Jack

My son Jack is eight years old now. He is the tallest boy in his class. He is the only one of my sons who manages to be serious and funny at the same time almost all of the time. Jack is a thinker and a watcher. If he doesn’t like you after the first five minutes of knowing you - well then, I’m sorry my friend but he’s never going to like you. Luckily for Jack he is also a surprisingly good judge of character.
There are a million and a half wonderful things I can see in Jack’s future. Things like being loved, being successful, owning a house filled with seventeen cats, twelve dogs and three turtles. Plus the odd bird thrown in here and there because he can never have a pet bird when he’s living in my house - they are wholly unsettling creatures, I must tell you. Menacing. Predatory. It’s the price Jack must pay for having me as a Mom. And not the only price, I’m sure.
So Jack‘s page is very much a blank page of uncomplicated promise in my eyes. But it‘s not the way he looks to me that worries me these days. It‘s the way he looks at himself. Already. You see, Jack is an average-sized boy, which means he is not skinny. He doesn’t have a ’weight issue’ at all. He’s not obese, not hefty, not out of shape. He’s pretty much just not skinny. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of this - after all, four boys mean four very different little builds and anyways, boys don’t care about that stuff at all, do they? Oh, they sure as heck fire do. Now Jack is an exhaustingly active boy, he loves life and is exuberant and good-natured - really I can say without a word of conceit that he is one of the easiest children in the entire world to love. But he can’t seem to get past this idea, this little seed being re-planted daily in his mind that there is something changing about him and not in a good way. A seed I can never seem to dig up or kill or bury someplace else. “Wow, Jack has gotten really BIG.”, one of our family friends will comment. “He’s going to be a really BIG guy, isn’t he?” “He’s not built like the other boys at all.”
I’ll generally try to shrug these comments off on his behalf, say something like “Yeah, he’s a pretty tall kid, I don’t know where he got that from because his father and I are both such shorties.”, but usually people will persist. “No - I don’t mean tall...”, they’ll sometimes elaborate - and I don’t hear much past that point because I’m busy visualizing myself stabbing them in the eye with my nail clippers (the only weapon I ever seem to have at the ready). It seems to come at him from all ends these days - he came home from his Dad’s house one weekend, embarrassed and sullen and refused to tell me why. He turned down his ice cream sundae for dessert - a precedent of earth-shattering proportions for anyone in our house - and went out to the front yard after dinner to run some laps around the driveway. These crazy, driven, silent, angry laps that scared me with their red-faced intensity. Finally he confessed (not to me but to his brothers who, I might add with no small amount of pride, were just as concerned). His new nickname at his Dad’s house was ‘chubs’ and he thought he should ‘stop eating ice cream and try to exercise more because I think my belly is too wide’. If only his Dad had been there…I had my nail clippers poised and at the ready for a fight.
For the most part, I must admit Jack’s mind is elsewhere. There are still matters far more pressing than this for him, thank goodness. Who’s turn on the wii being at the forefront, naturally. And there are big things to be done every day, firecrackers to be let off in the living room (another story for another day) and snowballs to save in the freezer. Especially on the weekend when it’s just us and we lull ourselves into a false sense of complacency and he wanders the house comfortable in his own skin.
But then he’s back at school. And it’s Wednesday and he’s grown out of an old pair of jeans. And then there it is again - that look. Of humiliation, of panic. Of anger. I’ve given him too much oatmeal for breakfast, he says, why did I do that? So we lose that morning, I suppose. A bit of the battle gone. Lost. But I promise you…we are going to win that war.