“No Way!”
Conrad Ho
It was a high summer night in July. The woods after rain was bustling with life and moisture. Amy and our two boys were lying in bed for a pre-sleep chit-chat. Yu Yat suddenly popped up with an idea of building a paper bus with sliding doors. And he jumped off bed and just did it.
Soon, Yu Sum the younger brother followed. Half an hour went by and Amy believed it was time to sleep. She spent quite some effort to usher Yat back to his bunker bed. But Yat was not at all willing to stop. He pulled his face long, flipped his lower lip out and look at his mom in watery eyes, begging to be allowed to finish the project. While Amy was searching for words to soothe him, Sum continued to play with the semi-finished product and crinkled it.
Right at this point, the elder brother exploded. He yelled and cried while at the same time, hit repeatedly on Sum’s head. Originally in the living room, I ran into their bedroom and split them. Putting on his usual expression of helplessness and watery eyes, Sum again managed to guide the adults to punish his brother. However, Yat had not responded with his usual angry condemnations. He just rolled in bed, crying out loud, wildly flinging his limbs, repeatedly yelling, “No way!”. The usual ways of pacifying him, like sweets, milk and story-telling, simply did not work.
Witty Amy heard a bell rang in her head. “No worry about the creased bus! I can make it flat again!” Hearing this, Yat stopped crying immediately. Already smiling when tears were still dropping, he enquired with his curious eyes. Amy took over the paper bus and put it beneath the mattress of Sum. “Sum made a mess with it. He is responsible to make it right! He will sleep on it to flatten it.” Yat went to peep at the paper bus, put on a contented smile and climbed to his upper deck to sleep. The “storm” dissipated.
It was another day. We rushed among our daily chores and forgot about the paper bus altogether. Suddenly remembering it again during a chit-chat after dinner, we asked Yat about it. We thought he would have forgotten about him during sleep, but he did not. He had examined it thoroughly right after rising this morning and finished the project after school. At the time we asked him, the “relic” of the paper bus was lying peacefully on his desk.
What a happy ending! Yat had completed what he had wished for and received satisfactory remedy for the damage he suffered. Sum experienced (though not necessarily consciously learnt) shouldering his own responsibility to remedy for the damage he had done. The parents could rest peacefully for the night and felt relieved for not having to inflict punishment to drive at our point.
We believe every act of a kid has a point, though it may not be clear to the adult. He can be insistent and persistent, too, if the goal has not been reached yet. If the parents miss the motive in his mind or heart, and proceed to force him into something they deem “proper”, like apologizing right away to Sum in this case, it may not work and at the same time, jeopardize parent-child relationship in the long run. ¢