Man-Boy Love (not like that)

A blog about how much I love my son. If anything, I love him even more now. Plus a great story (if I do say so myself) about taking him to playgrounds. From Wednesday, October 25, 2006

The boy and I are at the park the other day. A mother is pushing her kid on the swing next to ours, and she can't get her other kid to heel. He's on the other end of the playground and making tracks for the sandpit. But the little brother won't get off the swing.

"I'll keep him going," I tell her, and she thanks me and charges off in her high-heels after the brother. (High-heels on a cedar-chip playground, here's your first clue where this is going...) Easy enough for me to keep two swings going, and I do. Until the little brother starts blubbering for Mommy, now hobbling into the sandpit and grabbing a kid by the ear. Her own kid, I'm guessing.

My boy swings on, happily trying to touch treetop with his toes, so I attend to the crying kid. Soon the mother comes back, and expresses some delight that her child is crying for her. "It's the first time he's ever been worried for me!" (Early indicator of Munchausen-by-proxy? I make a note to consult psychiatric journals when I get home.) Big brother tags along behind her and she makes him sit on one of the tarry railroad ties surrounding us. He's about eight, I guess. I guess because I have no idea how old kids are, unless they're four-and-a-half, like mine, or under. That's the only frame of reference I have, how they measure up to my kid. (Few make the grade, I needn't mention.)

"You could've gotten lost out there!' she shrills at him.
"Aw, Ma, I was alright..." (That's right, he talked like one of the Dead End Kids, all the kids talk like that these days, and carry slingshots and live frogs in the back pockets of their overalls.)
"Someone could've taken you away!"
"Nobody's gonna grab me here."
"Shows what you know! This is just the sort of place where men come to take little boys!"

This from the woman who left me pushing her three-year-old on a swing. I'll confess, it was very tough for me not to point at my kid and interject into their conversation, "it's true, where do you think I got this one?" The boy would've backed me up on it, he's got a nicely absurd sense of humor for his age.

Overreacting? Sure. There were other parents there at the sandpit, they'd certainly have noticed a strange man approaching. God help me if I walked up without the boy, I'd have been stoned. Already I get suspicious glares, simply for being male. And, well, kind of creepy-looking, I guess.

But what bugs me about the current culture of paranoia parenting is that there's an element of truth to it. Yeah, there are bad people around. But are there more now than there were when I was a kid? I suspect not.

My boy has never met a stranger. He walks up to people and tells them his full name, including middle and last, my name (legal, nick-, and what he calls me -- Daddy), and I'm getting a little reluctant to teach him our address lest he invite someone over to play with his dogs. (Vicious maneaters, to a one, stay away.) Within about fifteen minutes of meeting a pretty girl or woman, he tells her that he loves her. He gives out hugs and kisses like a Hollywood celeb, only he means them.

Should I teach him to be wary? His teacher (a very stern woman) says she doesn't want him hugging her anymore, it puts her "in an awkward position." What, she's Mary Kay Letourneau? He's four, he loves! But maybe she's right. Maybe it'd be wise to teach him to be a little more restrained.

I don't want him to lose his trust. He is the most unrestrained person I know. He is id incarnate. His laugh brightens any day.

I think he knows better than to walk off with anyone but me. I guess we have to talk about that. Damn.