Last night, I wrote about my attempts to harden my five year old so he wouldn’t get his heart broken by a new neighbor, Dylan.
This morning as we walked to the bus, I whispered to Jonah, “Remember, sit next to Alec. He’s nice.” Jonah nodded, but right before he stepped onto the bus, he turned to me and said loudly, “I’m sitting next to Dylan.” Whatever.
My efforts to shelter my kid from rejection and pain were wasted. I could not dampen his five year old hope that the big boy with video games would open his arms to him and share the game controls. Thirty nine years of cynacism could not be injected into his pintsized frame.
It’s going to be so hard to watch my son, who wears his heart on his sleeve, fall down. And he’s going to fall down a lot in the future. Oh, how I dread the junior high school years. I can’t protect him from the sneers of girls in high school. Or the failure to make the football team. And those thin letters from colleges.
My boy and I are a pair of marshmellows. I thought I had developed a nice burnt crust to protect me, but I’m going to have make that crust more sturdy.
Apt. 11d 
I feel for you both. Jonah’s lucky to have a mom who spelled the Rules out clearly — mine just hinted, and I never got it.
Ultimately, do you really want to protect him from rejection? That encourages little-shittery, in my experience. The pain ahead of him — ahead of all five-year-olds — is at least useful; it will make them different and stronger people. The pain that *you’re* going feel seems much sadder in a way.
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You know it doesn’t change when they get older. My daughter is in Romania having some difficulty, and I wanted to jump on a plane immediately, to do the Dad thing, going to the rescue. Still want to.
What it sounds like what you are doing is instilling a sense of sovereignty into your son. When you have that, you can have a soft heart, and still navigate the bumps in life.
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I wouldn’t call it sovereignty, Jeff; that would seem to suggest that we have a right to feel aggreived if the world doesn’t respond to our best efforts. Our feelings are going to be knocked around by the world, and only the natural-born Stoics and psychopaths can deny it. But there is a resiliance that comes from having experienced love, and having learned how to be grateful for what rewards do come. Though I guess that’s what you mean.
Keep up the great work with Jonah, Laura. There’ll be bigger heartbreakers than Dylan in his future, sure, but many bigger rewards too.
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Ah, this topic has me going!
I feel a lot of sympathy for you—my son has a verbal learning disability that makes it very difficult for him to accurately read non-verbal social cues, so we live with the dread of his pain all the time. But in cases like Jonah’s with Dylan, I’d say that will teach him—vicerally, you can’t instil it—that some people are not emotionally dependable. At some point, the pain will outweigh the attraction, and he will come to his senses. You just have to help him interpret what he’s experiencing as irrational rejection, not an accurate judgement of his desirability.
We’ve all gone through this, well into adulthood and beyond. For me, my most traumatic such memory is not of any of the on-and-off friends, but one in particular in my early (Kindergarten-age) childhood who, after a couple of years of really close friendship, called out of the blue one day and told me on the phone that I wasn’t his friend any more. I was devastated, but because it came totally out of the blue (it wasn’t at all part of the cyclical crap Dylan is handing out).
One (not you perhaps!) can feel sadness for poor Dylan also, not a very good self-image there no doubt…
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I remember my parents trying vainly to warn me that my friend in grade school was a user, and I just couldn’t see it. It wasn’t until she did some particularly nasty things towards me (and I found another friend as an ally) that I was able to dump her.
I think my problem then was that I couldn’t empathize with someone who did mean things; I didn’t understand meanness, so I was more puzzled than hurt a lot of the time. In a strange way I didn’t take it personally, even when it was personal; it was like the weather, inexplicable. But eventually a real drag.
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We’re in the same boat here. Older son (9) is very sensitive. I am too. I went through lots of rejection. I’m not sure if there’s anything anyone could have done to help with that. With my son, I’m just there for him when it happens–and it has.
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It’s awful, but remember, too, that the feeling of awfulness doesn’t usually last very long when you’re that age. (I think this is true even for sensitive kids, but maybe I’m wrong.) He’ll be crushed, and then a half-hour later will be talking about battering rams again. And then the next day: crushed, and the next day’s version of battering rams – all the love from home and the general excitement of living.
Every age has its peculiarities. I remember my mother saying that she used to find retirement homes so depressing, with all the old people sitting around quietly by themselves doing nothing, but that after experiences with elderly relatives she realized that that lifestyle was actually just fine with them, at least most of the time. It’s hard to really get into the mindset of another era of your life.
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