Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting

One thing I will never understand, is the way that my son "plays". He tackles and wrestles constantly with his friends. He doesn't even really have to know them first. Just as long as they are willing to wrestle and play fight, he jumps right in with them.

This isn't a new thing. Nathan has been tackling friends since before he was 2 years old in daycare. I remember the shame I felt when his teachers asked me if his daddy wrestled with him often or if we watched wrestling on television at home. "ABSOLUTELY NOT!", said this first time mother. How dare these people blame us for this behavior?! Of course he learned it in daycare! I really didn't believe that, but it couldn't be our fault, right? At that young age, he did not limit the tackling and fighting to boys alone and I remember the embarrassment of pulling him off of my girlfriend's crying daughter. (I'm glad she didn't hold a grudge.)

At this point in his life, he knows who is interested in wrestling and fighting and proceeds to jump right in, literally, the moment he finds the interested party. Daddy described two scenes to me from this past weekend that rekindled that old feeling of "Where did we go wrong?" The first was when Daddy went to pick him up from his friend's house. He watched the two friends on the trampoline for a few minutes before they knew he was there. It seems the friend had my son in a choke hold and my son was therefore poking his friend in the eye. Understandably, the friend began to cry (at least understandably to me, Daddy seemed to think if one puts someone in a choke hold, one should expect to be poked in the eye.) The second incident happened on the soccer field after church, of all places. This time our son jumped on top of a friend and apparently hurt him. The friend instantly grabbed our son and bent him in half. There were plenty of daddies around to put a stop to it "before it got too bad". Before? Isn't that bad enough?

We have known for a long time that Nathan is a tough kid and we rarely find him crying from an injury...if we do, we run quickly because it may mean an ambulance should be on its way. But I just can not understand how it is fun to "play" this way. Clearly, other boys find it fun as well. After my husband described the two scenes above, something occurred to me. He used to be a little boy. Hmmmm...

After he told these stories and I finished cringing and sighing in frustration that I am not going to be able to stop my son from being a tiny little ninja, I asked his daddy, "Why does he do that? Did you play like that when you were little?"

Daddy answered, "Well, yes."

"Oh, then it is your fault!" I feel much better.