Apparently I have a superpower… Invisibility.
You wouldn’t believe the number of times I ask Mikey a question, give him a greeting, or otherwise engage him and he simply doesn’t respond – doesn’t even flinch!
“What did you do in school today?”
“Do you need a snack?”
“Can you put your shoes on?”
Nothing.
I’ve resorted to asking if he needs to go to the ear doctor because he can’t hear me. That usually gets a response. Since other parents say their 6-year-olds exhibit similar symptoms, I believe it’s a non-fatal condition.
For him, at least. My blood pressure, on the other hand…
A similar thing happens sometimes when we are actively playing and he just kind of zones out, or loses interest. We can be chalking in the driveway and he’ll just get up and walk away, and when I call for him to ask where he’s going, he’ll say, “I’m done.”
Just like that. No “goodbye.” No, “I’m going inside.” No, “This was fun but I got hot.” It’s kind of like getting the middle finger, and makes me grumble a promise to myself that I’m not going doing anything fun with him next time because he doesn’t appreciate it.
So, imagine my surprise when I was gearing Mikey up for skateboarding lessons and the mom of one of his classmates said, “So, Chloe told me Mikey’s mom has water fights with him.”
That made me pause.
I knew exactly what she was talking about. On Labor Day we were going through some things in the garage and found the water guns, and Mikey asked if we had any water balloons, which we didn’t. However, since it was our last hoorah of summer, I figured we could go try to find some. We went to three stores before we found them, and then went home and had an epic water balloon/water blaster fight.
But as soon as it was done, he went inside and watched TV, and I figured it was just another case of me wasting my time trying to entertain him, just for him to be ungrateful.
On the way home from skateboarding I asked Mikey, “Hey, did you tell Chloe that you and I had a water fight?”
Nothing.
I got louder. “Hey, Mikey! Did you tell Chloe we had a water fight.”
“Yes,” he answered.
When I just looked at him in the rearview mirror, he added, “We were talking about what we did over the weekend and I said you and I had a water blaster fight and it was really fun.”
Well, hot dang. If this isn’t emotional terrorism, I don’t know what is.
A similar thing happened at the end of last school year when a bunch of drawings and notebooks and other papers came home from his classroom, and we saw a whole slew of pictures that depicted things Mikey had done throughout the year.
There was a picture of the pinewood derby car from Boy Scouts, which he and my husband made together. There was a drawing of us all in the car heading up to western New York to visit my family. There was even a picture of one of us reading to him in bed.
There were also three … THREE drawings of me loading the dishwasher.
Anyway, it was clear to us that, despite the robotic demeanor or sometimes unenthusiastic response we get from the child much of the time, he is, in fact, present.
And – hopefully – happy.
PS: I hope you all got the “Back to the Future” reference. I’m sure I’m carbon dating myself with that one.
Holly Crocco is editor of the Putnam County Times/Press and mother of a 6-year-old. She can be reached at editorials@putnampresstimes.com.
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