"Where Do I Go?"

Asked Alec, my 5-year-old, when he loped up to our room to cuddle this morning and found nary a spot for himself in bed. I welcomed him to cuddle me, but he answered his own question by wedging himself, in proper birth order, between Miles and Dahlia, to which Miles responded with a slight shove to Alec's back and lots of verbal protests. Dahlia crawled over him. That in a nutshell, or a nuthuse, sums up our family dynamics at the moment.

Yesterday morning I took Alec to the pediatrician's. I had to lie to him about shots to get him in the door. Once he'd peed in a cup, squinted through his eye test, resisted his hearing test, and been weighed and measured it was time. I told him that I had made a mistake, that in fact he'd have to get some shots to get into kindergarden. He hid under my wooden chair.

The doctor came back with the nurse practitioner. I lifted the chair up, and with the doctor's help got him onto my lap where I held his legs and arms with mine while the two other women counted to 3 and shot needles into his arms twice on each side. He cried bitterly, and I felt like a cross between a child who tortures a bug in a jar, and the evil Munchausen-by-proxy mother in The Sixth Sense.

He refused the bandaids that the doctor had laid out for him, something his 4-year-old self would have taken comfort in, but that he is now too old for. He finally stopped crying long enough to stick 2 bubblegum lollipops in his mouth at once. I reminded him and myself that this was for the best—he would be spared the fate of contracting diphtheria, tetanus, mumps, measles, polio, chickenpox, and homeschooling. The last of which he said he'd like to get.

I thought, as I do from time to time, what would happen if I home school my kids? And for awhile I was imagining Miles reading Tolstoy at the kitchen table, Alec out in the yard collecting specimens of lichen, and Dahlia eating lead paint chips from the asbestos shingles. The image of our bed this morning comes to mind. Who am I joking?

Just as it's mostly good for Alec to be innocculated, it's just as important for our immune systems and our souls to be exposed to any number of ordinary germs and adversity— in and out of the home.

Alec cries, but he's getting tougher and tougher each passing day, underneath his hair shirt. I just hope that he'll keep his sweet, tender side and not cover that up in bravado the way boys in our culture do without much conscious training. And the way most people have to in order to grow up. I think I am as deluded in the hope that he'll maintain this innocent vulnerability, as I am that I might be able to prevent this garden variety adversity from entering his soul by some simple vaccines, or by keeping him from them.