My boy, aged five and three-quarters, is always fulfilling his curiosity on physical limitations—mainly, how much pain his dad can take. Then, he denies the reason for fulfilling this curiosity.
It goes like this: A query will enter his mind and he’ll see it through. For instance: What would it be like to smack Dad right across the face? Would it hurt him?
Smack!
“Hey!” I say, “Why did you do that?”
“I dunno,” he says. Then he punches me in the chin.
“Hey! You must know why you did it,” I continue.
“No I don’t.”
In another moment: What would it be like to climb on top of the couch where Dad is napping and jump as high as possible, coming down with knees bent, right on his unprotected midsection?
“Hey!” I say. “What did you do that for?”
“I dunno.” He yanks my bottom lip to see how far it will stretch.
But he does know why he does these things. And I know what he knows, because I am his father. And the truth is, I sort of asked for this treatment. You see, I tell my son every chance I get that I am made out of steel. That I cannot be hurt. When he punches me, I ask him if his hand is all right, because I know how much it hurts people to punch steel.
I do this for two reasons:
1) It bothers him to no end. “If you’re made out of steel,” he says, “then why does this hurt you?” He punches me in the groin. “It doesn’t hurt,” I say in a voice that is now an octave higher. “Is your hand okay?”
2) At his age, boys already see their dads as superheroes of sorts. I have to say, the kid really likes me. He wants to be around me all the time. I’m simply building on the dad-is-a-superhero myth in his little head.
I feel I deserve to be a superhero. One day, the boy won’t care a lick about me. I’ll have to beg him to come over to help me out of my chair. But today, I am the Man of Steel, and he is my sidekick. We don’t really walk places so much as we bump into each other, and I drag him (on his insistence), and he tries to tackle my leg at inappropriate times. I want to stress, he is normally an extremely well-behaved little boy—he is the only kid in his preschool class to never sit on the dreaded Red Circle. But with me …
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