Dear Santa

Dear Santa,

I'm sorry for what happened today, and I'm going to trade you 3 weeks of video games in exchange for still bringing me my presents. I was wrong to be mean to and spit on the teachers. I will never do that again. To earn my video games back I am going to feed the kitties every morning, help clean their litter box, make sure my animals don't fall on the floor, put my clothes away, and make sure my shoes and coat are put away.

I hope that I have done enough toshow you I am sorry and that I will still get the presents you chose for me. I am a good boy most of the time, and I am really really sorry.

Love,

Urban Maxwell

That is the actual email we crafted to Santa on Christmas Eve eve. Fun… What a roller coaster.

When Urban was 2 I bought a book called Parenting Your Strong-Willed Child by Rex Forehand and Nicholas Long. When I purchased it, I had absolutely no idea how much I would end up needing it.

Urban has always been a tour de force. He is the most creative, willful, independent, amazing kid I have ever met. Well, I should say, “…until his brother came along.”

Beringer is “spirited” in a whole different way. Where Urban is big, dramatic and playful; Beringer is focused, methodical and determined. It’s a whole new kind of strong-willed for us. Apparently, it’s time for that 5-week program… again.

Both of the boys are experimenting with their personalities. Beringer is just learning the basics of who he is and what he feels. Urban is testing out what he can do with what he knows he has.

Lately, the experimentation from Urban has led to calls from the school and a lot of my own personal soul searching. How much of his behavior do I take on as my responsibility? I look at the things he is doing in awe and frustration. I wrack my brain trying to figure out where it is coming from.

We have, like most parents, cleansed our language at home, but he still swears like a sailor when he’s raging. Is he learning the words at school? Is he using his rhyming games (“puck, duck, muck, shuck…” “itch, kitch, litch, snitch, pitch…”) to see which words elicit a reaction? Likely a combination of both.

He shouts things at us and see what stings. “DIRTY EYEBALL!” does not get the desired effect. But “FUCKING BITCH!” does. (I assure you, no one in my family uses that language –not even ‘dirty eyeball’. He does not watch TV or movies that use that language. The Lion King certainly does not talk to his father that way.)

So, why is he doing it? He always has reasons, sometimes they are epiphanies, but most of the time they make no sense at all. What I do know is that he is a highly sensitive kid. He feels the emotions and pain of others very deeply. He absorbs it all and doesn’t know what to do with it, and then it explodes out of him in these torrents of nasty words and spittal. It’s disgusting and heart breaking.

The scariest part of all is that it’s like he’s not even there. It’s like he is having an out-of-body experience, and then you say just the right thing, and he’s back and he’s so sorry. He cleans up his mess. He apologizes. He lies down like he’s just expendedeverything he has.

He’s needed a lot of hugs this week. So have I. Last night, I sat in Urban’s room with him on one knee and his arms wrapped around my chest and Beringer on my other knee and his arms wrapped around my neck. We rocked together and hummed. My boys. My beautiful, complicated boys. I love them so much, and I wish that I could take away all the stuff that makes them push over garbage cans in frustration (Beringer) or lie on the floor and wail (Urban). I wish that I could take all that confusion and wash it away with a kiss or a hug or a warm bath.

But for now, we take it one day at a time, and the more frustrated they get, the calmer we must become. The louder they yell, the softer we whisper. The more they push away, the stronger we pull them into a hug. The theory would be that all of this work we are doing now will produce boys who don’t swear and spit and push over garbage cans in later years. We can only hope, right? We can only hope…