The Road to 40 Day 137/365: Fighting Battles

I write the blog on a daily basis because I like to let life happen and just write about it. I didn’t realize that this week would be mostly about him to start.

I got a call from school in the afternoon, telling me that Vino had an incident in school at lunchtime. The teacher said that Vino and a classmate had a disagreement while playing, which led to Vino pushing his classmate. The classmate responded by putting his hand on Vino’s neck and pushing him to the ground.

The teacher said they have talked to the boys and they have made up. Vino did go to the clinic because he said his neck was sore, I was told. The teacher asked if I would like to pick him up, but I said he’ll be fine for another hour before I actually pick him up.

While I’ve been more open to my emotions with Vino, I think there’s still some toxic masculinity that flows in my veins in that I can’t show that I’m overly concerned about him so that he doesn’t feel coddled.

I asked if he was ok and asked him how everything went down.

Apparently, they were playing a game, and the guy was already eliminated from it. However, he kept disturbing the rest of the guys still playing, including Vino. At some point, Vino got fed up and pushed the guy so that he’d stop bugging the rest of them.

He said it wasn’t a strong push, but the guy charged at him, putting his hand on Vino’s neck and causing him to fall down to the ground. Then, the guy ran away. What a wuss.

Vino said his hand hurt a bit because he touched the ground when he fell down, and the sun was scorching hot this day. He said his neck feels a bit sore, but he’s fine otherwise.

I told him that it’s never right to start fights. No matter how much he was provoked, he was the one who started the fight because he was the one who got physical first. To some extent, I said he may have deserved what he got precisely because he went out of his way to push the guy.

While Che will never agree to what I told him next, I feel like it’s very important.

I said even if he doesn’t start the fight, he should be the one to end it. I don’t want to get a call from the nurse that he was hurt, I’d rather get a complain that some dude was in the clinic because he defended himself well. If the guy was close enough to strangle him, that means his knee was close enough to hit the guy in the groin area.

I told him that I was angry that he got strangled. I’m disappointed that he started the fight, but I’m angry that the guy was able to do what he did. I didn’t want him to feel that I support him 100% because he had a fault in this thing as well. However, internally, I was seething that I couldn’t just smack that kid’s face for what he did to my child.

I tend to be very confrontational about these things, and it took everything in me to hold back from messaging the parents of the kid. But I am very concerned about how a push warranted a neck strangle for an eight-year-old kid. Che reminded me that we shouldn’t judge how the parents parent their kid, but I just found it so wrong.

Still, I decided that I shouldn’t fight all of Vino’s battles for him. This was something he should learn from.

He tends to get impatient when people don’t follow rules, and mostly it’s in games. He takes his games very seriously – on the playground or on the tablet, he’d be very emotional when things don’t go his way.

I keep reminding him that games are part of being kids, but these should be just games for him – there will be times you win, and times you lose. He shouldn’t take them too seriously.

There were nine of them playing the game, yet he was the only one who stepped up to push the guy disturbing them. Somehow, I think I should be proud that he was the only one who wanted to do something about it, but at the same time, getting what he got for what he did was not even worth it.

What I am proud of is that he said all his friends came by to check on him in the clinic. A parent also messaged me to ask how Vino was doing because her kid told him about what happened. When I picked him up, his friends also asked me if I knew what happened to him.

I guess it was very public, and news traveled really fast. I saw in his group chat with friends from other classes that they were all asking him if he was ok. Kinda funny how the other kids exaggerate though, as one of them said he heard Vino couldn’t move or breathe during the incident, which Vino said did not happen at all.

If there’s anything that I’ve learned from people around Vino, it’s that he has a very magnetic personality. While I reprimand him at times for his overly expressive gestures, these are exactly the kinds of things he does that endear him to a lot of his friends. I’m happy that he’s on the right side of the incident in that no one appears to blame him for what happened.

Like I said previously, all I really want for him is to be a good person. Having a lot of friends rally behind him in this incident leads me to believe that he’s been on the right track.

I got Che caught up with what happened and we got ready for bed. He said he’ll be on his bed again, but asked that Che be on my spot so that she’s on his left side. While he was doing something on the other side of the bed, I decided to sneak in between them and got a priceless laugh from him.

I’ve made Vino laugh countless times, but there are laughs that are just better than others. On this night, I got a really good one.

He’ll have to learn how to fight his battles as he grows older, but I’ll never outgrow wanting to be his safe space where he can laugh and cry to his heart’s content.

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