Exposing Daddy's Deep-Seated Malevolence

Daniel knows how to size up a situation.

Tonight, when we came home, he suddenly realized that he didn't have his "alien guy" - some kind of (probably plastic) alien figure that he had taken out and about with him over the course of the afternoon and evening. Of course, he immediately checked my pockets first, because he - like Amy - will sometimes put things in my pockets for safe keeping, without necessarily telling me. But no - there was no alien in my pockets, and in fact we didn't find "him" all evening.

There's something especially surreal about the way that Daniel, in spite of his tough-guy, rough-and-tumble identity overall, will crumble in quasi-maternal sobs of love-and-loss when the most awful things in his arsenal - pirates, aliens, etc. - sometimes disappear. It's as if some sweet little lovable creature had somehow slipped away into urban chaos during rush hour, and the grieved parent can't be consoled.

In any case, we made a trip out to the mini-van, where Daniel conducted a search among all of his trinkets, across both his "turf" and other's - only to find that the alien wasn't there. But about 25 minutes later, he got the idea that perhaps he needed to look in one more place, but this, too, was a wasted trip. [This time, he thought he might have opened up his hand-held light saber and stuffed the alien in the handle, or the "blade," for safe keeping. This was a perfectly plausible prospect, although it turned out not to bear fruit.] Finally, I absolutely had to put him to bed, and when I already had him upstairs, he had another "revelation" that the alien might be in the vitamin-water bottle that he had been drinking out of earlier in the evening. Again, a very good guess, knowing Daniel, but at this point, I was completely unwilling to be drawn off the bed-bound trajectory one more time - outside, no less - based on a whimsical possibility that had just flown into Daniel's imagination. [And this, too, turned out not to be "the place," as I confirmed in my own hajj to the mini-van after Daniel finally went to sleep.]

But this was more than Daniel could take. This time, he was quite sure that he "knew" where the alien was, and here I was, stubbornly refusing to let him take an extremely brief trip out to the car for what would surely be a very rewarding find. So he went on a standard wailing campaign, which was utterly unsurprising. But this bout of tears and recriminations reached a psychic crescendo in one of Daniel's more wonderful accusations: "YOU don't want me to be happy!!!"

He even went on, at one point, to tell me that, because he can't go out to the car to look for his alien, "I don't have any Happy in me!"

And then it degenerated into the old, boring stuff that we've heard so many times - either "You don't love me!" or "You hate me!" - it's hard to keep track of the charges.

But I was especially impressed with the summary of my deepest motivations that Daniel crystallized earlier in the rant - "You don't want me to be happy."

He may as well tell me that I always made everybody sad. I'm assuming that there's some touch of pay-back in all of this, but I don't remember ever hurling such a delicious accusation at my parents.

(March 22, 2012)