My son believes himself to be the luckiest person on the face of the Earth. As far as contests go, that is. It’s not that he’s ever won a contest of any sort or that he’s received any encouragement, but he’s certain that at some point, he’s going to hit it big. When he was seven, he signed up for some drawing for a new truck while at the mall with his grandmother, so the next week, when our own car broke down and I was stressing over how to pay for the repairs, he told me not to worry. He was going to win a new truck, and he would let me drive it until he was old enough.
The fact that I am still driving a third-hand car has not deterred him. Last night, for instance, he tore the house apart looking for missing McDonald’s Monopoly game pieces. I’m not sure what prompted the sudden search. It was almost ten o’clock, and we had eaten fast food the night before. But I arrived home from work and found him with a game piece in his hand as he shuffled papers and dug through the trash.
He was frantic.
“I have the last railroad piece,” he said, almost whined. “I had three other pieces. They were on the table. What did you do with them?”
I hung my apron near the door and reminded him that he had been the one to clean the table off and that he must have put them somewhere. He snapped back that he would have left them where they were and I must have lost them somehow.
I wasn’t interested in arguing over useless squares of paper, so I left him to his quest and changed out of my work clothes before planting myself in front of the television. But for the next hour – yes, an hour – the kid stormed up and down the apartment, in and out of the diningroom, and sulked around the livingroom, trying to figure out what had happened to his precious game pieces. He growled. He grunted. He slammed things down. He threw stacks of papers on the floor as he looked through them. He kicked boxes and grumbled because I hadn’t unpacked them yet.
He was, in short, behaving ridiculously.
I paid no mind to his growling and grunting. I reminded him that beating my table top would not make anything appear. It is not a magic table. Just a wooden one. With benches. I stared at him – the puzzled, I-know-you-didn’t-just-do-that, mom-stare – when he threw things on the floor. And after a moment of glaring back with a yeah-I-did-it-now-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it stare, he recovered his senses and stacked things back where they belonged.
At one point during his apartment-ravaging-tantrum, I asked him if he hadn’t put them somewhere in order to keep track of them and then forgotten where that somewhere was. I do this sometimes. Okay, all the time. I suggested places he might have hidden them. I even joined his search for a few minutes, before telling him that it was (by now) almost eleven and he needed to go to bed and that wherever the pieces were in the apartment, they would still be there tomorrow when he got home from school and he could find them then.
This sent him into another mini-tantrum in which he again accused me of moving his things and of having too many of my own things lying about.
I suggested he go to his room. He did, but not without shouting on the way there.
At this point, I was pretty angry and frustrated myself. I had about an hour between the time I got home and the time I should be going to sleep to relax, and every bit of it was spent dealing with an unreasonably upset teenager. I wanted to shout too.
But I didn’t. I let him cool down. And eventually, he emerged from his room and apologized and acknowledged that perhaps, just maybe, he had behaved slightly irrationally. And I listened as he told me that he was almost certain he had all four of the game pieces needed to win a hundred bucks and how he knew if we had that hundred bucks it would really help out and he was just so mad because it was like he lost money.
I told him that it was likely the fourth game piece he found was probably a duplicate of one of the others, but I assured him he would find them so he wouldn’t have to wonder. And I told him I understood his frustration, and that I too was tired of living out of a half-unpacked apartment, but there wasn’t much I could do about it right then and that we would work on the weekend to get everything in order.
We sat and talked about the rest of his day. He had a crummy day at school, he said. There’s a field trip next week for the kids with the best grades and he was expecting to go, since he’s gotten hundreds on all his work, but his English teacher claimed he had missed a quiz (which was given the first week when I couldn’t get him enrolled yet) and hadn’t turned in homework, which he says he did. And his technology teacher misplaced a project he and another student did in class and turned in, so in both classes he has lower grades, and he won’t be going on the field trip. And then he came home and one of the kittens had peed on his new magazine, which he hadn’t read yet. And then he tried to play a game on his new XBox, and it kept freezing up on him. Then he tried to take a nap, but workmen are tearing up the parking lot at our complex, and every time he almost nodded off, the sound of machinery or shouting workmen woke him up.
The source of his frustration became clear.
The thing is, I could have yelled. The moment I came home from my second job only wanting to relax and was met with an irate teenager, I could have joined him in his anger. We could have shouted, escalating with each back and forth exchange until one or both of us was in tears. Or behind a slammed door. Or in a squad car.
But what good would that have done?
No comments:
Post a Comment