It was 2000 when I picked up my seven year old son, Josh, from summer child care and heard multiple accounts from teachers of how, while on a field trip, he'd hit a child in the leg with a golf club, and yet another child in the chest. Like any responsible parent, I was pretty concerned and determined to set this situation right. He and I marched out to the car and I buckled him in. I waited until I started driving to start the conversation, not on purpose necessarily, but I could tell it was making him anxious. He hadn't said a word since we walked out of the school.
I watched him in the rearview mirror for a minute and then asked him, “Did you hit a kid in school today?” Very meekly he said, “Yeah.” This was not in his nature at all. First, he wasn’t big for his age and second, he was a sincerely sensitive, big-hearted kid. At the same time, I realized that kids will be kids and there are times when tempers flair and these things happen. For that reason alone I wanted to find out exactly what happened before I doled out one of my world famously humiliating punishment-fits-the crime penances. The most recent of which had been when another child had dared Josh to pull the head off of a Barbie doll that belonged to the school and he’d done it. That night, during the 30 minutes that was allotted for video games, he had to take his allowance to the toy store and buy a replacement Barbie. He had to go through the line all by himself while I waited for him where I could see what was happening. If he was asked if he was buying the doll for a sister or a friend or whatever the clerk was destined to ask him, he had to say, “no.” He could only tell them he was buying it for his school and why, if he told them anything. He had to be honest. He was embarrassed, but he told me years later that he was always conscious of how he was treating other people’s things after that.
“Who did you hit?” I asked, beginning to feel a bit frustrated.
“Ronald,” he said, sounding ashamed.
I had heard that name several times since he’d started at that school. Was that one of his little friends? “Who was the other kid?”
“Just him.”
“Your teacher said you hit two kids.”
“I hit him twice,” he said in a voice that was so phenomenally adorable I almost laughed. The two fingers he was holding up didn’t make it any easier not to.
“Oh.” How do I respond to that? “Why’d you hit him?”
“I don’t know,” he told me, mumbling the words together.
“So you just hit him for no reason?”
“No,” he said, becoming even more quiet.
“So why’d you hit him, Josh? You know that’s not how you’re supposed to act.”
“Um,” he said a few times and then miraculously became a very energetic participant in the conversation. “So, we were playing putt-putt at Adventure Golf and Ronald kept not letting us play. And he kept kicking our balls away and pushing us down and then when I was trying to go he stepped on my golf ball and wouldn’t let me go and Miss Amy told me to go because I was holding up the line so I went and Ronald started crying and said I hit him.”
Well, this was quite a bit of information, but I was pretty sure after hearing it that I remembered why I’d heard Ronald’s name so many times before. He was the class bully.
“Did Miss Amy see Ronald standing on your golf ball?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Did she tell him to stop?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Miss Carol told Miss Amy they aren’t supposed tell Ronald no anymore because his dad yells at them.”
Well, this was suddenly making complete sense. “And why’d you hit him the second time?”
“I was trying to go again and I he pushed Katie into me and she started crying and then he stood in front of me so I couldn’t go.”
“So you hit him?”
“No, Miss Carol yelled at me to go because everyone was waiting, so I had to go.”
“So you hit him?”
“No. I hit the ball and it hit him and he started crying.”
I smiled a smile that he couldn’t see from his seat behind me. Another moment came to mind, years earlier when he was a much smaller child and faced with a bully almost twice his size. He stood up for himself then, too, refusing to back down. “Is Ronald the kid that bullies you all the time in school?”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding somewhat ashamed to admit it.
“Why does he pick on you?” I wanted to know.
“He picks on everybody.”
“And the teachers don’t stop him?”
“Not anymore,” he said, looking out the window.
We drove the rest of the way home in silence. I was thinking about how much of an advantage this kid was going to have in life if he continued to refuse to submit to the bullies of the world and he, I was certain, was thinking about how horribly creative his punishment was going to be for this most recent transgression.
We got home and climbed out of the car. Josh rushed ahead of me toward the house, then stopped and walked back. “Am I going to get in trouble?”
“Do you think you should get in trouble?”
“No,” he said earnestly.
“Why not?” I asked just as earnestly.
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.
“Well,” I said legitimately concerned about stunting my child’s will to stand up for himself, “I don’t either.”
His eyes turned into golf balls and his mouth dropped open. “You don’t?” he asked.
“No, I don’t,” I told him. “You shouldn’t hit people, Josh, but I like that you stand up for yourself when someone bullies you or your friends. And it sounds like your teachers have just left you and the other kids out to dangle in front of this kid with no support. If you start a fight,” I added, just as my father had told me many years before, “you’ll will be in a lot of trouble, you know that, right?”
“Yeah,” he said looking at the driveway.
“But I want you to stand up for yourself, so no, I’m not going to punish you.”
His sense of relief was more than obvious when he ran into the garage and grabbed his skateboard. I’d been chuckling to myself all week about how his stories of his amazing skateboarding abilities did not quite match up with his actual participation in the sport. He had been bragging for weeks about the tricks he was performing, but when it was “show time” he tended to fall down a bit more than he completed any of them. I chalked this up to his very active imagination and his desire to be more than just a typical kid. I grew up feeling this way and I took that hope with me into adulthood. That hope to be more than typical is in big part responsible for many of my successes. So while I cautioned him to be careful not to let his exaggerations progress into lying, another part of me believed that the “hotshot kid” in his exaggerations was how he saw himself and I wanted to encourage him to grow that visualization into reality.
And that was the moment the spark lit the match. Standing there watching my son try his hardest and imagine himself greater I realized he was already a kind of hero. The little kid who never backed down from a bully, and was willing to work hard enough to become the action star he dreamed of being.
And then I wondered, what would happen if this kid suddenly developed superpowers?
To read the adventures that were inspired by this young man, visit Amazon: Lincoln Nabb and the Bully's Father
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NOW AVAILABLE! : Lincoln Nabb and the Bully's Father - Lincoln Nabb struggles with many of the same things the rest of us do. He's bored in school, wants to spend time with his friends, and he wants to understand where these strange abilities are coming from and how to control them. He's spent most his life being bullied by bigger kids because he's never had the ability to defend himself. But much more than that is about to change in Lincoln's world and the keys the biggest mystery of his entire life are being held by the one person he'd least suspect.
