Parenting woes

"Mom, something happened at school today that is still bothering me."

Groaning inwardly, I fought the urge to roll my eyes and instead slowly finished smoothing the covers around my seven-year-old. You see, my son suffers intermittently from what I once heard described as "Eeyore Syndrome." It usually hits at bedtime, and involves a view of the world that everyone is somehow against him, and causing him grief for absolutely no reason or provocation. It is particularly perplexing to me because it is not all the time. Thus, I never know when to take a complaint seriously, or brush it off as something that he will have forgotten by the morning.

"Do you want to tell me about it, James?"

"Trenton has been beating me up at recess almost every day."

"Really?" My mom antennae have just gone up. This is my baby, after all, and I bristle even against my own will at the idea of someone trying to harm him. But I try to remain calm and cautious. I have learned that I can't rush in with both guns blazing; sometimes the story doesn't hold up to the tagline, and sometimes James is not an innocent participant. "Well, that doesn't sound very nice. What do you mean by "beat you up?"

"Well, today at recess he held me down while Gabe and Elizabeth screamed in my ears as loud as they could."

Now I am starting to lose my dispassionate interviewer mindset. I breathe slowly to remind myself to get more of the story. "Well that is a very strange thing to do. Why do you suppose they would do that?" Of course, James has no idea why.

I continue to query him.

"Did it hurt when they screamed?" Yes, definitely.

"Did they know you didn't like it? Did you tell them?" Yes.

"And you can't think of anything you might have done first that would make them want to treat you like this?" No.

"And you say that Trenton has been beating you up other time?" Yes, lots of times.

"Did you ever find an adult on the playground to tell about this?"

James gave a typically vague answer to this one. "Well, yes, but she said she didn't see it and she didn't know who Trenton was. She said I should point Trenton out to her, but it is really hard to do that from across the playground, and then it was time to go inside."

"Did you tell an adult about the screaming in your ears today?"

"Well, I tried. I hinted to the parent on the playground that my ears were really hurting."

"Hmm. You know, James, you have to be more direct than that. I don't think the person you told would have had any idea what you were talking about from that."

James nodded and agreed with me, if reluctantly, that he might not have been clear enough. But there was more. "Well, another day, Trenton held me down while Elizabeth and a bunch of other girls kicked me in the hindquarters."

Okay, now I am starting to lose control myself. Someone is holding down my seven-year-old first-born, a child who is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and letting him be physically abused. I read Lord of the Flies once upon a time but I have never had to live through it. Was James?

"And did you tell an adult about this?" Yes. Of course, I don't know now how direct the report was, based on James's earlier comments, but he says the adult on the playground didn't seem interested in helping him solve the problem.

I have to buy myself time. "Well, James, I am really sorry to hear this is happening. It is never okay for people to treat each other like this. I am glad you told me about it. I will talk to your teacher about this tomorrow and try to find out what we can do to solve it, okay?"

James, feeling somewhat consoled, now drifts off to sleep. I am not so fortunate. Instead, I ache.

I ache for James, who must witness the injustices of the world at such a tender age. I ache for myself, feeling incompetent to handle the challenges of parenting now that they are more complicated than just hugging a screaming infant to my breast, waiting for the sobs to pass away. I ache for the loss of my own mother just over a year ago. I feel with the certainty that only accompanies an untestable hypothesis that she would know just what to do; how to find the right balance between protecting the cub and letting him grow up a little on his own.

Perhaps most resignedly, I ache for humanity. Why does Lord of the Flies have to be even a partially accurate portrayal of our baseness, so that even second-graders have the bullying instinct to gang up on each other and cause harm?