We’d just dropped his sister at school (prep at the local primary), and were about to head home to draw some trains or maybe make some play-doh anemones (trains and anemones being his favourite things), when my four-year-old son and I were stopped in our tracks by the sound of braying voices behind us.
“Dum-dum Blake! Stupid, dum-dum Blake!”
We turned around to see two of his former kindergarten buddies (let’s call them Scott and Charlie) perched on the jungle gym, little faces contorted into sneers as they chanted their singsong spite.
I say former buddies, because we withdrew him from four-year-old kinder after his first term, after much hand-wringing deliberation, as he was the youngest in the year group and didn’t seem ready (plus everyone else is doing the holding back boys thing...), so he doesn’t see them so much any more.
Blake hasn’t appeared too bothered about being held back, accepting the change as nonchalantly as he regards the yields of his regular nasal excavations before devouring them (boys being boys).
Now though, at the sound of his ex-playmates’ teasing, his face crumpled into a mask of dejection and the tears sprang from his eyes.
Not for the first time in my career as a parent, I had no idea what to do.
Scott and Charlie must have sensed my uncertainty, because for an awful eight or nine seconds they just carried on chanting, or at least Charlie did. Scott started to look a bit uncertain himself and quickly piped down. Maybe he remembered the time that I was in his kitchen, having a cup of tea with his mum as I picked Blake up from a playdate, and sensed he could be in trouble.
“HEY!” I heard myself shouting, my voice more gruff and aggressive than I meant it to sound, “that isn’t very nice. Look, you’ve made him cry.” (Good grief, was that really the best I could come up with?)
Now Scott and Charlie’s mothers had broken off from their conversation over by the sandpit and were walking towards us, grimly purposeful.
Ridiculous, how my heart pounded, as I dobbed those five-year-olds in to their mothers.
“What’s going on?” asked Scott’s mum, in soft tones far better suited to the occasion. Silence. I looked at the boys. The boys looked at me, then at the ground. They’d come down from their perch - they knew this was a bust. The mothers looked at Blake, who was still crying, now in that heartrending, shuddery way that belies attempts to get a grip.
“Can you tell us why Blake is crying?”
Silence.
Ridiculous, how my heart pounded, as I dobbed those five-year-olds in to their mothers. Somehow I’d been transported to my own schoolyard, back to the laws of the jungle-gym, so that I felt like some kind of snitch. There was the suspicion, too, nagging at me, that in protecting my son I was doing him no favours. That he was going to cop it harder, somewhere down the line, for my hand here on his shoulder, my speaking up on his behalf.
By the time we got home he had forgotten all about the incident, but I hadn’t.
It’s a small and tight-knit suburban community, the one in which we live, much like the one I knew growing up. One of the unexpected side-effects of parenthood is how it reconnects us to our own childhoods. I’m remembering vividly now how tough it could be back then, struggling for status, for acceptance, not to be excluded.
Back in the badlands of boyhood in the seventies and eighties, if you weren’t good at fighting, you had better be funny, sporty or adept at disappearing into the crowd, into safe anonymity. Don’t stand out was the golden rule of survival. And even if you found your spot in the pecking order, your place in the gang, you needed to watch your back. It might just be your turn to be ostracized this week, to suffer the snide remarks, the school bag chucked on to the bus shelter roof, the random kicking, that was just the way it went.
I like to think things are less brutal these days, at least for the pre-teens, before they have to navigate social media and all of its casual cruelties.
“You wouldn’t like it if someone called you names like that, would you?” asked Charlie’s mum of her little boy, who was now wailing, himself, at the prospect of having some cherished figurine or other confiscated for the week as punishment for his behaviour.
Now that his chief tormentor was in tears, Blake had brightened considerably. Both the boys apologised to him, while their mothers reassured me I had done the right thing in telling them what had gone down.
By the time we got home he had forgotten all about the incident, but I hadn’t. I continued to brood on it as I helped my son to craft an entire rockpool ecosystem from play-doh, anemone after anemone. It dawned on me that we might have kept him back for a year, but eventually we’re going to have to let him go, and that I won’t always be there for him on those inevitable occasions when being a kid is going to suck.
He got grumpy that day, what with all the cuddles I gave him, but I couldn’t help myself.
Ian Rose is a Melbourne-based writer.
