My boy, aged five and three-quarters, is always fulfilling his curiosity on physical limitations—mainly, how much pain his dad can take. Then, he denies the reason for fulfilling this curiosity.
It goes like this: A query will enter his mind and he’ll see it through. For instance: What would it be like to smack Dad right across the face? Would it hurt him?
Smack!
“Hey!” I say, “Why did you do that?”
“I dunno,” he says. Then he punches me in the chin.
“Hey! You must know why you did it,” I continue.
“No I don’t.”
In another moment: What would it be like to climb on top of the couch where Dad is napping and jump as high as possible, coming down with knees bent, right on his unprotected midsection?
“Hey!” I say. “What did you do that for?”
“I dunno.” He yanks my bottom lip to see how far it will stretch.
But he does know why he does these things. And I know what he knows, because I am his father. And the truth is, I sort of asked for this treatment. You see, I tell my son every chance I get that I am made out of steel. That I cannot be hurt. When he punches me, I ask him if his hand is all right, because I know how much it hurts people to punch steel.
I do this for two reasons:
1) It bothers him to no end. “If you’re made out of steel,” he says, “then why does this hurt you?” He punches me in the groin. “It doesn’t hurt,” I say in a voice that is now an octave higher. “Is your hand okay?”
2) At his age, boys already see their dads as superheroes of sorts. I have to say, the kid really likes me. He wants to be around me all the time. I’m simply building on the dad-is-a-superhero myth in his little head.
I feel I deserve to be a superhero. One day, the boy won’t care a lick about me. I’ll have to beg him to come over to help me out of my chair. But today, I am the Man of Steel, and he is my sidekick. We don’t really walk places so much as we bump into each other, and I drag him (on his insistence), and he tries to tackle my leg at inappropriate times. I want to stress, he is normally an extremely well-behaved little boy—he is the only kid in his preschool class to never sit on the dreaded Red Circle. But with me …
At the community pool, I climb the high dive and he watches from the edge of the pool with great curiosity. I run toward the end of the board, jump as high as I can, hit the end of the board with as much force as I can, let it rocket me skyward—and for one moment, in my mind at least, I am flying!
There are oohs and ahhs from the pool crowd; clearly, they are worried about what comes next: the landing. But there’s my sidekick down below, with goggles on, ready to stick his head underwater so he can see my not-so-graceful entrance into the blue water.
“Did that hurt?” he asks as I swim to him.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“It looked like it did.”
“How many times have I told you: I’m made out of steel. I can’t be hurt.”
“Dad, you’re not made out of steel!”
Later, he punches me in the mouth. “If you were made out of steel, then why are you bleeding? Steel doesn’t bleed!”
But this is where I win. You know why? Because a part of him believes I might be telling the truth. After all, why would he attack me while I’m napping? Why would he argue with me about being made out of steel if he really believed I wasn’t made of steel? If someone told you the sun was a beautiful place for a vacation, would you argue? No. You wouldn’t even bother to waste an ounce of energy on something so ridiculous.
By acknowledging my claim with an opposite claim, by kicking me at unexpected times, the boy actually reveals that he might believe my claim. You see?
Recently, we went fishing at a park. We caught nothing. It didn’t matter. My son had a blast feeding bread to the baitfish, and, as I said, the kid just likes being with me. As we were leaving, I stepped on something. At first, I thought it was a thorn. Then the pain deepened and spread through my entire foot until I wanted to yelp like a little puppy. I had been stung by something! A very, very powerful sting from a very, very powerful bug!
I bit my lip. I tried to act cool; I didn’t want to blow my “made of steel” M.O. I told my son I had been stung.
Later, in a moment of mental weakness, I said to him, “Man, when I got stung, that really hurt. I don’t remember stings hurting that bad.”
His eyes lit up like a prosecutor who had just cornered the guilty party. “I told you,” he said, “you’re not made out of steel.”
And that’s how I know: He actually thinks I am.
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