Bullet has a great post up on Left Brain/Right Brain about her son that reminded me of when I took Jared to the zoo with my parents. In just the same way that Tom can’t abide walking around the park to the entrance, Jared used to hate back-tracking.
We were at the National Zoo wandering around with my parents and Sierra up ahead, while Kellie and I wrestled Jared along. We came to a fork in the path, and my parents went right, so we followed. Then, they realized that the right fork led back around to where we had just been, so they turned around and headed back to the left fork.
Jared was not pleased.
He fell to the ground, tears flowing and screaming his lungs out, and Kellie and I realized that all we could do was keep going around until we got back to where we could get back to the path that would take us to my parents. When we caught up, Jared had stopped crying, but we realized that the left fork dead-ended and we’d have to turn around. I saw that there was a little round flower box in the center of the pathway, so Jared and I walked around it 4 times and headed back the way we had come. Crisis averted.
Because Jared has learned to do so much since then, it’s easy to forget how much he hates situations like that. Part of it is that he can now tolerate physically going the wrong way, but Jared still hates doing things the wrong way. Missing out on an appointment? Not an option. Skipping a stop in our routine? Oh no.
So Jared brought home a flyer from the Cub Scouts the other day and said that he wanted to join. We didn’t know if he was serious about it though, and we had our reasons not to get involved, so we held off on calling.
Why wouldn’t we want Jared in scouting? Well, partly because it’s difficult for Jared to participate in unstructured activities. Jared can’t go with the flow. He has to know what the plan is, in order to manage his anxieties. He has to talk through the things that we’re going to do, and then they have to go according to plan. And expecting a group of other kids to stick to a plan is impossible.
The other reason is that the Boy Scouts of America doesn’t like people like me. Atheists and their kids are not allowed to participate in scouting. In addition, gay men are barred from being scout leaders. And that kind of intolerance isn’t something that our family wants to support. Of course, it’s the national organization that lays out those rules, and I’m sure that there are many local groups that use their own judgement, but the Baltimore BSA has an Inter-Faith Relationships Council for a reason: promoting understanding and cooperation between the different religious faiths by creating opportunities for interfaith dialogue and advocacy. Not something I’m really excited about getting Jared into.
I know that Jared doesn’t understand religion at this point, but he also doesn’t understand the concept that people have different opinions. Thanks to some games at the Arthur website, he’s starting to learn the difference between facts and opinions, but that’s a concept he only understands intellectually. To Jared there are only absolute truths.
What’s more, if somebody at Boy Scouts tells him about their god or that he has to go to church, Jared will believe it. And if their god happens to be Cthulhu, I’ll have to take Jared to where he can worship the great old ones. Otherwise we won’t be doing things the right way, and we can’t have that.
Which brings us back to Tuesday night. Evidently, the helpful people at Jared’s school had put out a notice in the morning’s announcements that the first Cub Scout meeting was Tuesday night, and Jared had decided that he was going to be a Cub Scout: he was in first grade, after all.
But we hadn’t made up our minds about what to do, and that didn’t fly with Jared. He spent an hour or so screaming and crying that he was missing the meeting at 7, and every time we got him calmed down, he would look at the clock and start crying again. By the next morning, he had accepted what we told him: that Tuesday’s meeting was an orientation for parents (not exactly, strictly speaking, true), but he still told the bus driver that he missed the Cub Scout meeting as he got on the bus.
So I guess Jared is going to be a Cub Scout. I don’t like their policies, and it’s going to be hell to keep Jared calm and focused at meetings, but I’m out of options. The school is going to keep announcing meetings, and Jared is going to expect to attend them.
Because it’s the right thing to do.