brat son, errrrrr.....
My husband called my son a brat and it hurt my feelings.
(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! Each ♥️ takes a little bit of pressure off my children to validate my worth!….)
The other day, my 5-year-old was playing Pokemon Monopoly with the little girl who lives across the street. Why Pokemon Monopoly? Because apparently for some, regular Monopoly isn’t boring enough. Anyway, there they were, two beautiful children hunched over the board they’d spread out on our porch, with spring springing all around them. In our yard, yellow roses and pink camellias burst from their buds like the buttons on a buxom woman’s cardigan. A wall of jasmine in our driveway perfumed the air. From the giant sycamores above, green parrots squawked and red-whiskered bulbuls sang like a music box. In case you’re not getting the picture, it was heavenly. Especially the part about me not having to play Monopoly. Then something in the game did not go my child’s way, and he began to lose his shit. This reaction is not unusual for my child, who I would kindly describe as intense. “He’s gotten a lot better since he was 4,” remarked our neighbor, the little girl’s dad. That someone else should offer their opinion on my son’s intensity hurt my feelings, but not nearly as much as what would follow….
The next morning, our neighbor’s comment still echoing in my head, I asked my husband if he thought our son was a brat. “Yes,” he responded flatly. I waited for him to qualify his statement with something like “….because all children are.” But he didn’t. Instead he reminded me of my child’s regular insolence during karate, which I’d blissfully managed to ignore until the only kid naughtier than him got moved to a different class. Also, hadn’t I noticed my son’s tendency to disregard his coach’s instructions during soccer? (To be fair, my husband is his coach.) So fine. He’s got a bad boy streak. Can’t be too nice or the world will run you over! But could he really be a brat? This is the same little boy who asks me what God is while we’re reading Calvin and Hobbs and listens intently as I try to explain. He’s the same little boy who hides under the covers when Ramona gets sent to the bench for pulling Susan’s curls in chapter 2 of Ramona the Pest because “that part’s too scary”. He’s the same little boy who clung to me with tears in his eyes as we waited to hear if his split chin needed stitches. Brat is a word for children who aren’t yours. Not because it can’t be true, but because it implies a lack of curiosity. Brat is a word to be used when you don’t care to get to know person. For us (his own parents!) to call my son a brat felt as cruel as loading him into a picnic basket and dropping him off at a firehouse.
The manosphere casts a long shadow over our child-rearing. Keeping two boys under six alive is hard enough — get that battery out of your mouth, put down the weed wacker, don’t break that plate over your brother’s head — are all things we’ve actually had to tell them because they lack the common sense to figure it out for themselves. On top of that, we also have to not raise assholes. And not raising assholes is harder than ever, because being an asshole is highly incentivized these days. If you’re really good at it, you could grow up to be president! But how do you not raise an asshole? My husband thinks you do it with structure and limits, rules and discipline. After all, isn’t the problem with so many terrible men that they feel entitled to do/take whatever they want? I don’t think my husband’s approach is wrong, but so often in those moments where discipline is required, I feel my sons yearning for tenderness. And I want to show them tenderness, because I want them to be tender, too. Logically, I know my boys need both of what my husband and I feel compelled to offer, but how much of each? What exact portions does the recipe call for to make a nice man? And what if we can’t make one? What if it makes no difference what we do? (Because sometimes it doesn’t. Just read Sue Klebold’s memoir!)
But in the spirit of full disclosure, my concerns over the yay or nay of it all re: my son’s brattiness have less to do my with sense of him, and more to do with my sense of self. Because yes, for the sake of others, I want my child to inflict minimal harm and discomfort. But as far as how I feel about him, whether he’s a brat is sort of irrelevant. It can’t really touch how devoted I am to him and his brother, who can also be a brat. That devotion demands so much of me, there is none of me left over to question it. Why difference does it make who they are? It can’t change the fact that they are all my days and all my energy and all my sadness and all my joy. BUT… if he is a brat, what does that say about his mother, a woman whose personality I often find to be total trash? Am I using my child as the opposite of a human shield? Am I weaponizing him in my own war against myself? SEE?! This is exactly why people like me get on my nerves. We always make it about us! To dig myself out of holes like these, it helps to remember that in addition to being me, I’m also someone’s child. How comforting to know I’m loved by people who don’t need to be charmed by my personality.
My dad once told me that marriage’s great project is to take the ideas you’ve formed about yourself and see if they hold true in your dealings with your partner. After all, how can you really know who you are unless you know who you are with someone else? In other words, if a tree has a personality in a forest and no one is around to get to know it blah blah blah…. Being a parent feels the same but more so. I say I want to protect my sons from being red pilled by the manosphere, but what better way to turn someone into a men’s rights activist than for his mother to call him a brat on the internet? So let me explain, for any son reading this in the future, that brat meant something very different when this was written, way back in the days of Charli XCX. I couldn’t say exactly what, because even in the past I was old. Still, I know it was good. Also rest assured, now-grown-up-son, you were no more bratty (in the bad way) than most kids, but in the good way, you were the brattiest of all. Regardless, to your own brat-of-a-mother, none of it mattered. It only mattered that you were mine.