Where Has Mr. Pie Gone?

The cheeks are red, the lips are potato-chip-salty, but do the ears work?

For over four years, we have had a fairly sweet, usually obedient, generally kind boy who listened, or at least pretended to. His name was Ben, but I usually called him Mr. Pie, my favorite nickname for him, as we read books or talked about trains.

For the past two months, we have had a often difficult, usually testing-the-limits, sometimes violent boy. He uses the words “dead” and “stupid” way too much for my liking.  His name is still Ben, but I often address him as Ben Davis as in, “Get over here right now, Ben Davis!”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ten of us went camping in Rocky Mountain National Park this weekend: four adults and six kids. Because I was watching my sister’s kids for the weekend, four of the kids–Ben, Amelia, and their two cousins–belonged, temporarily, to Grant and me. The other two kids belonged to our neighborhood friends, who let us tag along on their annual fall trip.

There were classic camping good times: pretending to see bears and roasting s’mores and the general bliss that comes with being a pack of kids in the outdoors with nothing to play with sticks and rocks and imaginations. But then, totally unprompted, something would click in Ben’s brain and he became Ben Davis. He threw dirt on other’s plates. He bit his sister and hit his cousins. He would whisper, yes, he heard me, and promise he wouldn’t wake up his tentmates, then he poked and poked them, against my warnings, until their lids lifted.

On the final part of a hike, he worked himself into such a rage when he couldn’t lead the other kids–they simply weren’t interested–I could hear his histrionics for at least 10 minutes before he reached me. (My boot and I were sunning ourselves on a huge rock while the group hiked.) When I could finally see him, I thought a hug and some quiet time with me would calm him down. Instead, my presence enraged him more. His temper-tantrum needle was beyond the red zone, an occurrence that usually happens in the (relative) calm and privacy of our house. To have it on display so publicaly was hard to for me stomach.

Granted, my parenting skills were on orange alert all weekend. Our campground neighbor, who I quickly nicknamed Very Mean Man (VMM), called the ranger to report our children at 7:30 on Saturday morning. I admit they weren’t exactly whispering, but it’s a public campground with thin-walled tents, not brick-walled hotel rooms. Plus, we definitely heeded the 10 p.m.-6 a.m. quiet zone rules, and if you want true peace and quiet, which is what VMM not-so-nicely hissed to me, as the veins popped out of his neck, that he came in search of, you don’t pick a public campground with six tents within talking distance of one another on the last weekend the park is open. You take your VM attitude and binoculars and go to the backcountry.

So everytime any of the little yellers shrieked, ventured to close to VMMs site, or when VMM turned to just glare at me in case, you know, I didn’t get the message, I immediately freaked and went into hypersensitive, way-too-controlling parent mode.

Still, Ben’s behavior remains the stand-out memory of the weekend to me because I was clueless as to what would actually work. How do you get a kid to listen? How do you get a kid to not bite? How do you get a kid, a kid in a pack of kids, to behave?

I, like most parents, bandy about the word phase, but it’s a nebulous term. A phase feels like mile 12 of the marathon: you’re sure you’re in the thick of something, but you’re not sure how or when or even if you’ll get to the finish line. More than one friend has told me four is by far harder than two or three, and four-year-old’s have phases of independence, of feeling out boundaries, of figuring out how much one has to push before something or someone (usually me) breaks.

One fear, though, is that while he’s in this mean boy phase, he’s going to be branded as the jerk kid who breaks things and always gets left out. And the other one–and maybe this is worse–is that my “listen to me!” demands pack as much punch as non-alcoholic beer. If his ears glaze over permanently, I’m running away from home.

The encore came this morning. VMM (and his very mean lady friend, who told Charlotte, a five-year-old that, “Her parents should teach her how to be quiet,” after Charlotte nicely asked her a question about their tent) had, thankfully, packed up. I was thinking about hanging out for a few hours to let the herd finally have free reign on all the rocks, not just the ones on the right side of the fake boundary we’d drawn. But then Ben Davis kicked in a fairy house, a little stick and pine-needle structure Charlotte’s brother and father had engineered. I put him time-out in a camp chair (not super effective, I realize, but time-outs overall aren’t really working these days) then made him apologize to both of the builders. I held out hope I had made an impression. He went back to the rocks to join the other kids, and within minutes, there were screams of, “Stop it, Ben!” We had to go.

I know this post isn’t running-related–and Lord knows, I could sweat and process this and remember sweet memories of Mr. Pie so much better if I could log some miles–but just wondering if you have any strategies that work for when your kid suddenly does a 180? If the freakin’ fours were, in fact, worse than the terrible twos? If there are any books on raising boys–a species, I’m quickly realizing, as foreign to me as sea urchins are–you’d recommend?

I’m not a fan of any unsolicited advice of the parenting genre (running tips? that’s another story) but make no mistake:  I’m definitely soliciting. All three of us–me, Mr. Pie and Ben Davis–could use it.