My girlfriend has a 7 year old son named Robear that goes by the moniker Bear. He’s 3 ½ ft tall weighing in at 40lbs. Yet what he lacks in body mass he compensates for in personality and panache.
Bear is brilliant and possesses an amazing amount of comedic intuition. That intuition however, is impartial when it comes to appropriate and inappropriate times to share it.
Case in point: When his mother and I picked him up from school last week his teacher said he was in trouble. Homeboy looked like he was on the verge of a breakdown akin to Howard Hughes proportions.
“What’d he do?”
“This,” handing over a half colored picture of Sponge Bob holding a cigar or rocket directly aligned with his backside.
We didn’t see any outright infraction other than the half done coloring job. But maybe procrastination and indolence is tantamount to bringing guns to school these days or threatening to vote Republican when you’re of age.
His teacher could tell we were puzzled so she turned the paper over, exposing the damning evidence of Bear’s vulgar tendencies…and comedic genius.
“Look at my ass” were the flipside’s caption. I could actually hear Sponge Bob begging me to do so.
Containing my laughter the entire walk home whilst his mother admonished him was a futile attempt. Once I gained composure, I had 3.5 questions for him.
“ What’s that thing pointing at his butt and did you draw it?”
“ I don’t know what it is, and no, I didn’t draw it, it came like that.”
“Looks like a V-I-A-B-R-A-T-O-R.” I said in parental Morse Code to his mother.
“You always write sloppy, why is THIS perfectly legible?”
“I took my time because it was funny.”
I had to admire his ability to merge image and humor in a situation that the marriage of those two wasn’t intended. His sagacious answer left me with no retort. So, like any adult thumped by a child’s dry logic, I asked another question.
“Where’d you learn to spell this word?” Referring to “ASS”.
“Another kid helped me with it.”
I thought we were savvy on the word ASS. Then he pointed to the word “AT”.
“He crossed the ‘t’ for me.”
“You had an editor?”
“What’s an editor?”
“Never mind.”
“When he got finished helping me he gave the picture to my teacher and I got in trouble.”
Entrapment is a bitch as are creative partnerships that quickly disintegrate, leaving one with glory and the other in the failed ashes of misinterpreted artistic intentions. He was learning at least two valuable lessons today.
“Where’d you learn the word ’ASS’?”
“Oh. The movie you gave me, KICK-ASS”
I countered with irony.
“Where’s your responsibility? You agreed not to say that word out loud.”
“I didn’t SAY it.”
I was negotiating with Ganghis Khan.
He and I both shared the blame. But I didn’t shake him down. He’s going to curse, it’s a rite of passage.
I was sent to Catholic school in the hopes I’d be insulated from the harsh language of the world. Within my first month I was asking God to help me refrain from saying the word SHIT, FAG & BITCH all the time, all learned on God’s wholesome playground.
So I gave Bear a talk about making good decisions. I informed him that in the real world we have to choose our words wisely. Spoken and written.
He understood that notion, promising to use better judgment in any future endeavors on the page or otherwise.
I in turn told him we could create a character (during non curricular hours) in a comic strip environment that could use bad words depending on context and situation. He liked my attempt at “positive correction”.
ALL potential starts out raw, it’s what we do as parents that make it a talent or shame the child wears on their sleeve.
