Life Matters

It love those Awful Awfuls

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It just so happened that my oldest son’s birthday was on Father’s Day, which was an apt tribute because he is a new father of a two-month-old baby boy named Conrad. It is hard to believe the my baby has a baby of his own. No matter how old the children get, they are still children in my eyes (albeit a big, six-foot-four tall, burly bearded, prematurely gray hair with a growing pot belly “child”). It seems like only yesterday that he was a toddler with a visual impairment who was having worries that most sighted children didn’t have to fret about.

He started at Lad and Lassie Preschool at the tender age of three and initially adjusted well.  I was thrilled that he seemed to develop a friendship with a little boy named Eddy, whom I had not yet met because his mom dropped him off at a later time. Francis would come home and tell me that he and Eddy played with blocks or outside in the playground or cleaned the hamster cage together. I was glad that he was able to socialize and make a friend while enjoying school and my fears about social isolation vanished. One morning I slept late and drove him to school much later than usual. I accompanied him into the building and saw the entire class sitting on the floor listening to their teacher read a book. At first glance, the sea of toddlers looked all the same; Caucasian. Francis scanned the room with his limited vision, spotted Eddy, ran over and sat down next to the only African-American child in the class. Francis was one smart kid; his best friend was the classmate who was easiest to pick out! (Later on in high school, Francis’ could pick out his best friend in the corridor because he always wore a bright, tie-died shirt amongst a sea of bland t-shirts.)

While in nursery school, he did develop some unusual worries, not the type of things that concerned other children. During one lesson, his nursery school teacher told the children that a skunk had sprayed her dog and it had to be bathed in tomato juice. This horrified Francis because he hated tomato juice and the thought of taking a bath in the disgusting stuff struck him as the worst thing ever. He developed a dread of being sprayed by a skunk and refused to go outside to play. He feared a skunk would enter our yard, he would not see it, he would step on it by accident and get sprayed. In an attempt to allay his fears, we fenced our backyard. He still refused to go out because he was afraid a skunk could vault the fence and spray him. I assured him that skunks couldn’t jump that high. He then fretted that a skunk might burrow under the fence. I told him our dirt was too hard and skunks cannot dig, (which may have been a white lie, but I had never actually seen one dig). He finally rejected going outside to play because he was convinced that a skunk could spray him through the holes in the fence. I lacked a rebuttal for that, so Francis shunned backyard play that summer. Fortunately, as he experienced new things, and learned more about his world, he outgrew this particular fear.

Another notable negative nursery school experience happened the day an exterminator was a guest speaker. He talked to the children about termites and how they can eat the wood supporting the house. Francis came home terrified at the possibility of having them in our basement. He developed problems sleeping and became anxiety ridden. After about a week of this, I finally asked, “Why are you afraid of such tiny bugs?”

“Tiny?” he replied, aghast. “They are huge.”

My quizzical look soon turned into laughter as I realized that that the only termite large enough for Francis to see was the “Big Blue Bug” on Route 95! At 928 times the size of a regular termite, it is 9 feet high and 58 feet long. It is no wonder that he was worried; he thought termites that large occupied his basement! After my laughing stopped, and I wiped away the laughing tears from my cheeks, I explained to him that the big blue creature by the side of the road was a joke and that termites are tiny.

We went downstairs and searched for any such tiny creatures, and soon confirmed that the house was, in fact, termite free. Peaceful dreams were soon his again, for the time being, anyway.

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