FriendBurst Blog

I thought of this last night as I voluntarily took a daycare assignment.  I was at a 12-step meeting in the basement of a church.  This meeting offered child care, wherein adults could bring their kids, who went off into another room of the church, chaperoned in 15 minute increments by volunteers from the group.  Childcare at AA meetings is a nice feature; it’s hard for Mom or Dad to pay attention to the message if they’re pre-occupied with minding unruly children.

The format for volunteering to take care of the brats was simple.  Cards with 15 minute periods of the 90 minute meeting were placed on the center table, and whoever wanted to volunteer, simply picked up one of these cards.  I was attending this meeting with my sponsor, who has occasionally noted that I haven’t been too big on the whole “service” part of the 12-step tradition.  For example, I haven’t found a sponsee off my own yet.  At this point in my  program, I “should” be sponsoring a newcomer by now.  I’ll admit, I picked up one of these childcare timeslots to show my sponsor I am willing to be of service.

Oh. My. God.  It was one of the longest 15 minutes of my life.

The boy was probably about 8.  The girl was maybe 11.  Two children to chaperone.  No biggie, right?  I was lucky to get out of there without them hurting themselves, each other, myself or the church room we were in.  All the toys laid out were not for playing with, no, instead, they seemed to think they were for using to attack each other with or throw about the room.

After a few minutes of, “No, I don’t think you should be doing that!”, I came up with an idea for how to channel their aggression.  Sports!  See, I walked into the room thinking I could engage them in fun verbal and mental games, of which I know many.  The first thing I asked when left alone with these two monsters was enthusiastically, “Hey kids, wanna play a game?” They answered quite bluntly, “NO!”

I managed to turn their self-discovered game of throwing toys at each other as hard as they possibly could (thank god kids have bad aim otherwise there would have been stitches at the ER in this story) into toy baseball…with me as the pitcher.  They took the longest block of wood out of the block set (about 12” long) and used it as a bat.  I threw the stuffed animal at them with relatively decent speed and they tried to hit it.  I told them what the result was after they smacked the stuffed bear, dog or dinosaur into submission.

Sociological analyses of sports often refer to them being replacements for our natural human desire for aggression.  When our city-states of Cleveland and Pittsburg square off on the football field, it replaces what would have been in times past  actual warfare.  This is a very true analysis which I demonstrated by channeling aggression in it’s purest form (kids versus adults in the ultimate ‘substitute teacher’ situation; 15 minutes at an AA hall) into a sporting game.

Now, I won’t be playing games with the new girls upstairs.  How do I prevent them from annoying me, their downstairs neighbor?  If I am friendly with them, I know what will happen.  I will be sitting at my computer, with the warm summer air coming in from the open window 5 feet to my left, and they will appear, asking what I’m doing.

No, it is best that I am, in their minds, the scary downstairs troll who they don’t want to have anything to do with.  That would suit me fine.

Tonight, as the new upstairs tenants were passing by the side of the house we share, the older girl misinterpreted my bedroom window.  As the adults passed, she lingered at the ground-level window, which she could pass through with just a little stoop.

“What a neat little door!” she exclaimed with wonder, not seeing me through the curtains on the other side of the window.

“IT’S NOT A DOOR!” I yelled dramatically, “IT’S A WINDOW! AND SOMEONE LIVES DOWN HERE!”

The little girl scampered off, catching up to her parents, frightened by the scary basement troll behind the curtains.

Good! That initial frightening impression should buy me a couple weeks of peace before they appear at my window asking “Whatchya doin?”