Not long ago, I arrived to pick Jake up from school to find not one but two incident reports awaiting me.
“He got bitten,” one of Jake’s teachers said apologetically. “Twice.”
From the deliberately pared-down details they provided — perpetrators’ names and identifying characteristics are omitted from incident reports to protect those too young to deserve the wrath of their friends’ mothers — I gathered a general idea of what had happened. Jake demonstrated, as he does quite a bit lately, his desire to possess a toy already in the possession of The Biter. And The Biter bit him.
So far, so good. Maybe it’s a tad Lord of the Flies of me, but I kind of like knowing that when he tries to steal a toy from one of his friends he may get bitten. It’s a valuable lesson, and one I can’t teach him myself.
The second bite, however — occurring a mere half hour later — happened under far murkier circumstances. The way Jake’s teacher described it, Jake was merely in the other child’s space and got bitten for nothing more than his willingness to let first bite bygones be bygones.
My initial reaction was, naturally, to try to figure out who The Biter was.
One of the other kids had bitten Jake before. And his mother cheerfully admits he’s a biter. So, of course, Mike and I spent the evening teaching Jake to say, “No, [name withheld to protect innocence]! Don’t bite me!”
I asked him to demonstrate his new trick the next day at school.
A teacher looked at me sadly. “It wasn’t [name withheld to protect innocence],” she said.
Oh, my. What happened to three years of law school when you’re supposed to remember (because they never really spend time teaching it to you in any substance) that one is innocent until proven guilty?
My suspicions next fell on a friend of Jake’s we’ve actually played with outside of school. Since I like his parents so much, I didn’t feel animosity toward him for being The Biter, so much as amusement. Despite being three months younger and several inches shorter, he had easily pushed Jake over on the playground where we met for a date one day. And, more damningly, he had an incident report of his own taped to his cubby at school. Since perpetrators receive incident reports just like victims, I felt I was on to something.
Until his mother and I arrived at the same time to pick up our children from school. And I found out that her son, too, had been a victim of The Biter.
So I never did find out who The Biter was. I have my ideas, but Jake has managed to remain bite-free for some time, so I can let it go.
But with the passage of time, I’ve been left to ponder the more significant question the double-biting incident raises: Why would Jake have gone up to this child who had just brutally bitten him and allow himself to be bitten again?
Think about it. If it were you, wouldn’t you spend the next hour or so fuming about what an [expletive deleted] that person who bit you was? Wouldn’t you work furiously at justifying your own actions in trying to steal his toy? Wouldn’t you steer clear of him, refusing any gestures of friendship, for at least the rest of the day?
So why did my child shrug it all off in the time it took him to stop crying and buddy up to The Biter a second time?
The answer, I think, lies somewhere in my own condition. Because I — despite having had so much trouble regaining my equilibrium after giving birth to Jake that I started this website — am pregnant with my second child. Twice bitten, indeed.
Continue reading ‘Twice Bitten: More of the Wisdom of Toddlers’
