I’m a little concerned that my 4-year-old doesn’t have enough friends.
I’m also aware that I’m being a lunatic.
My son is not at an age where he can properly operate a fork, let alone forge enduring emotional ties. And anyway, he has friends: Eva and James down the street; his cousins a few towns over; Kyle, this 5-year-old who floats around our neighborhood like some sort of rootless drifter — albeit one primarily interested in drinking our Gatorade.
My son also has friends at school — rare is the morning that he doesn’t tumble headlong into a flailing crowd of something: the kids building laser-spy guns and helicopter boats; the girls tumbling into beanbags by the chalkboard; his teachers, who he likes to impress with his Hulk shirt.
But this morning, the patterns shifted slightly. Once at school — like every morning — he ran over to the Block Center — like every morning. This morning, a boy and a girl were sitting there, furiously building. The boy talked first.
“I’m going to play with Alicia today,” said the boy, who I think is Max.
“But I thought you were my friend?” my son responded, with shocking plaintiveness.
“No, I’m not your friend. I’m going to play with Alicia today,” repeated Max, closing the discussion. And my son, having not much previous experience with outright ice-cold rejection, put his head down and slunk away to the Puzzle Center, where he quietly pulled out a box of train pieces and sat on the floor while I tried not to sweep him up and take him immediately for three breakfast sundaes.
Now, understand, I am fully aware that at this point:
1) The kids are going to play together anyway. In fact, about 30 seconds after announcing that his morning’s friend allegiances lied elsewhere, Max, my son and this appealing new Alicia person were all using Lincoln Logs to craft some combination of Santa’s sleigh and a volcano. (It was hard to tell from my position outside the window, staring in.)
2) My son has a wisp of an idea about what the word “friend” means. In fact, on this day, I’m sure he equated “long-term emotional connection” with playing with sticks for 20 minutes before Mr. Bob comes to read “Sam and the Firefly.” I know this because my wife and I have both recently been designated his “best friend,” a title as wondrously welcome as it is frighteningly tenuous. I’m writing it here so I can one day present proof that he ever said it at all.
3) The other kid, Max, isn’t being vindictive. He isn’t being anything. He’s 4. But to hear those words, regardless of whether or not it’s being delivered in the nebulous, half-formed social order of the average preschool, is pretty comprehensively heartbreaking. It opens up this little wormhole into your brain where perspective falls away, a stiff wind blows and without warning you’re standing on the junior high school track getting pushed around by kids who have cigarettes for some reason.
I am torn about how to respond to this, and am irritated that I’m torn. This is preschool. If I’m chafing at off-handed comments made by kids who are not yet fully vested in the idea of washing your hands after peeing, imagine what sort of unspeakable horrors await me in junior high or, gasp, high school, in which kids shatter the fragile veil of emotional literacy for sport and, I think, points.
I think a lot when he’s not looking, when he’s immersed in the Grinch or a particularly colorful rocket toy.
Is he around enough people?
Is my worry about this comforting or smothering to him?
Should we live closer to his cousins, his family?
Does he play with people at school?
I had to ask that one last week, when my son came home with the news that some kid had apparently smacked him in the face on the playground. Further investigation revealed that my son might have started it, and by that I mean probably totally started it.
And I guess that’s it: There will be mornings he swings, and mornings he has to put up with other people’s swings, and that is the natural order of things, and any problems I have about that will be mine, at least until I stop reflexively claiming responsibility for them…in about 80 years.
