In and out of harm's way

This past weekend I took my son Picaro to a neighborhood birthday party, which was an interesting experience (or at least we’d better all hope that it was interesting, since I’m embarking on a lengthy blog-xamination of it here). The birthday boy was our neighbor’s youngest son, turning 4 years old, so it was a bit of an older-skewing crowd of kids than the usual collection of 1- and 2-year-olds Picaro usually hangs out with, whether at daycare or when his mother and I hang out with friends of ours who had kids around the same time we did. The entire guest list consisted of Picaro, another little boy almost exactly the same age as Picaro, the birthday boy and his two older brothers (maybe 8 and 12?), and a brother and sister (maybe 5 or 6 and 8 or 9 respectively, although I am admittedly dreadful at the “how old is that kid?” game), so the age range was fairly broad and not exactly typical of my pre-conceived notions and/or memories of childhood birthday parties, where you turn 6 and invite a bunch of other 6 year olds from your first grade class.

But then, I suppose neighborhood parties in general tend to be a bit more of a random mixing of people as well, since (all panic about the Great Sorting of Our Society aside) a group of people living on the same street don’t necessarily have that much in common, especially compared to other social-party situations which are usually family gatherings or get-togethers with old friends from high school and college or mandatory work events or whatever. And since we’ve only been living in the new neighborhood for about three months, our neighbors constitute a random group of people whom I don’t know terribly well yet at all. The father of the birthday boy was the guy who ran out with his snowshovel in hand to help me get the U-Haul unstuck on moving day, so there really was no question that I would accept the invitation (which technically was extended from my neighbor’s son to my son, in theory, anyway) even though social situations in which I don’t know anybody are not exactly where I shine.

I’m trying to get better about it. I like the idea of being on good terms with all the neighbors, especially if we’re going to occupy our current house for the next few decades which is the current plan, and I know the only way to get to that point of comfortable neighborliness is to put myself out there and plow through the awkward getting-to-know-you-stage that comes first. But it’s still hard and doesn’t come naturally, and it never has.

Opinions vary on what constitutes the threshold between childhood and adulthood, but speaking for myself I think it lies somewhere around the point where you start recognizing the things you’d like to change about yourself and take active responsibility for getting to that goal, where you start making yourself do things you’re not pre-disposed to do. There is a long list of things that I still have to remind myself to do in order to be a grown-up, and socializing pleasantly with strangers is one of them. It has not yet become just another practiced habit. It still puts knots in my stomach sometimes.

People always think I’m lying when I cop to this, by the by. Very occasionally, if a group of us are reminiscing, someone will say, “Man, I remember when I met you, I thought you were such an introvert!” or words to that effect. I really am two different people depending on my comfort level. Around people I already know and am friends with, or even a mixed group of some friends and some strangers, I clamor to be the center of attention, I’m loud, I’m clownish, I’m fearlessly opinionated. But take away my safety net and I fade into the background. Many people get to see both sides, if they meet me on neutral ground and then get to know me over time, but for most of them the recency effect of my obnoxious side soon crowds out their memories of when I was quiet and subdued.

And that’s adult-me, the one who actually tries to overcome the awkwardness as quickly as possible. My childhood memories runneth over with feelings of crippling shyness. I used to be pathologically averse to new experiences of any kind. In retrospect, I just wish I hadn’t been so closed off. I feel like I missed out a lot (on what, exactly, I’m not sure, but that doesn’t make the certainty any less poignant).

Which brings us back to Picaro, who I hope isn’t bound for a childhood of missed opportunities and paralysis in the face of the unfamiliar and vague shapeless terror at the prospect of being forced out of his element. The birthday party was as good a testing ground for that as any (obligatory caveat about how I know, I KNOW I can’t read too much into any isolated incident in an 18-month-old’s life) especially because the birthday boy owns a Fisher Price Bouncy Castle (which is something I heretofore did not know existed) and it was one of the feature attractions of said birthday party. At first Picaro wasn’t the slightest bit interested in going inside the bouncy castle, preferring instead to ride some of the scooters and trikes scattered around the backyard (you can imagine the abundance of those in a house where they have three sons under 12). But as some more of the older kids got into the bouncy castle, Picaro wanted to check it out. So I helped him in and let him go. The great thing about bounce-house type toys is that if you put enough kids into one it becomes a self-sustaining ride, and an 18-month-old doesn’t have to grasp the concept of jumping and ricocheting, because the motion of the other kids just makes uncontrollable motion happen. And, as it turned out, Picaro loved it, it made him laugh, and then after a little while he had had enough and wanted to get back to scootering and triking, and I helped him out.

I’d like to say that all that really matters to me is that the little guy had fun, but obviously that is not true, because it’s also fairly important to me that I think I caught a glimpse of a little kid who might be a little slow to warm up to new experiences but eventually goes for it, and that is an immensely gratifying relief, because if my kid were condemned to be exactly like me just because he’s mine, that would bum me out.

Of course, kind of off to the side of all this, there’s the notion of whether certain experiences are scary just because they’re new or if they’re legitimately inherently scary, from the child’s perspective or the parent’s perspective. And it did peripherally occur to me as I shoved Picaro through the mesh gate of the bouncy castle that there was a very real possibility he might get a bump on his head or a split lip or who-knows-what if one of the bigger kids landed on him after a wild jump or something like that. Picaro has always shown a certain resilient rough-and-tumbleness, though, and he’s had more Accident Reports at daycare than I can count, so I was aware of the risk but decided it was worth it. I didn’t want to stifle his fearlessness, I don’t want to be an overprotective parent, I thought the risk was pretty small overall, etc. And maybe I just got lucky, but the point was moot; he was fine, in and out without a scratch.


It’s also entirely possible that on some level I was consciously choosing to laugh in the face of danger to my son’s well-being because so often that is not the case, because so often I succumb to world-class freak-outs, like when Picaro suddenly stops playing with his bulldozer and blocks and wails in pain and I know that it’s most likely just a teething twinge because his canines are starting to come in, but part of me can’t help but wonder if maybe that time a week ago when he was fussing as we left the store and I gave him some unwashed organic grapes right out of the package, maybe those grapes were absolutely saturated with parasite-egg-filled snail shit and evil fangity brain flukes are currently hatching inside Picaro’s brain and causing him excruciating intracranial agony. Maybe? (You probably think I am exaggerating my thought process here for humorous effect. I assure you I am not. Also, I might need to dial back the amount of parasite-centric edutainment I watch on TLC. I blame my wife and her arguably reasonable professional fascination with parasitology as a veterinarian. Anyway.)

And then of course it’s not the bouncy castle or the malevolent parasites that are going to end up doing the damage anyway, it’s the things you never see coming. I didn’t blog about birthday parties and injury-defying exploits yesterday because it was a bit of a sensitive subject given the way Picaro started off his week: rattling the baby-proofed doors of a very large cabinet until a statue of a horse on top of the cabinet wobbled off, fell and hit Picaro horse-ear-first on the cheek, giving him quite the shiner. He screamed bloody murder (or so I’m told, since I was at work and my wife was home at the time) but once the initial shock wore off it became pretty apparent that, flagrant bruising aside, he was fine. Which didn’t stop my wife or myself from massive self-recrimination for thinking that just because things were up out of reach they were incapable of doing harm, or wondering if Picaro could have tugged on the locked doors until he pulled the whole huge cabinet down on top of himself, or speculating as to how close we came to having to deal with a concussion or shards of statue lodged in flesh or any number of torturous hypotheticals. By late last night the Cabinet of Doom had been partially dismantled, but it remains an eye-opener as to just how much trouble our little guy can get himself into now. And I honestly want him to get into a little trouble here and there, because that’s how he’s going to learn to be self-sufficient, but I also know it’s my job to draw the line between acceptable risk and unacceptable life-threatening stupidity. There’s probably no one who always draws that line in precisely the optimal place every time; there may not even be an objectively optimal place to begin with. It’s just yet another challenge, yet another karmic ha-ha for every time, when I was a kid, I thought “Being the dad looks pretty simple to me over here.”