Is It Just Me? – The Fresh Start

“Jack was so mean to me. I HATE Grade One!”

“What happened?” I asked. My son, Harrison, and I were walking to the corner for hot chocolate after school. Well, I was walking and he was stomping.

“Jack told me I sound like a girl.”

More like Elmo on crack, I thought, and only when you’re excited.

I tried to think of something wise to say. Jack needs to have his hearing checked. Jack really likes you and is just trying to get your attention. Nothing, I knew, would calm my youngest son’s indignation.

Since the start of school, Harrison had experienced problems with Jack, ten months his senior. With three older siblings to guide him, Jack was savvier than my son and their constant clashing made school an unpleasant experience for Harrison, and by extension, for me. How could I teach my boy to get along with this other child? If I didn’t give him some sharp tools soon, Grade One was going to blow like a puffer fish and school would become a dreaded event like going for a flu shot or even worse, shopping for Mommy in a ladies store without a “Gameboy chair”.

I had met Jack and talked to him during pick-ups. He didn’t strike me as a malevolent kid, just rambunctious. Jack wanted to be my son’s friend. He often asked me if Harrison could play after school. But, Harrison didn’t want to hang out with the same boy who had once smacked him in the face for no apparent reason and who today, had humiliated him by comparing his voice to that of the girliest girl in their class.

“Yesterday, Jack dumped my pencil crayons on the floor,” said Harrison. His teacher had intervened, but when a tearful Jack apologized, Harrison took his revenge by laughing.

“That wasn’t very sporting,” I observed.

“But, he started it, Mom. Jack always starts it. He’s my enema.”

I sucked down my laughter. “You mean he’s your enemy.” I would have to remember to rebuke my older son who sometimes liked to teach Harrison the wrong words for his own amusement.

By now, we’d reached our local Starbucks. I settled my son at a table that I could watch from my place in line and stood remembering my own childhood enema.

When I was eleven, I met Darlene Perlmutter, who was in my class at school. Darlene was loud and brash and what polite people called a big-boned girl. I called her Fatso. Despite this encumbrance, Darlene was a star athlete. She did running flips over the pommel horse with grace and fearlessness. This maddened me because I was a disaster of ungainliness, what polite people called . . . more musically inclined. She called me Spaz. We traded insults daily and lobbied to turn our mutual friends against each other like insecure Canadian political leaders.

Halfway through the school year, my gut told me that something would have to change. Because we shared the same group of friends, Darlene and I were almost always in each other’s company. Concocting the wittiest insults to launch her way was sapping my energy and I could see that it made everyone around us uncomfortable – except for the boys, of course.

“Do you see?” I said to Darlene one cold day after we’d soaked each other with snow at recess. The boys were howling with laughter. We were both dripping with fast-freezing icicles. “They love it when we fight. We’re their entertainment.”

“I know,” she said, wringing out her sopping Partridge Family toque. “That’s the one bad thing about hating you.”

“I’ve got an idea,” I blurted. Darlene regarded me with one suspicious eyebrow raised, bracing for my next assault, but I felt an excited wave of optimism, sure we could learn to be in each other’s presence without being in each other’s face.

“Why don’t we start pretending to like each other? We’ll call each other by our actual names, ask each other how we are and stop saying mean things. It’ll drive the boys crazy.”

“I like how you think,” she grinned after a moment’s thought. “It’s definitely worth a try, Spaz. I mean, Robin.”

The following day, we shifted the universe.

“Excuse me, Darlene,” I asked in my best Queen Elizabeth accent. “May I please borrow your ruler? I seem to have misplaced mine.”

“Why, certainly, Spaz . . . uh, Robin. In fact, please use it for the whole day. I have an extra one.”

Our classmates regarded Darlene and me as if we’d lost our collective marbles.

And, so it went. That first day, the boys still tried to encourage us to soak each other at recess but we shrugged and made snow angels instead. Our girlfriends rolled their eyes and asked us if we were serious. When no one was watching, we smirked at each other, our collusion paving the way to greater mutual appreciation.

A month later, Darlene and I became official best friends. We’d been surprised to find that behaving nicely towards each other hadn’t just reduced our daily stress; it had allowed us to notice the qualities that we both desired most in a friend. Our friendship taught me that changing my behaviour can change my mind.

I told Harrison a version of this story. His chocolate moustache had become more pronounced and he regarded me with scrunched up eyebrows like a disbelieving detective. “Boys are different, Mom. We aren’t as nice as girls.”

I smiled and simply remembered what I’d gleaned from Darlene Perlmutter. The more often you employ a behaviour the more that behaviour will come to feel natural.

“Tomorrow, why don’t you give Jack a compliment,” I suggested, “like Jack, your hair looks cool, today.

“Jack doesn’t have much hair,” said Harrison.

“Just think of something about him that you like and tell him. Try it once and see what happens.”

The next day, when I went into the school, Harrison skipped out of the classroom, laughing.

“How’d it go with Jack, today?” I asked, relieved to see him happy.

“Fine, of course” said my son as if his mother needed to have her head prodded by a professional. “I told Jack that I really like his Sponge Bob lunch bag because, you know, Sponge Bob is my favourite cartoon character and he’s Jack’s favourite, too. So, we played tag at recess and Jack invited me over on the weekend to meet his dog and watch a video and stuff. Can I go, Mom? Please?”

“I think we can make that happen,” I smiled.

In the end, it was just the beginning.

"Connected Parenting advises us not just how to parent, but—far more important—who to be as parents. The therapeutic methods suggested by Jennifer Kolari are based not on simple-minded behavioural solutions, but on building warm, nurturing relationships with our children, with insight and compassion not only for their little flaws, but also for our own larger ones."
—Gabor Maté, M.D.

"A must read for parents, educators, and any other adults who want to connect in a deeply caring and positive way with the children in their lives."
—Barbara Coloroso