I’ve been feeling sort of bad lately because there will be parents who will fawn over my daughter, and I’ll just look at their kid, and their child won’t seem to stir me in the same way. If a parent keeps complimenting our child do we have to return the favor? I’ve done this before and it turned into a kind of Japanese bowing farewell, both sides caught in a gushing eddy.
I don’t have to fake it all the time–I really do like a lot of my daughter’s other three-year-old friends–she has fairly good taste, yet does have a soft spot for the weak, slow and emotionally disturbed.
With some of the kids I have trouble not only with finding something nice to say, but hiding my disinterest and occasionally, my semi-aversion. One girl at her school is a whiny tank, one looks like she’s on Kolonopin, and this little red-headed girl eerily resembles John Madden. Finally, there’s one boy whose mom compliments my daughter all the time, and he’s my little foe–he’s an angry and mean son of a bitch who creeps me out with his habitual expression, which makes him look like he just had sex and is telling his friends about it. His laugh is diabolical, like he just screwed over a drug dealer named Fang, and on top of all this he hits sand, food, books, and kids. Once he ran off with my daughter’s blanket and my keys and when I told him to give it back he threw everything at me. I was going to “speak assertively” with him, but then he gave me one of his looks and I seriously thought he was going to cap my ass. So I told on him, and I sort of have been doing this a lot.
But now, since I’ve been feeling bad about my lack of reciprocal fawning I am going to start fresh and try to be understanding. Maybe he has trouble at home, maybe he has mental problems or a botched circumcision. My daughter tries to explain that he’s “just really bad,” but I’ll try and be the better person. I’m thirty years older, after all.