Exhausted and impatient, I wasn’t in the best place to deal with a tiny two-year-old wrecking ball trying to demolish my son. But I realized I faced an important decision. Is this the moment I teach my son that there is a limit to compassion? Do I, in my exasperation, show him how to hold a grudge? I wondered. Or do I learn from my little baby bodhisattva that compassion is a limitless abode?
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“Gween! Twees are gween, wight? ‘G’ starts wif gween, wight?” my son Sahaas said, still a little wobbly with sentence construction.
“Yep! Green starts with ‘g’,” Shannon said. “What other words start with the letter ‘g’?”
The summer of Sahaas’ third birthday I drove east, thick into the Northern California redwoods, deep enough that we only saw highway, trees, and sky. A short car ride across town could inspire my son to howl and tug at his car seat, but we thought that with enough stops we could handle a four-hour car trip. We rolled along toward a spiritual camp to share a few days of fun with other families and played a word game to pass the time.
“Um, gwass. Gwass is gween, also. … Gwavel. ‘G’ starts wif gwavel. … And gum. Do you have any gum in you mouf, Shannon? Let me see? … Guns. We don’t wike guns, wight? Guns hurt people. … Gwapes. Dad, you like gwapes in the feezer? Dat’s silly. Dad is silly, wight, Shannon? Dose gwapes are cold in my mouf.”
After the road hummed Sahaas to sleep, I realized that the trip was taking longer than the official directions indicated. When we were still driving an hour after we should have arrived, my irritation grew with every mile. At the end of the six-but-they-told-me-four-hour drive, I jumped out of the car, expecting to swim through the cool, crisp mountain air. Instead, I stepped into a dry, hot oven swirling with dust and brittle leaves. My suitcase was stuffed with jeans and turtlenecks, but I was more concerned about my allergies.
I tried not to let these logistical disappointments distract me, so I engaged in making new friends. To my surprise, most people were rather nonchalant about socializing. Another failed expectation.
The first night I couldn’t sleep on the slim twin cot in the cold, dry cabin. Between sneezes, I alternately pursed my lips in defiance of the weather and gulped air like a fish out of water.
To avoid feeling grumpy, sneezy, and sleepy, I concentrated on my family. But as I paid closer attention to my son and his new playmate, my tension rose again.
When we arrived, Sahaas bonded with Malphisto (not his real name), the only other child near his age. The two spent a lot of time together, and any moment my son wasn’t playing with him Sahaas would ask: “Where's Ma-phis-o? I want to pay wif him.”
But during the second day of the retreat, I saw Malphisto hit my son almost a dozen times. With his open hands. With his fists. With his toys. Whenever the little cad didn’t get his way with his parents, an explosive tantrum changed the situation in his favor. I had only recently survived my own son’s “terrible twos,” so I guessed that Malphisto was riding the same roller coaster.
“Why can’t they keep a lid on that little brat?” I asked Shannon, reserving my resentment for a conversation behind closed doors. “The world doesn’t need any more men who only know how to hit somebody when things don’t go their way!”
Just saying those words out loud sounded funny, and dissolved my frustration. This two-year-old showed no signs of becoming a megalomaniac with plans for world domination—he was just doing what most two-year-olds do.
But just when I started to feel a little guilty about judging Malphisto and his permissive parents, others began to mirror my incredulity.
When Malphisto the Malevolent ran unabated through an adult meditation session, bumping and banging things as he went, the adults glared sharply at his parents.
When Malphisto the Masher whacked kids two and three times his age, their parents found other activities for their children.
And when Malphisto the Fire Fly wanted to stir a bonfire with a long, thin branch, several adults told his mother it wasn’t a good idea for a two-year-old to be that close to danger, let alone poke it with a stick.
While his mother was telling us not to worry, Malphisto nearly buried his glowing-hot poker in a man’s eye. The man’s quick reflexes saved him from having a really bad day. The group erupted with anger and threatened to remove Malphisto from the edge of the fire—if his mother did not—for the safety of everyone. Malphisto’s mother launched into a defensive monologue that started with how we didn’t understand the normal stages of child development and ended with the primal human urge to capture fire. She grabbed her son and left without saying anything to the man her son almost skewered.
The next morning, our last day at the camp, I suggested to my son other fun things to do that didn’t include playing with Malphisto. Sahaas pleaded so earnestly to continue playing with Malphisto, I recanted. We only have half a day, I thought. Nothing too bad will happen.
After breakfast, the two boys were playing only three meters in front of me. Malphisto grabbed a plastic toy dinosaur from my son, and when Sahaas asked him to return it, Malphisto yelled, “No!” Malphisto’s eyes glazed over, and his arms and shoulders tensed.
I didn’t make it in time.
I was in mid-stride when Malphisto whacked my son on the head with a T-Rex so hard that Sahaas’ body bent to the right. I scooped my little one up as he drew a deep breath, and as I ran for the nearest bathroom he screamed in my ear and squeezed hot tears down my neck.
A fitting end to the weekend, I thought. Maybe we should leave now.
After I checked my son’s head for blood and punctures, I wiped away his tears and consoled him with hugs.
“We don’t have to play with Malphisto anymore,” I said.
I’d had enough—the Little Hitter had gone from annoying to dangerous and wasn’t getting anywhere near my boy again.
“No, Dad, no. I want to pay wif him. I’m OK,” Sahaas said, still sniffling, wiping his tears. “Ma-phis-o is just a little boy. Little boys hit cause dey don’t know better.”
I stood there blinking…amazed.
My son recently decided that age three was the demarcation point between little boys and big boys. The adults in his life constantly encouraged him to acquire new skills (putting on his own clothes, washing his own hands) by reinforcing the notion that he was a big boy. So, here he was really being a big boy, understanding the behavioral limitations of a two-year-old who just pummeled him.
But what if I continued to let my son play with Malphisto and a serious injury occurred? What if Malphisto hit my son in the eye, drew blood, or ruptured his eardrum? I contemplated. What kind of parent would I be for not protecting my son from potential danger?
More than a year later, I wrestled with these questions whenever I told this story to friends. Should I have said something more to Malphisto? His mother seemed inaccessible, but maybe I should have approached his father? Could I have been a little more creative, like the other parents, in finding something else for my child to do at the camp to avoid Malphisto? Or was I just simply obsessing about my son’s safety?
“We can’t leave our hearts closed,” Rev. Liza Rankow told me, when I told her about the incident with Malphisto. “A closed heart is unavailable to give or receive anything else. The heart that I would close to an abusive person is the same heart that I have to open to my child.”
I sought other friends for advice, too.
“Your son is really giving you the opportunity to learn about fearless compassion,” Mushim Ikeda-Nash said, and I felt a little bit of her family counseling expertise seep into our conversation. “Instead of still being distressed about the actions of your son’s friend, realize the gift you are being given.”
Mushim also pointed to a helpful passage in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa:
“Compassion contains fundamental fearlessness, fearlessness without hesitation. This fearlessness is marked by tremendous generosity. This ‘generous fearlessness’ is the fundamental nature of compassion and transcends the animal instinct of ego. Ego would like to establish its territory, whereas compassion is completely open and welcoming. It is a gesture of generosity, which excludes no one.”
That nailed it for me.
My son was showing “generous fearlessness,” an element of compassion that I wasn’t ready to accept—especially in the face of danger. When adults are inconvenienced or hurt by others up to a point, we tend to discard the relationship. Most of us have a limit on the grief we’ll take from someone else—a Drama Meter. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most drama I could imagine, strangers are allowed up to a 3, friends and business associates about a 5. Core family and close friends get up to an 8, but 9 and 10 are reserved for my sweetie and children. Scores are given for cumulative experience, and once you hit your limit on my Drama Meter, you are out.
Malphisto clocked in on the Drama Meter at 6 and was quickly approaching 10, when I shouldn’t have let him get past 2. But back then my son was asking me to extend myself beyond my perceived capacity for compassion, an act that would ripple into the future and challenge my beliefs about how much grief people can give me before I kick them out of my life. How much drama are we willing to take from our neighbors before we call the cops? How much can we take from convicted criminals before we execute them? How much can we take from various countries before we bomb them, with economic sanctions or scud missiles? When we measure notions of justice, exactly where is the line between rejection spawned from anger and forgiveness born of compassion?
It was easy to think about my situation many months after the camp. But when I was wiping the snot and tears away from my son’s nose after Malphisto hit him, I was hot with fury and unable to think clearly.
“Dad, I want to pay wif Ma-phis-o,” Sahaas kept repeating while we were in the bathroom. “Pease?”
Exhausted and impatient, I wasn’t in the best place to deal with a tiny two-year-old wrecking ball trying to demolish my son. But I realized I faced an important decision. Is this the moment I teach my son that there is a limit to compassion? Do I, in my exasperation, show him how to hold a grudge? I wondered. Or do I learn from my little baby bodhisattva that compassion is a limitless abode?
“I want to go, OK, Dad?” Sahaas said as he started to wiggle away from me. “Ma-phis-o is just a little boy. I’m better, OK?”
I took a few deep breaths to calm down. I decided I was afraid of teaching my son a practice that I was working to shed in my own life—that certain transgressions require equal measures of withdrawal. I decided to trust Sahaas’ instincts.
Shannon and I agreed that for the next few hours we would stay close to Sahaas to shield him from Malphisto’s blows:
• Four hours until departure: I snatched Sahaas up when Malphisto tried to scratch him.
• Three hours to go: Shannon blocked Malphisto’s attempt to push Sahaas into a swimming pool.
• T-minus two hours: I jumped between the two of them when Malphisto yelled, screamed, and thrashed about because his mother let my son use one of his toys.
• 60 minutes and counting: Shannon prevented Malphisto from hammering Sahaas with a small flashlight.
Each time Malphisto attempted to clobber my son, my body flushed with heat. Each time I expected Malphisto’s mother to say something. Something to her son; something to me. She said nothing. But each time Sahaas waited in my arms just outside of Malphisto’s striking range, silently waiting for the little cyclone to dissipate. As soon as Malphisto’s violent mood receded, my son immediately darted to his friend and resumed playing as if nothing happened.
I had already packed the car that morning, so after lunch I tried to hasten our escape. My son wanted to say goodbye to his caballero. Malphisto’s mother stood near the door of their cabin, hushing us with her index finger to her lips. Malphisto, she informed us, was napping.
“Why we can’t say bye-bye to Ma-phis-o?” Sahaas asked, as I pushed him along a dusty path to the car. “Why do we have to go now?”
“We can’t stay until Malphisto wakes up,” I said. “We have a long drive (sneeze) home, so it’s time (sneeze) for us to leave,” I said. “I want to get home (sneeze) before bedtime.”
“Why is Ma-phis-o going naptime?” my son asked.
“Cause it’s probably tiring to be so ornery,” I mumbled.
“What?” Sahaas asked me. I didn’t reply. “What did Daddy say?” he asked Shannon.
Shannon looked at me, smiled, and said “Papa!” with a tone that indicated my covert naughtiness had not gone unnoticed.
In his car seat, Sahaas folded his arms and scrunched up his face. “I don’t wan go home!” he yelled.
“Hey, what letters (sneeze) start with the letter ‘g’?” I asked him.
In the rearview mirror I saw Sahaas unfold his arms and look out the window. The camp and all its troubles quickly disappeared in a thick cloud of tan dust as we drove away. For a few moments, we all sat in silence.
“Gween!” Sahaas yelled. “Twees are gween. ‘G’ starts wif gween. … Gwass. Gwass is gween, too. … Gwavel. … Good. … And gum. Do you have any gum in you mouf, Shannon? Kids can’t have gum, wight? … Gwapes. You like dose cold gwapes, Dad? That’s silly!”
Already, my baby bodhisattva had forgiven me for separating him from his friend.
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This story appears in the Summer 2010 issue
of Turning Wheel: Cultivating Compassionate Action.
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