No Pain

     I must admit that I have a lot of guilt over my last post. I wasn't very nice to my boy. But I'm not going to delete it. Ian is a hard kid and I need to be able to express the good as well as the bad. Fortunately his behavior is improving, at least on the home front.
     I've spent the better part of this evening immersed in a Baldacci novel while Ian quietly watched T.V. Every so often I'd head out to the family room and tell him he's too close to the screen. For some reason, he has to have his face pressed to the glass in order to see. Yet he always passes his eye exams. Go figure. The last time I ventured out I found him walking calmly out of the kitchen, a white dishcloth wrapped around his hand. He stopped me and said, "Mom? Can you finish cutting my pickles?"
     "Were you trying to cut pickles yourself?" I asked.
     "Yeah, but I missed."
     That's when I noticed the blood.
     "Ian? Are you okay? Did you cut yourself?"
     He unwrapped the dishcloth to reveal a bloodsoaked thumb, "A little. You are mad?"
     "No, I'm not mad. Let's get that cleaned up."
     He didn't protest as I helped him wash pickle juice off his hands and clean the cut. It was of those that makes you cringe and say to yourself Stitches? Uh...maybe...maybe not...maybe... In the end I settled for Polysporin and a thick layer of band aids. If he bleeds through I might have to rethink the stitches. While doctoring his wound I told him to let me do the cutting from now on. "You aren't quite old enough to use the sharp knives yet, okay?"
     "Okay."
     And that was that. He went back to the T.V. and I went to the kitchen to clean up the mess. On the cutting board I found two large dill pickles, evenly sliced into chunks. He got all the way through his cutting until the last part of the pickle, when his thumb got in the way. Not too shabby. I finished the last part for him. As I wiped off the cutting board he came back into the kitchen, got a paper towel, gathered up his dills and said, "I almost forgot my pickles."
    

Empty Bucket

     I've tried for several weeks to find something positive to write about. I've tried taking some of Ian's outbursts and thinking of them in a comical way. I've tried looking at him when he's sleeping, hoping to dredge up some maternal love, but my bucket is dry and my patience withered. There's only one thing I want at this point: to inflict bodily harm--to give him a good taste of what it's like to be his mother.
     During sacrament meeting yesterday, Ian decided that his matchbox cars needed to jump benches. And then he decided he should follow them. While the deacons passed the sacrament, he was running up the aisle, not caring about jostling water trays or glares from the bishopric. When I attempted to reign him in by taking away his toys, he tried head-butting me and started repeating, in his screeching voice, "I want it! I want it! I want it!"
     "That's it!" I hissed in his ear. "You are going out!"
     Which is what he wanted. I dragged him--none too gently--out into the foyer where I stuck him in a corner by the garbage can. Oops. My mistake. Shouldn't have put him by the trash. He tried pulling the liner out. I moved him to a different corner. He started jumping and banging the coat hangers together. I moved him again. He began to kick the walls with his shoes. I took his shoes away. He threw his socks at me so I kept those too. We were beginning to draw a crowd and all I wanted to do was gouge his eyes and cane him to death. Instead, I stuck him in an empty classroom informing him, "This is spirit prison. Good luck getting out," and then I shut the door. It was a relief not to see his face. He was safe from me and I was safe from him, not to mention he wasn't disturbing anyone. Until he decided to throw his body against the door. Over and over again.
     You might be asking yourself why didn't I just take him home and put him in a time out? I didn't do it because that's what he wanted. He hates being at church so he's determined to make it miserable for everyone else. I was waiting for sacrament meeting to be over so that I could turn him over to the primary and he could be someone elses problem for the next two hours. Which is what I did. And then I went home for a time out.
     This is what my life has been like since my last post. I don't know what is up with my kid, but he is an absolute menace. He screeches constantly like a two-year-old banshee, he trash talks everyone around him, he's violent and stubborn and obstinate and I can't think of one good thing to say about him.
     At a birthday party last week, he loudly informed an overweight woman that she had a big butt. He said, "Hey, fatty! Get your big butt out of my face!" I was horrified. We don't talk that way in our home. Where was this coming from?
     Tawni brought a friend home the other day. She was Asian. Ian took one look at her and said, "Hey, China! China, China!"
     I've come to one conclusion. My kid is a shit. Plain and simple. One minute he explodes like diarrhea, and the next he's as stubborn as constipation. Sometimes he's messy and other times he slips right on by and you never see him until it's too late. He can be sneaky, hard, loose--but one thing is certain--his bad odor lingers long after he's left the room.