Raising Sissies

I knew weeks ago that it wasn't going to work with her. She's a bland sort of forgettable woman who is raising her first son to fear his own shadow, terrified of fireflies and shrinking into a shell at the slightest breeze. A butterfly becomes a menacing winged creature with fanged hunger and a penchant for devouring little boys.

This can't go on, I thought to myself after a playdate that had both her and her son wet as rags from the fear and terrror and shear exersion of being afraid of my GIANT infant boy.

I've rarely seen a display of such pathetic stupidity although, I am privy to these sort of shinannigans daily now that I am a member of the illustrious motherhood clan.

The straw that broke this camels back arrived in my own home, on a devestating afternoon with the sun shining and my beautiful boy squealing with delight as he crawls at breakneck speed towards his little friend who reacts to this exuberant display of joy and excitement by violently flinching away in shear terror and cowering behind his mother's legs. His mother reacts similiarly, afraid, picks up her boy, we'll call him Susan, and uses her body to sheild against my hulking danger of a son.

My beloved boy sees the fear of him; he sees that his friend is afraid of him and he stops mid-crawl, recoils and shrinks into himself.

I hear the sound of shattering glass and I know what it is, it is the veneer of my civility splintering. Flashes of carnage.

There's a scene in the book I'm reading, a man is gutting another man and smearing his internal organs all over the wall.

It's a comedy.

This is the scene that flashes before my eyes because I feel profoundly gutted that my son is wounded by people not fit to wipe his ass but, also because the primal urge to fly at this absurd woman and eviserate her, slice her from cervix to sternum, is intoxicating. I want to shred her, rip her limb from limb and then toss her remains out the door. I am shocked by the violent well that lives in me to protect my beautiful boy; this is motherhood, a shocking, primal tsunami of love.

I pick up my son and make it clear this isn't going to work and I can't have her overly protective, fear laced parenting effect my son.

I. Can't. Have. That.

She needs to leave and take her son, little Susie, with her.

Later that afternoon as the murderous desire fades, leaving only a dull hangover, I realize this is going to happen often over the years and I will have to make decisions much more serious in nature and the reprucussions of those decisions will echo in our lineage for generations so, I better pace myself.

Since this is the case, I decide to limit the emotional investment I make everytime a compulsively over-protective mother and her poorly raised offspring interfere with the strong, independent, confident boy I've raised.

I wish I could tell you these hovering fear-based care givers are a rarity but, they're all too common and I would even claim they're the norm. I meet these types of parents in every play centre, kids romper room and birthday party; they're the ones who are convincing themselves and their son's that playing will break them and getting dirty will kill them and roughhousing could muss up their hair and then what will we do?

I'm delighted to report my son bounced back like a big boy and clobbered a towering four-year-old who shoved him.

That's my boy.