My seven-year-old son Bucky says, “May I draw a picture that shows my
feelings?”
“Of course,” I answer. He has been sitting at our kitchen table ever since I asked
him and his nine-year-old sister, Rhapsody, to do their homework. That was half an
hour ago.
Bucky is in the first grade. Every school day he is supposed to write a short story
of three to five sentences. Every evening we argue about it: Bucky tells me he doesn’t
know what to write, and I tell him to just start and something will come. It usually does
with me.
Bucky hands me his finished picture. With a brown marker he has drawn a table
with a person at each end. Each person is made of two circles, one for head and one
for body, with straight lines for arms and legs. Person A is holding an L-shaped stick.
Dots coming out of the stick make a path to Person B’s body, where they end in a big
red splotch. “What’s this picture about?” I ask Bucky.
He points to the red-splotched person: “That’s blood and that’s you.”
My eyes widen. “What are you mad at me for?”
“Homework,” he says.
“Isn’t your teacher who assigns the work the one to be angry with?”
Bucky smiles, picks up his workbook from the seat next to mine, and says, “Help
me.”
“How can I?” I shrug. “I’m dead.” Rhapsody, who has been taking this all in,
joins in our laughter.
Of course, making a joke is the easy way out. Learning that my son wants to kill
me, if only for a moment, is hard. I don’t recall this coming up in any of the parenting
books I'd read. I once wrote a song, He Broke My Heart I Wish He’d Die, but I
never thought how the “he” in question would feel if he heard me sing it.
A friend of mine directed a film that no one liked to watch because he got so much
of his own anger up there on the screen. Even his wife was troubled by it. I told her,
“Better to get it out in a film than with you.”
Before returning to his homework Bucky tests his pencil on the homicidal drawing.
I grab the paper and said, “Hey, don’t mess with my murder. I need to call someone.”
“Joan?” Rhapsody asks. Both my kids know that Joan is my unofficial parenting
coach; our daughters are best friends and so are we.
“Yes,” I answer.
Bucky sounds contrite now. “It’s just paper.”
Rhapsody rushes over to the art supply table and rushes back a moment later with
her own drawing. A magenta mama bird with big blue eyes sits in a yellow nest
whispering, “I love you” to a brown-eyed baby bird, who whispers back, “I love you
Mom.” I have blue eyes. Rhapsody has brown. An extra big “I love you, Mom,” is
scrawled across the top where five seagulls look down as witnesses.
I smile and say, “This is beautiful sweetie, but no sneaking in here for brownie
points. This is between Bucky and me.”
Bucky is a boy of few words. When he was twenty-three months old his Dad
died from colon cancer complications. He began speaking late. When he was four he
said, “Do you know why there is war, Mom?”
“No Bucky, why?”
“Because the good guys and the bad guys wanna make more money.”
I had no anger management issues as a child, but a lot of yelling by my siblings and
parents happened around me. I did not like that noise so I learned never to express my
anger. Not till I was widowed at thirty-seven did I start channeling my emotions into
art. Now when I feel destructive I grab a pen and write a poem, a song, or a letter
that will never be mailed. Some of these creations I share with family or friends. The
rest end up in a scrapbook that I keep in a locked drawer. Those are just for me.
Bucky learned to literally draw out his feelings in kindergarten. Whenever he did
something he shouldn’t have his teacher got the markers out. Then they would talk
about what he had drawn, which led to a dialogue about what he had done and what
he could have done differently. When Bucky’s drawings bristled with guns, the
kindergarten teacher, a veteran of twenty-five years at a Christian school, told me not
to worry: it’s perfectly normal. But does that include Murder One with me as the
victim?
I don’t want to suppress the expression or the emotion behind it. I want Bucky to
trust me with all of his feelings. But I also want to introduce the idea that there are
appropriate levels of anger, and having to do homework doesn’t warrant even a
pretend killing.
“Bucky, I know it’s just paper,” I say. “I’m so proud of your drawing. You used
to grunt or hit when you were angry. This is better. But I still feel yucky.”
Bucky grabs another piece of paper and a yellow marker, draws furiously and then
hands me the page.
Mom: “What is it?”
Bucky: “You with a cup of tea.”
Mom: “Earl Grey with half-and-half in it?”
Bucky: “Yeah.”
Bucky sits down and finishes his homework.
The next morning I wake up early and bake him his favorite blueberry muffins.
When I get hold of Joan that afternoon, she tells me, “glad you’re still alive.”