Fathered Five

Remember the post a while back in which I congratulated myself for not rolling my eyes, though I had plenty of opportunity? The one about kids asking each other on dates in “cute,” creative ways?

Well, Girl 16 thew down the gauntlet on her blog, One Extraordinary Machine. Some dufus asked her out face to face, with no balloons, no rhymes, no guesswork, or other nonsense. It’s suspiciously adult behavior, if you ask me. What is he, a poseur? Thinkin’ he’s all that, trying to act all 25 when he’s barely 16?

If he thinks this is going to earn him any brownie points, he’s got a lot to learn, let me tell you somethin’ right now!

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I’ve had a month to process and can now maybe write with some clarity about the latest drama at Chez Five.

One day in gym class last December, Boy 13 was farting around in gym class and put another boy in a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) choke hold that made him pass out. They were sitting on the bleachers at the time, and the kid fell or was pushed (so says Boy 13) off the bench and slammed his forehead on the ground. He chipped a tooth and cut his tongue. He came to a couple of seconds later to a crowd around him asking if he was okay.

He wasn’t. He went to the next class, but his teacher noticed blood and a growing goose egg and sent him to the office to call his parents. His dad came and picked him up and took him to the hospital for evaluation.

Because, you see, if Boy 13 had tried to pick a worse “victim,” he couldn’t have. It turns out this boy has had traumatic brain injury in the past, which makes him more susceptible to additional injury. On the way there, he started having difficulty breathing so the trauma teams were waiting for him when they arrived and they were able to stabilize him. The difficulty breathing was due to swelling/bruising of the tissue around his trachea from the choke hold.

Meanwhile, Boy 13 is in the assistant principal’s office getting a good talking to. A stocky guy with a full beard. Says he put the fear into him, and I hope it’s true. He said boys in all the schools are doing this to each other and they have no idea how dangerous it is. He said one more incident and Boy 13 will be suspended. I almost wish they hadn’t given him that warning. No, there have not been earlier incidents, thank goodness.

Where did he learn this choke hold? From his sunday school teacher! He came home and told us what he’d learned and we warned him, “Don’t you EVER try this on anybody. Never, ever.” Fat lot of good that did. Boy 13 seems to do whatever the hell he wants, or whatever he can get away with. We haven’t found consequences that are deterrents yet. Yeah, he’s grounded, and yes, he’ll lose privileges, but he’s been there before. Obviously it’s not tough enough. I wish I were the beating type, but a couple of hard swats and some yelling are about all I can muster.

Anyway, I digress. The assistant principal called Her Hotness and explained what had happened, and she…”mentioned” to me in an e-mail while I was at work, “Oh, your son sent another boy to the hospital today. I’ll tell you the details later.”

We tried to call the other boy’s parents that night but they weren’t home. They were still at the hospital. The doctors kept the boy overnight for observation because of his susceptibility to brain injury. He came home the next day and we went to see them the following morning to grovel. It’s a long story and I’ll spare you these details, but the boy won’t be going back to school because his brain needs time to re-learn some things.

We haven’t talked about money yet, but it’s going to cost us something. How many thousands is the question. We signaled that we want to do something to help, and the dad said, “Well, costs are going to be the hard thing.” And then we stopped talking about it because his wife gets diarrhea of the mouth when she’s uncomfortable, and that little exchange sent her into a 10 minute blabfest about the schools.

All of this was about one month ago. We have since talked to Boy 13’s therapist and he assured us that, no, this was not normal and that he should see the kid right away. He has ordered some tests. Says there are learning disabilities that interfere with cause-and-effect reasoning. It would almost be a relief to have a name. Some label that would help us understand this creature we have created.

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Howcome I’m always the last to know about the good viral videos out there? On the off chance that some of you haven’t seen the public service announcements from fatherhood.org, check it out:

The day I do a cheer like that with my daughter is the day I turn in my Man card. Just kidding. I wish I were the kind of guy who could do this. But it would kill me, you see, and then where would she be??

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My mom, who is 73, gave me and my siblings a booklet for Christmas called, “The Story of My Life.” A spiral-bound treasure of some 30 8×11 pages.

It has been very fun to read her recollections of the war years, wash day during her childhood, and other details. It’s not really a “story,” though. It’s a trove of reminiscences that tell us much about the facts of her life, but nothing about the person who lived them.

Except what we’re able to read between the lines, which isn’t much. For example, this duo of paragraphs about my father:

In the fall of 1994, his diabetes had progressed to a critical stage. He had minimal eyesight—was on increasing levels of insulin, and spent most of his time on the recliner. He had many sleepless nights. Then in September of 1994, he developed pneumonia, and eventually kidney failure. He had determined that he would never have dialysis, so after being bed-ridden for nearly a month, with complete kidney failure, he passed away on September 22, 1994.

Again, I was thankful for my job which I enjoyed so much.

I resist the tendency to read something into this passage that she did not inted. And yet, is it not revealing for what it does not contain? I know a little about how she felt because I was there and saw the funeral. Saw? I escorted her down the aisle directly behind the casket.

But my children, or even I in a few years, will learn nothing essential about her or their marriage from these paragraphs. We learn that he died of kidney failure on 9/22/94, and that she liked her job.

It’s curious and I don’t know what to make of it yet. It suggests unexpressed relief, certainly, that she had a means of self-support after he was gone. But the mere suggestion is not much of a wall upon which to hang a portrait that will form posterity’s view of her.

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That’s Boy 13 and Boy 5 at the top of the hill. (Yes, Samson, that’s the park where we walked.) In a few moments, Boy 5 and I will get on that piece of plastic behind them, which, I note for posterity, is some 3 mm thick. He’s too scared (or too smart) to go down by himself, so I give in to his pleas for “one mow time!” before we leave for the day. (See the setting sun. See the rosy cheeks. It’s 18 degrees F., -7 C.) Though none of us know it at the time, that is the ride that will cause Boy 5 to swear, “I’m nevo going swedding again!”

It caused me to swear something entirely different, which I don’t really recall, except that it rhymed vaguely with RODDATUCKERPILLYFLOFFANSNOTT!!

You have to know that the sled is squirrely. It has three runners on the bottom, which I guess are meant to give some control to the rider, which is a laughable idea in itself unless the snow is the perfect consistency somewhere between ice and powder. This hill was ice, I should also note for posterity.

So I get on first and plant Boy 5 between my knees and we glide toward the precipice like an ice cube on a freshly waxed car. Just as we clear the lip and begin to pick up speed, there’s Dogtard Lilly standing right in the path of travel. Normally quick to move her butt out of my way, especially when moving fast and hollering something like, “GET THE *^@#! OUT OF THE WAY YOU STUPID DOG!!,” this time she inexplicably stood there and looked over her shoulder at us, as if to wonder where we could possibly be headed in such a hurry and without her.

We barrelled into her and it completely threw my balance off. Here’s where your knowledge that the sled is squirrely comes in handy. You steer it not by leaning, but by flexing one cheek or the other, thereby applying more pressure to one of the two runners on either side. You flex the cheek on the side opposite from the direction you want to turn. Balance is important. It keeps you from crashing into the trees on the right or the rocks on the left (out of the picture). Important? Nay, balance is the one indispensable ingredient, like the sugar in sugar cookies. So you see how bad it was that the stupid mutt of a Lilly threw us off balance.

We veered one way, then the other as I flexed cheeks to keep us heading down hill in a semi-upright position. My boots came out of the sled and the heels started to skip on the ground, kicking up a cloud of ice and powder that we then plowed through. Unlike us, Lilly had recovered from the collision and was barking a high-pitched, excited bark right. In. My. Ear! as she ran down after us.

Boy 5’s left mitten flew off somewhere so that by the time we got to the bottom (in one piece, and atop the sled, is my final note for posterity) and just before coasting to a stop, his hand was frozen and he was crying, snow all over his face. He held it in front of him like a thing wholly other, this numb slab that had once been his hand and its useless, rigid fingers. “I’m nevo going swedding again!” he bawled.

“Oh, come on,” I said, ever the empath. “You had fun all the other times!”

“No I didn’t!” And he descended into the irrational howling characteristic of five-year-olds who believe their limbs are about to fall off. He cried all the way home, cried as he sat by the fireplace warming his back and ears, even cried as he sipped his hot chocolate that eventually returned life and feeling to his hands, which didn’t fall off, after all.

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