It's Not a Towel, Mom. It's a Cape!

Every family has it's "you're something else again, kid" child.  Sess was ours.  His nickname was Sesame because he had a magical imagination.  I was forever looking for my large flour sack dish towels, only to be told, "It's not a towel, Mom.  It's a cape!"  He took the wheels off his new roller skates and turned them into wrestling boots.  He was Captain Underpants years before there was a Captain Underpants.  He also found that underpants on your head made a pretty good wrestler's mask.  One time he was really upset with me because I couldn't figure out how to make a web shooter for his wrists like Spiderman's.  The only reason he even asked me was that he had failed to make one himself using my best white gloves and some kitchen twine!

When Sess was in his own world, he had his own way of seeing things.  His fantasy had a bad habit of colliding with someone else's reality.  His older brother, Beed, was forever bringing him crashing back to the real world, which left Sess frustrated and angry on a lot of occasions.  We had a family rule that if a child felt angry and needed to blow off steam, that was okay (after all, don't we sometimes need that?) but that no one else needed to witness a tantrum.  So if you were about to blow, you had to go to your room until you could get things under control.  If a child forgot the rule, Carmon or I would pick him or her up and escort the child - willingly or unwilling - to the room.  Sess ran into that rule so often, that nobody had to take him.  He'd put himself in time-out.  I'd hear the front door slam and there would be Sess red-faced and breathing hard, headed down the hall to his bedroom huffing, "I'm about to lose my temper!"  I'd hear the punching clown being pummeled for a minute or two, but pretty soon, Sess would come out calm; crisis passed. 

On one such occasion, he was smiling when he came out of his room and said, "Mom, I'm really tough.  I could hurt somebody." 

"Oh," I said, "Who did you hurt?" 

"Me.  I threw myself off of the bed!"

One of the most common uses of his imagination was the fact that he could come up with the most creative ideas for getting out of doing something he didn't want to do.  His best, by far, had to do with his lazy eye. 

 

Sess had been born prematurely and as a result, had crossed eyes.  The crossing was corrected surgically when he was a year old, but his vision in his left eye was essentially not there.  He was diagnosed with amblyopia, more commonly known as lazy eye.   The doctors patched his good eye, trying to force the lazy eye to work and bring his vision up to normal or near normal.  Unfortunately, it didn't work and he is blind in that eye to this day.  But having the patch, aggravating as it was for him, had its advantages.  It got him out of doing a lot of things he didn't want to do.

 

I didn't realize that I was babying him in this respect until he went to kindergarten.  A got a phone call from his teacher just a few weeks into the year asking if I could come in for a conference.  After telling me all the great things about Sess, the conversation went something like this:

 

Teacher: "I do have one concern.  Sess seems to be using his patched eye to avoid trying new things.  For example, when another child invited him to go down the slide, he said, 'I can't do that. I've got a lazy eye.'"

 

Mom (defending her cub!): "Well he does.  I don't think he feels secure with his balance."

 

Teacher: "He doesn't want to color in his letter book.  When I ask him to get back on task, he says, 'I can't color.  I've got a lazy eye.'"

 

Mom (still defending): "I'm sure it is difficult for him to do that."

 

Teacher: "Perhaps, but yesterday, I redid the seating arrangements.  Do you know what he told me?  "I can't sit next to that ugly girl. I've got a lazy eye!'"

 

Carmon's response?  "That's my boy!"

 

Text © 2012 Gebara Education

 

Picture of boy with towel from www.halfapica.blogspot.com

Picture with boy with eye patched from www.bandoeyy.com