Yesterday I had a 9 year old visitor. A former patient dropped by to see me while his Mom had an appointment elsewhere in my building. When I speak of him, I often tell how it was that he was brought to see me. At three years of age, he'd been expelled from daycare. Yep. Imagine being three years old and already a spectacular failure, a colossal flop in the eyes of your Mom and Dad. I soon learned that he was a terrified kid caught in his parents' web of insanity. Fortunately he had a Gramma (God bless those Grammas) who though he was the greatest kid ever and loved him dearly. I grew to love him too.
Boy did we play hard back then! We had car races on our carefully constructed race track..always ending with spectacular crashes. We made up our own version of football complete with victory dances when we'd score a touchdown. We reminisced yesterday about our times together. He nodded solemnly saying "You did me a lot of good." Such adult words out of a little kid's mouth. He said he still had the balsa wood airplane we put together. I said I remembered the red model car he assembled. I told him I hadn't thought he was old enough to do it, but he'd proved me wrong. He grinned and repeated "Yeah, I proved you wrong." He still has that red car.
He invited me to play with the dart guns. Oh we had had some blood thirsty shoot-em-up battles in the past. We had a great one yesterday, dodging darts, sneak attacks and plenty of verbal insults volleyed at one another. As we played, I heard that Mom's latest ex-husband had been mean, but her new boyfriend was nice; that he hadn't seen his Dad for three months because Mom had a restraining order against him; that his sister was babysitting him but ignored him; and that he was having trouble making friends. I wished there had been a happy ending to his story, as it sounds as if his life is still pretty miserable. But yesterday, dang it, we had one hell of a great dart gun fight!
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