Another Reason Why Being a Parent Sucks

This week Gabe is at Transformers camp--another theme week at the karate dojo where he had his Jedi Ninja training last month. This theme, I thought from the beginning, was a bit of a stretch, and based on what he's done at camp so far, it would appear that the theme was more a product of bandwagon-popularity-jumping-onto-thingy than of them having any real idea how they could cleverly incorporate fighting robots into karate training. So far the extent of Transformer involvement has been them watching two Transformers movies (the first two of the pretty awful new ones--neither of which I would have chosen to expose Gabe to yet, if ever). But, Gabe loves the camp anyway because it's out of the house and he's hanging out with new people and doing stuff all day.

Frankly, it's a relief to me that he feels this way about doing stuff. It proves that I am not having an entirely negative effect on his development. Norah I am a bit more concerned about because I can already tell that she and I have pretty much identical personality types. It's going to be a chore coaxing her into wanting to get out and do things (because, if she's like me, forcing her to do it is only going to guarantee that she will hate it and do whatever she can to sabotage things out of spite--being a passive-aggressive introvert can be such a chore sometimes).

Anyway, back to the sucking-to-be-a-parent part. Every morning we've been packing Gabe a lunch to take with him--a peanut butter/honey sandwich, some caprisuns or juice boxes, a big thing of water, and some various snacks like crackers or a banana or fruit snacks or whatever. The first two days, when I picked him up, I checked his little cooler to discover that he hadn't eaten anything but the fruit snacks. As soon as he got into the car, then, he tore into his food and ended up eating most of what was in the cooler on the drive home.

I grilled him for reasons why he didn't eat anything else while at camp both days as we drove home and each time he didn't really have anything to say. I tried to impress upon him the importance of eating his sandwich and the healthier foods in his cooler as his meal and having the snacks either as desert or for their snack breaks or he'd run the risk of feeling like crap and not having enough energy to get through the day. 

He responded by telling me that he'd figured out how to open the fruit snacks on his own--something he had done here at the house several times, so I wasn't sure how that related to anything and just filed that bit of information away in the "Things My Kids Think Are Important for Some Reason" file.

Yesterday morning, then, after I prepared his lunch, I reiterated the importance of him eating at least his sandwich at lunch time and then moving on to the other things in his cooler. After that, I asked again why he hadn't been eating the sandwich. And he said something a bit troubling.

"I didn't want to make a mess on my face with the sandwich."

I went back into the kitchen and finished packing up his cooler, and while I did, I thought about what he'd said a bit. Then I pulled the filed information about the fruit snacks out. While he HAD opened the fruit snacks at home before, he'd always done it with scissors, never by tearing open the packaging. What he meant was that he had figured out how to open the fruit snacks, on his own, without asking for any help and without using an scissors (which he didn't have access to). And then he had only eaten those fruit snacks that he could open without help. And he didn't want to eat the sandwich because it made a mess of his face.  And he's probably the youngest kid in this class full of mostly bigger kids . . . .

It all came together and started to make sense. Gabe wasn't eating the sandwich because he was embarrassed about making a mess of himself with it (he, like my brother Ben, has a weird ability to always get food on himself no matter how careful or attentive he's being--though, admittedly, he's never being that careful or attentive either). And he was only eating the fruit snacks because it was something he could manage on his own, that he KNEW he could manage on his own and felt comfortable tackling in front of the bigger kids.

In other words, Gabe was tackling his first awkward social situation and dealing with a very early instance of peer pressure. When I put all the pieces together, my heart sunk.  Every parent, I'm sure, wants their child to be "the cool kid" who can do no wrong and intuitively cruises through school suffering no ill effects from the myriad pitfalls of social development. Or, failing that, every parent would love to shield their child from suffering through all those awful situations--and I am no different. 

I, of course, had to empathize with Gabe more than sympathize. Since I was always "the cool kid," I really don't have a wealth of personal heartbreak and social awkwardness to fall back on to help me relate to what it's like, but I have a pretty well-developed sense of compassion and recognition.  And I compassioned and recognized what Gabe must have gone through those first two days of camp this week and wished more than anything that I could protect him from that sort of thing.

This, obviously, was a pretty minor situation, and there will be far greater and worse ones down the road, and I think that more than anything is what stung. It's the beginning of our baby growing up and figuring out the world, and that's something that he needs to do without us looking over his shoulder and pushing him one way or the other or he'll always need us there to make the tough decisions for him.

And that's great and it's part of life and all, but it still sucks.

So I provided him with a few more tools to help him adapt. I told him that if he just ate the crust on his sandwiches they wouldn't be rubbing up against his cheeks, getting peanut butter all over, and I provided him with some napkins so he could wipe his face when he inevitably didn't eat the crusts and still got peanut butter on his face.

Then, when I picked him up yesterday, I looked inside his cooler. He saw me looking, knew what I was check on, and, beaming, said, "I ate my sandwich today and didn't make a mess!"

Sweet victory. If only napkins could always be the answer.