Boys

A couple months ago, Oliver came home from preschool casually mentioning that a friend he played with was pretending he had weapons in school.

Weapons.  Weapons! My sweet 4-year-old baby boy just uttered the word, "weapons."  I can understand why Oliver knows about guns- it is absolutely unavoidable between owning a Batcave, a Nerf gun and even dinky dollar-store water guns.  Boys are practically born with the concept of guns and shooting.  Not that I'm at peace with it, but I understand that it's inevitable.  But the word "weapons" feels much more violent to me, and to hear it uttered in the same sentence as the word "school" made me want to run home and put Oliver in a nice shiny bubble for the rest of his life. 

Not having grown up with any boys around (I have one sister and no cousins), I quickly learned how boys are wired.  No matter how sweet a demeanor, how sensitive a personality, how thoughtful, pensive, and creative he may be...he will still wrestle, yell, shoot, smash, throw, scream, and replace all normal words with those of "poop," "butt," "fart," and derivatives thereof.  There are days when Oliver cannot say a single sentence without aggression or referencing body functions.  This is not my favorite part of mothering boys.

Today I caught Oliver repeatedly joking about cutting open your stomach.  "Where is he getting this from?!" I asked Michael in desperation.  We limit Oliver's screen time and when he does watch TV, it is always animated, educational, and/or annoying- not violent.  Michael shrugged, shook his head, and just said, "school."  I expressed the helplessness I felt that in preschool- preschool!- I felt like I couldn't protect my own child from violence.

I told Oliver I wanted to talk to him, and he approached with hesitation as I explained why it wasn't okay to talk about cutting people's stomach's open.  It was very scary to people, the younger kids in our home may not understand reality from imaginative talk, and we just didn't talk like that in our house.  Oliver listened, then pleaded: "But I was just trying to be like Little Red Riding Hood."

Oh. 

Right.

In the classic version of Little Red Riding Hood, she cuts open the wolf's stomach to rescue her grandmother, who had been eaten by the wolf just before Red's arrival.

Looks like I'll be sitting Oliver down in front of the TV while I do some editing in our bookshelf...