My two-year-old son does not deal crack on street corners, and yet I often find myself talking to him as if I were one of the men and women of law enforcement. At the dinner table: “Put the knife down. Put it down right now.” When changing diapers: “Put your hands on the toilet and don’t move. Hey! Stand up! Stand up and put your hands on the toilet.” After he throws something large and heavy at my head: “You’re going to sit down here and be quiet, you got it? Right here, and don’t move.”
His preschool probably does not help our police-prisoner relationship. The other day when I dropped him off they had all these kids out in the yard digging a hole. All that was missing was a Cool-Hand-Luke prison guard saying, “What’s that hole doing in my yard, boy? Fill it in.”
After I pick him up from preschool, he sometimes goes through a two-hour period of resocialization. He lists all the people he knows, putting the adjective “stupid” in front of every person. I find chocolate and bananas speed up the process of getting him “back in the world.”
It’s not easy being a kid, is it? Kids are by their nature mentally underdeveloped. In preschool he is thrown into a whole yard full of snot eaters, screechers, pushers, eye-pokers and self-defecators, himself included. I can understand why he sometimes prefers the company of snails.
The Sugar Pea Express 