In Which Kai Gets Punished Unfairly

There was an incident at the pool a couple of weeks ago that’s still bugging me.

It was a sweltering afternoon, the kind where I grudgingly lay down my book and throw “My-bones-are-too-old-for-this-water-to-feel-warm-so-I’ll-just-sit-here-on-the-side-and-watch-you” to the wind to splash and swim with Kai and Amélie. I was busy watching Amélie learning to swim underwater when a woman I didn’t know approached me. Because of the simple fact that I didn’t recognize her, I’m fairly certain she doesn’t live in town.

“Is that your kid over there with the black hair?” she snarled in her smoker’s voice.

First of all, Kai’s hair isn’t black; it’s brown, so it took me a moment to realize that it was him she was indicating. Secondly, Kai is not my kid, a point that seemed to fine to explain considering her nasty tone.

“He’s with me,” I replied. “Is there a problem?” I could see that Kai was sitting cross-legged on his towel just on the other side of the shallow.

“He just shoved my kid in the face is all,” she said.

Her intonation on “is all” indicated that in fact it wasn’t “all” and that she was taking what was probably a bit of mild horseplay very personally.

I apologized and told her that I would speak to Kai about it.

“Yeah, well, it’s no big deal, ‘cause the lifeguard already gave him time-out. Kids do other kids, you know. I just thought, y’know, that you should know or something.”

“Or something”? I was peeved at the way she spoke down to me but was determined to stay polite. I thanked her once again and lifted myself out of the pool to sit next to Kai.

As soon as I sat down on the towel and asked Kai what had happened, he burst into tears and crawled up onto my lap, looping his arms around my neck and burying his head in my chest. He told me through heavy sobs that he had been playing with the angry woman’s child when the other boy had started to splash him. Kai asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He asked several more times, and when the boy wouldn’t stop splashing water into Kai’s face and eyes, Kai tried to gently push him away. Bodies are slippery in the water, though, and he accidentally got the kid in the face. That’s when the lifeguard had asked Kai to take a short time-out.

“But he only s-s-saw the end!” Kai sobbed. “He didn’t even see what the o-o-other boy did!”

Then Kai asked if we could leave. He is someone who takes punishment very personally, and he was mortified. It was the first time he’d ever been punished by a lifeguard.

First of all, I wasn’t going to let some kid and his bully mother ruin our day at the pool. It was too hot to go home and Amélie was still having a great time practicing her new skills. Secondly, I didn’t feel that it was appropriate for Kai to evade punishment by convincing me to take him home, even if the punishment wasn’t the most fair. I explained to Kai that sometimes the people in charge don’t know the entire situation, and that sometimes they may make decisions that we don’t agree with, knowing what we know. We still trust their judgment, though, because sometimes they might see something that we don’t see, and they are in charge of keeping us safe. Even though it seemed like the lifeguard punished Kai unfairly, I told him, he thought he was protecting the other boy from being pushed.

Kai nodded; he understood, but he admitted to being very embarrassed. I told him that it was okay, but that I was on his side, always, and that as long as we knew that he hadn’t shoved the boy maliciously, that he had nothing to be embarrassed about.

I sat with him for a good twenty minutes. He cried softly, still curled up against me, but soon stopped and started taking some deep breaths, inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth. Honestly, sometimes I am so impressed with the level of maturity in these kids.

Then he was ready to get back into the water, and I’ve rarely been so proud of him, with such confidence did he jump right back in to find a new playmate. I, on the other hand, was still bothered by the entire situation. I was still angry at the mother for the snotty tone she took with me, which I didn’t understand but is something that I’ve experienced before when I’ve taken the kids to neighboring communities, to places like the mall or Barnes & Noble.

The thing is, when I take Kai and Amélie out in places where nobody knows us (that is to say, outside Yellow Springs), many people assume that they are my children, something that never ceases to shock me, mostly because we look nothing alike. My blonde hair and blue eyes made many French people confuse me for a German, while Kai and Amélie’s olive skin and dark eyes make them looking nothing if not incredibly exotic. But I guess most people aren’t used to seeing our level of familiarity between babysitters and their charges, and a lot of Ohioans give me a distinct “Huh?” look when I identify myself as their nanny. So maybe it’s the way they snuggle up to me in public, as Kai did at the pool, that leads people to believe that I am their mother, not their nanny. That assumption made, they must assume that I am a young mother. A very young mother. I’ve been working as a nanny for about three years, and while I may have a bit of a mother’s sensibility, I barely look my age. And yet many people seem to have no trouble imagining that I am a 21-year-old mother of two, aged five and seven! Maybe that’s why they feel they have the right to talk to me the way the angry mother at the pool did when she looked me up and down and spat the question: “Is that your kid over there with the black hair?” Or maybe people are just rude. 

In addition to her less than polite demeanor, I didn’t appreciate that the mother had simply dumped the situation on me and then completely absolved herself of it. I’m not blowing things out of proportion; I’m just following her lead, the level of gravity that she implied when she ironically pronounced “is all.” To her, it was a big deal – her child had been wronged. She didn’t, however, bother to ask her child if he had done anything to provoke Kai’s behavior (on the contrary, I saw her hand him a dollar afterward, which he promptly spent on a handful of candy at the snack bar).

In this situation, I missed the kind of community parenting that I feel distinguishes our small town. Yellow Springers are fond of the African proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child,” and they mostly take that mantra to heart. As a child I remember feeling like I was surrounded by parental figures. Villagers who knew me or my parents, or sometimes even those who were unknown to me, were just as quick to gently correct me as they were to compliment me on my performance in the school play. Many parents would consider this to be crossing a line, but it was always done so lovingly that I think my parents and many others often appreciated the extra help.

The other mother at the pool that day was certainly not the type I would expect nor want to discipline Kai, and later on I saw her chiding her own child in a much harsher manner than I would ever consider using on Kai or Amélie. However, I have two children to watch – two children who don’t always find themselves in the same area of the pool or playing with the same friends – and I must stretch my attention to monitor them both. When I can’t be close to one of them, I expect (and am rarely disappointed) that the other adults in the area will pick up my slack, just as I occasionally settle disputes or break up splash wars in my vicinity of the pool. But this mother witnessed the episode (according to Kai she was right next to them the whole time) and didn’t intervene at all, even on behalf of her own child! Her “kids do other kids” comment, which I am still struggling to understand, seems to demonstrate a kind of hands-off parenting that I hope never to exercise myself.

I never punished Kai for shoving the other boy, though I didn’t exactly pat him on the back for it either. While I’ve put Kai or Amélie in time-out myself for hitting or pushing one another unnecessarily, I just couldn’t help but feel that Kai did the right thing in this situation. After all, he explained to me that he had tried to use his words but that the boy hadn’t responded. Generally I tell the kids that if they can’t solve a problem with words, they need to come find me before they resort to violent behavior. Maybe he looked for me and didn’t see me on the other side of the shallow end where I was playing with Amélie. For that, I feel a bit guilty. Is it my fault that he got in trouble? Probably not. Would he have pushed the boy anyway? Maybe.

At the end of a long post like this, you probably expect me to have made some sort of deep realization or to offer some profound bit of wisdom. Not gonna happen. I’m still contemplating that afternoon. Overall, I was just so impressed by the grace that Kai demonstrated. The way he sat bravely on the towel until I came to talk to him, the fact that he seemed to understand and respect the lifeguard’s authority, the easy way in which he accepted that famous line that Papa often uttered during my youth: “Life’s not always fair,” his self-calming exercise as he breathed deeply, and the way he seemed just a little bit taller as he strode back over to the pool’s edge afterward and dove into the water.

Sometimes I think he’s more mature than I am.