There’s the old adage “An emergency on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” I bring this up in the context of the boy coming screaming down the steps this morning and asking me, in an extremely agitated state, “Do you know where my swim shirt is?”
I flatly replied “No.”
He seems not to have figured out that I don’t have a “lost item” tracker in my cerebral cortex. Nor do I have x-ray vision. I can use logic though, and invariably this is all that’s needed to track down 99% of the “lost” items he and his sister come at me with. The thing is, I hate to do that because he’d rather I or the Wife find his lost items. He won’t learn if he doesn’t do.
“Well, it’s not my fault that it’s lost because you did laundry, so you were the last one to see it.”
These sorts of statements test my patience. On the one hand, he’s frustrated and doesn’t possess very good coping skills yet and I’m aware of that circumstance. On the other, he’s being extraordinarily rude to someone he’s asking for help. On yet another hand, he seems capable of using logic, albeit a twisted form of it. Ultimately, today, I decide to hold my tongue and let his comment slide. But I don’t get up to help him look- I’m sure it’s somewhere obvious and sensible, he’s just too worked up to think of that spot.
He stomps upstairs to continue his search, screaming “It’s not anywhere!” This is always the pattern for lost items. He looks in the spots where he expects the item to be and doesn’t find it. He then looks more frantically in the spot he expects the item to be, and still doesn’t find it. In between, he gets up and walks in circles gazing at all areas of the room along the way, declares “It isn’t anywhere!” and then looks a third time where he expects it to be. Unremarkably, he still does not find it. When I or the Wife ask “Where did you see or have it last?” the reply is invariably “I had it and then put it away right here. Someone picked it up and moved it on me. This always happens to me!” The thumping sound that follows is typically my palm hitting my face.
By this point, the boy is highly agitated and difficult to deal with. He yells, and retorts to suggestions with great amounts of sarcasm. We calmly try to suggest places he might look and he invariably replies he already looked there. The Wife and I are dubious of this prospect because, well, every time we intervene we look in a couple of spots and lo-and-behold the item turns up exactly where we said it would.
The good news is the boy finally found his swim shirt in the laundry. Apparently, he actually had to look to find it. You know, that means moving a couple of other articles of clothing to uncover his shirt. The bad news is he was an ootch to his Mother, who was trying to get ready for the day while he stomped around with his searching antics, along the way.
My assumption is that someday he’ll learn how to find things in a more congenial manner. The tough part is I’ve been thinking that for what seems a long time now.