Can I Spare Him the Plague That Struck Me?

I chaperoned my second preschool field trip yesterday. The first was to the Festival of Trees at the Appleton Art Center in early December. I could handle that. This one, though, was more of a challenge--fifty preschoolers on thirteen lanes of a bowling alley. Now THAT is a spectacle to behold.

Once the six-pound chartruese balls were in place and we'd gotten into the rhythm of pushing the reset button (the pinsetter doesn't notice a ball striking the pins at roughly the speed of continental drift), a good time was had by all. Well, almost all. All but my son and me.

We'd visited Grandma's house in Green Bay the day before, and the excitement and late return left us both a bit worse for the wear. He and I also tend to experience a strange harmonic amplification of our bad moods--picture those films of that poorly engineered suspension bridge shaking itself to bits and you'll know what I'm talking about. It's not pretty.

That's what was going on this particular morning. He was tired, I was tired...we were two tired peas in a cramped, gunpowder-packed pod.

Then the clinging started. And the whining. And the pushing, sassing, and shouting. I did my best to fake my way to success, cheering for him each time he threw (and you can take that verb quite literally) the ball down the lane. But the cheering only enraged him. He ran off to a corner to cry.

When I approached him, he said tearfully, "You cheered when I didn't knock over any pins! Not getting any pins isn't good! You don't cheer for something that's not good!"

I was speechless. We hadn't talked about the idea behind bowling, the scoring, nothing...heck, I hadn't even told him we were GOING bowling until we got up that morning. Where was this coming from?

"Honey, I was cheering because you were trying hard," I explained. "We're just here to have a good time."

"Well, it's not GOOD to not get any pins. So don't cheer for me any more when I don't!" he said.

What could I say but OK?

I watched his next turn attentively, clapping when six pins fell on his first ball. Then, when he knocked down two more with his second, I said, "Good job, buddy!"

He stomped up to me, near tears again, and said, "Don't cheer when I only got two! I didn't get all of them."

Obviously, this was not about bowling. I tried to convince myself that this was a genetic thing, that he was somehow hardwired for competition. That it was his dad's fault. Anything, anything, but that my own perfectionism had already rubbed off on him at age four.

After all, I've abandoned that approach to life. I'm not engrossed in a high-achieving career, I don't strive for an impeccable home (what parent of small children since the invention of Legos and Play-Doh could?), and I'm known to spend entire days in my gym clothes. I'm so far from perfect that he couldn't possibly have learned this from me.

Oh, but they watch so closely, far more closely than we watch ourselves. He's heard me sulk when the scrambled eggs are overcooked, fret when I'm not prepared for a meeting at church, and rant when we're late to the Y. On a bike ride through a new neighborhood one day last summer when he was barely four, he pointed to a decidedly nice home and said, "That house is prettier than ours." Why would he think that unless he picked it up from someone like, oh, me?

He hears every comparison I make and soaks up every disappointment with myself or my situation that I express. And tragically, his observations manifest themselves in, of all places, a bowling alley. Who can get that upset about bowling?

I know who. She was a nine-year-old girl in a Saturday morning league who used to get all bothered when her ball went left when it was supposed to go right. She didn't mind so much if her team won or lost, but she obsessed over missing an easy spare. She was me.