Wisdom Isn’t For Kids

The boy was working on a last minute gift for the Wife. He’d already picked out a couple of presents, but he wanted to make her something as well. So, he set to work on one of those rubber band bracelets that seems to have taken the world by storm. Perhaps its just our world, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the world.

He came home one day a couple months ago and was weaving these these rubber bands together with his fingers. He said a friend had shown him how to do it at school. Soon after that, the Wife had purchased a supply of rubber bands for making the bracelets and he and the lass would sit and string them together. Shortly after that, he got a “loom” for making even fancier patterns. Then we were seeing all the kids making the dang things. Since then, both kids have mastered several patterns and designs and will sit and work on them when the mood strikes them.

So the boy had worked out a hybrid design involving a “hex-a-fish” and a “star-burst” design together and was working on joining the two halves together. That’s when “disaster” struck. Remember, when you’re a kid, everything that doesn’t go exactly, perfectly, as expected is a disaster.

The boy, naturally, responded appropriately.

He grabbed the bracelet he’d been working on and threw it across the room. Then yelled about how the world isn’t fair and everything always goes wrong right at the end when everything is almost done.

The Wife and I both tried to calm him a bit, but it was little use. He was cranked up and needed to be distracted from it. He stomped upstairs to go beat up his bed, or something.

I then had an idea.

I went up after him and asked him to join me for a moment. We walked over to a book shelf I’d made for the Wife and I pointed to some inlay work I’d done on it. It was a straight line of alternating darker wood set into a piece of maple. The accent gave the book shelf a little bit of character that it otherwise would have lacked.

It also never would have been there if I hadn’t messed up while building the bookshelf. I’d cut a groove on the wrong side of that piece of wood. I was upset when I’d done it, but rather than hurl the piece across the yard and destroy the garage to vent my rage, I walked away from it. I showed it to the Wife a bit later and she came up with the idea for the inlay.

So I explained all this to the boy. I set it up by asking him if what he thought of that little bit of inlay and then went on to explain how it ended up there. I even concluded the entire thing with a nice pithy “And the only reason it’s there is because of a mistake,” which, given the circumstances, I thought was a nice way to try and give him a different perspective on his own situation.

I was feeling pretty good about myself at that point. It was just like the movies where the young child is imparted with some useful life wisdom by his parent and everyone walks away happy and better. Roll credits.

Yeah, right.

The boy, seeing I was done, got up and walked back to his room to continue doing whatever it was he’d been doing. I sat there for a moment, admittedly disappointed. I already knew life kids don’t accept these sorts of lessons quite so neatly and cleanly as we parents would like. But I’d hoped this would at least get some kind of reaction. Alas, it was not meant to be.