first time. The second time I go over to him on water break, tap him on the shoulder, point his face up to me a few inches away, and quietly say, “I don’t ever want to hear that language again. You understand?” The boy looks at me then nods and looks away. I tap him on the helmet and he keeps his mouth shut the rest of the day.

Mostly I keep my mouth shut and watch, do what the coach tells me to do and try to make sure no one gets hurt.

M-ito does well in the drills, is tentative in the skirmishes as he should be as a first timer, needs help on where to position himself on the field  on both offense and defense but the coach is hot and tired and hasn’t explained the rules or any team tactics so he along with the other inexperienced kids are left to guess. I shout some suggestions during the scrimmage. “Spread out. Pass to the open man. Some concepts are the same no matter what sport.” Maybe the tactics talk will come tomorrow. There is one kid who knocks another kid down, cleans his clock actually. It was uncalled for and done not while he was going for the ball. He’s made to take a lap. He head checks another kid a few minutes later and I see it but the coach doesn’t. I let it go even though there are words between the players. It’s the same kid I talked to about his mouth earlier. That one’s trouble.

The first day of camp ends in a deep sweat with the kids getting hosed off with a power washer and the coach glad his first day is over. I wonder what he’s got in store for tomorrow. I talk to Mom-ita and we both agree M-ito ‘s going in the younger group with the newer players tomorrow. He argues at first, but his friend convinces him. He signed up to play with his friend in the first place and it’s a good reason to play with the other two coaches, who seemed to be a little more adept at what they were doing.

1:31pm

Gino’s Pizza and M-ito and his friend are laughing and fooling around, tickling each other and chomping their pizza alternately. The air conditioner is on. It’s 96 degrees outside. They both said they had a good time and want to go back tomorrow for more.

I hear it’s supposed to rain.

At least it’ll be cooler.

Fight Club

A child kicked my son at camp. Let’s call this child Oderoso. He has been, in the past, M-ito’s nemesis. We, his family and mine, have a history together and it is not a good one. For now I’ll concentrate on the present.

Oderoso is a child that that has driven every counselor at the camp crazy this summer, made many of them say they are turned off on children for life because of his activities. What does he do? He doesn’t listen to anyone. He takes no instruction. He is rude. He calls other kids names. And, to kick it off, he hits other children. These are daily occurrances. These activities have given him a reputation at each of the childcare sites he has been at over the few years of his short life. His parents, I think, are to blame because they neither discipline nor watch him. He is basically unsupervised. I think they refer to Oderoso as smart and very active. Perhaps these are code words. M-ito does not like Oderoso. Oderoso is smaller than M-ito and about half a year younger. Over the course of camp, though, Oderoso has not bothered M-ito, and M-ito has stayed away from him – until this week. He kicked M-ito while M-ito was sitting on the carpet and Oderoso was walking past. He kicked my son.

M-ito is basically a peaceful child and we have taught him to be so. His first line of response to a bully is to tell the bully to stop bothering hiim. Mom-ita spent a full week going over this with him when a girl was picking on him last year in Pre-K. He is to match his tone of voice (stern) with a facial expression (mean). Mom-ita had to do this because he would say, “stop it” to people who bothered him while laughing or giggling or smiling. It just didn’t work. They didn’t take him seriously. Mom-ita came up with the system of matching his tone and manner to what he was saying. She told him to pretend he was in a dramatic play center at school and act as if he was being angry or mean. They role-played this a number of times until he got it right.

His second line of response is to walk away and or ignore the perpetrator. He did this with the Pre-K girl a number of times, but then one day she hit him and he turned around and hit her back. At this point we added in the third line of response – tell the teacher so she can discipline the other child. M-ito has been good to go since.

So it’s been a while since there has been a problem like this. I can tell you, though the incident upset M-ito, it has upset me even more. It makes me want to pummel Oderoso so that he can never harm my son or any other child again. Having any child hurt my child brings out a part of me that is scary. I had to calm myself down the day after the incident when I went to pick up M-ito from camp. I was going to speak to Oderoso’s mother and I knew I had to remain calm and not yell. She had come and gone by the time I got there and Mom-ita then told me to let it go (she’d already talked to the counselors to tell them what had happened). But inside my head the issue keeps simmering and flaring up. When I hear that a child has hurt my son, I see red.

Here’s my problem. We have taught M-ito not to fight, unless absolutely necessary – though we’re not sure if he really understands what physically fighting means. M-ito has been taught not to kill insects if he can avoid it and to live peacefully with the rest of the world’s creatures. We’ve taught him the three levels of response and Mom-ita and I try to follow these guides in our lives as models for him. So I can’t just tell him to deck this other child. It won’t make sense to him. I’m also not sure it’s in his basic nature to do this (even though he did defend himself aginst the girl from his pre-k class).

So what do I do? Here’s the fantasy that fuels my walks home from the train station. I find the father and tell him that I will hit him every time his child hits my child. Then I’ll follow through and hit him as a kind of exchange program until he disciplines his child and Oderoso stops bothering M-ito. It is a violent fantasy but it gives me great satisfaction as I imagine it working immediately. As a yogi and subsequently someone who does not believe in the use of violence, it will have to remain a fantasy but still, it is attractive. Also, I wonder, would it work? I told this fantasy to Mom-ita and she’s still laughing – only I’m not sure which part she’s laughing at…

Heartbeat

“Dad-dito, put your hand here,” M-ito said, taking my hand in his and placing it over his heart. He’d just taken a bath and only had on his shorts. His skin is tan from camp and the mosquito bites from camping two weeks ago are almost all healed up. I could feel his heart beating through his chest. It was loud and made my son seem so vulnerable to me. He smiled as we both felt the strength of the thumping, thudding, pulsing, beating. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever felt in my life.

The Revolutionary

It’s six-thirty in the evening and M-ito has just returned home with us from a play date and dinner with his friends Noito and Celita, twins (boy and girl)eight months older than M-ito and his oldest friends – he’s known them since he was about 18 months old. Before the play date he lasted through a full day of camp. M-ito is tired and cranky, though you wouldn’t notice this if you looked at him with his smile cocky and his brown eyes sparkling. He’s still moving in the right direction though, ie: inside our apartment. But when I tell him he has to take a bath, it’s as if an invisible straw breaks.

“No!” he shouts. “I’m not taking a bath.” the smile is gone and the eyes become coals.

I go through the litany of reasons why he has to take a bath while Mom-ita checks messages. There’s the “You are stinky,” reason, the “It’s been five days and you are stinky” reason, the “because you are one stinky boy” reason, and finally the “because if you don’t you won’t be able to read any books before you go to bed,” reason. I know the last one doesn’t make any sense what-so-ever but I can’t help myself. Then I try to take M-ito’s hand and lead him into the bathroom when he runs past me into his room shoulting ,” NONONONONONONON,” and slams his door behind him. I’m tired from a full day of work and my patience is thin. I knock on the door, hard.

“Open the door,” I say in a low voice and try the door. He’s holding the doornob and pushing against the door. I try to push it open but stop not wanting to hurt him. “Open the door,” I say again, my voice threatening.

“No!” he shouts.

“M-ito. I know you and this is not you. My son has good manners and doesn’t slam the door on people.”

“You don’t know who I am,” M-ito says, “because you’re not me.”

“But I know you very well and you do not – “

“You don’t know who I am because you are not me!”

“But M-ito – “

“You are not me!” he shouts like a revolutionary.

I can picture him thrusting his fist up into the air as he says this. When did my five year old become sixteen? Mom-ita comes up behind me. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“Have you heard this one yet?” I say, exasperarted and amused now almost equally – which is good because I was about to lose it completely and the levity of the situation is a lifesaver.

“What?”

“You don’t know me because you are not me,” I repeat.

Now Mom-ita is smiling too. “I’ll get him out,” she says and I acquiesce. She opens the door. “What’s going on?” I hear her ask as the door closes behind her and I go to the computer to check the messages Mom-ita has already scrolled through.

A moment later a flash of naked boy runs past me shouting, “No, no, no, no… “

“M-ito…” Mom-ita calls from the bathroom, the sound of the water running for his bath adding texture to her call.

“You are not me!” my son shouts, but now he’s laughing.

“That’s right. I’m not,” Mom-ita says and I hear the bathroom door shut and the muffled sounds of the revolutionary fade. This is the difference between Mom-ita and me. She knows how to answer M-ito and get him to do what she wants him to do. Me, I try to make a tired, unable to hear, 5-year old understand logic. I get up from the computer and head towards the bedroom. At least I can still read him a book before he goes to bed.

First full Day of Camp

M-ito had his first full day of summer camp today. I took the day off to walk him, with Mom-ita, to camp but also to get some writing done while he was at camp. I got very little accomplished writing-wise. I’m a great procrastinator lately. What I did instead was finish getting rid of things in our dinning room, shredded lots of bills, put up a battery powered light fixture, and organized my office space. And both Mom-ita and I worried a lot. How was he doing? Was he having fun? Was he getting into mischief? Was he lonely? It was strange having all this time on our hands to do what we wanted. All this time…

Mom-ita and I went to breakfast and lunch together.

We picked up a new sandbox for the backyard of our building (the old one having lost its top a few months ago), along with 200 pounds of fresh, never been used before, sterile, sand. M-ito doesn’t really use it anymore but we bought it because other, younger children, who live in the building will.

This is what it’s going to be like when he’s in kindergarten come September, I thought – all day kindergarten. All day. The rest of the world will start to have more and more of an impact on him, and we will have less and less.

When we dropped M-ito off at the school that functions as his summer camp this morning, I watched him go in with his camp-mates and counselors (one counselor to every five campers) and my heart went out to him. He’s growing up. Even clichés carry weight when they apply to you.