Empathy

It was an absolutely gorgeous day today,  and we took a family stroll through the park this evening. Olivia somehow got a teensy tiny little poke on her hand, which had a teeny tiny little speck of blood on it. Seriously, we are talking smaller than the eye of a very small needle. I could barely see it through the grime.

And how long do you suppose you can listen to your kid screaming at the top of her lungs "I'M BLEEDING! I'M BLEEDING! I NEED A BAND-AID! I NEED TO GO HOME!" over such a little injury before you lose it, and want to box her ears?  Does it make me a bad parent if my tolerance for such things has devolved to about 4 seconds?  She was putting up such a fuss, I'm seriously surprised somebody didn't call the cops, thinking they were hearing a violent crime being committed before their very ears.

Overall, I thought we were being very nice.  We tried to tell her it was okay, she was  going to live. We told her it would only hurt for a second. We told her to GET OVER IT ALREADY OR WE'LL PUNCH YOU IN THE NOSE!  No, we didn't tell her that.  But somewhere in the back of my head, I might have wanted to think it.

The screaming and moaning went on and on.  It was getting embarrassing. Will and Audrey were annoyed, and told her to stop being a baby.  Duncan was floating around the outskirts of our little group, silent as usual and seemingly oblivious to the crisis at hand.  People were craning their necks to see what the heck was going on.  She would not stop crying and I thought I was going to lose my mind.

Then, Duncan stepped up beside her and calmly reached out his arm around her shoulders.  "That really hurts, doesn't it?" he asked her gently.

For just a couple of moments she stopped crying and looked up at him.  "Yeah", she said.

Then he stepped ahead of her and she started back into her hysterics and the moment was over.

But there it was again-that uncanny ability of my second son to seem so distant and removed, yet be more fully in the moment than any of the rest of us.

One day, I'm going to ask him how he does that.