Imperfections in the universe

My sweet little Will has been a budding obsessive compulsive boy ever since he first gained motor control of his hands; one went straight to either his hair or mine, and the other to his mouth. Three years later, they’re still there, although occasionally he lets them loose for other activities. This week it’s been drawing at school. Every afternoon the kids come in from their rampaging around the playground, sweaty and wild-haired and sandy from the giant sand-house, and while they wait for their parents to pick them up, they spend the last half hour of the day doing fine-motor control activities—putting together Lego puzzles, tracing stencils, drawing shapes. So last week Will learned how to make circles and something mostly resembling a triangle, and this week he drew his first person. A little frowny, but pretty darn good.



I can look at the drawing and see his process, a big circle followed by a line, but doesn’t it look like they’re covering the reproductive cycle here?



My favorite this week has been his illustrated story about “scary stairs.”



The obsessive compulsive part of this is how upset he gets when he doesn’t get it right. He will just freak right out about messing up that triangle. Saturday morning he got out his Pooh coloring book and was going to color some bees, which should be yellow, he decided, but he just couldn’t bring himself to put the crayon on the page. I can’t do it, he kept insisting, and then he’d come to me and ask me to color it right. It’s as if he can only scribble on a page when it’s blank—if it has lines, or if he’s expected to produce something specific, it’s all over.

We had this same problem with his tennis shoes the other day. He had these cute little velcro strap Nikes, handy dandy for taking on and off all by himself, and he has really about worn them to a nub. I guess we must have bought them a size too big waiting on the usual post-shoe-purchase growth spurt. I had felt for his toes once or twice to make sure they’re weren’t scrunched up in there, but the shoes still seemed to fit—they just looked ratty. But then the velcro started to separate from the strap, at first just enough that the strap would poke out over the edge of the shoe a bit, but later enough that he couldn’t really fasten that strap by himself easily anymore. He was getting worried about it, but still in a low-key sort of way.

Chris tried safety-pinning the bits together, semi-successfully, but really I just made myself a mental note, get Will some new shoes. One morning last week, as we rushed around in our usual pre-school chaos, I was yelling at Laura for losing her lunch money check and not telling me for a week. She’d waited to mention it until she’d run up a negative balance so high they wouldn’t even give her IOUs anymore, just the dry bread crumbs (or maybe peanut butter sandwich) they give the poor indebted kids. Then I hear this blood-curdling scream from the living room, where Chris was helping Will get dressed, and sure enough, the velcro and strap had bid each other adieu. Because the kids have to wear closed toe shoes to school, and because it’s the end of summer and we haven’t bought new fall shoes yet, his only other shoes were sandals, and he had to wear the “busted” shoes. Chris pinned them again, but Will didn’t settle down until I promised, really really promised, that I would pick him up early and take him to buy new shoes that very day. Which, needless to say, I did.

I understand all about the difficulty of delayed gratification, and if that were it, it wouldn’t trouble me so. But, broken shoes aside, it just kills me to watch my boy stop himself from coloring at the ripe old age of three, especially when he’s so creative. I tried once coloring outside the lines myself for him, after which he went ballistic—that’s not right. I’m afraid he’s inherited my powerful and disabling sense that things need to be right in the universe, which I’ve finally learned after almost forty years is a state you never ever reach. Naturally this hasn’t stopped me from working towards it, which might be OK if I hadn’t passed down the gene. Fortunately he’s not quite ready for therapy yet—probably he’ll have to get close to forty like his mother—and he doesn’t have these little episodes about many things, but wow, when they hit, they measure eight or nine on the Richter scale. All kids have temper tantrums, and I’m betting Will pitches one tonight, when I take off the fake tattoo he’s currently sporting, but a kid who worries about coloring—well, one more thing to add to my list of imperfections in the universe.