Day Twenty One: Brats

At church, I decided to volunteer in the daycare. God knows why. The kids I dealt with were the brattiest kids I've ever met, but I think I loved them.

They were throwing balls at each other and screaming and hitting one another, so I told them all to sit down. Then I asked them what they wanted to do. "NOTHING!" Um. One kid suggested making Father's Day paintings, which made sense. I forgot it was this greeting card's turn.

So we pulled out all the paints and I went around asking them what color paper they wanted. The kids hated me. One little girl named Zoe kept screaming at me, "Go away, you're weird!" She was probably raised to hate all men by TV. She went through a dozen sheets of paper, cause she kept messing up. I kept handing new ones to her and she'd get angry at me for giving her what she wanted. How odd, a six-year-old feminist-perfectionist.

The boys would kick me and try to steal my fedora. They'd run all over the place, leaving their handprints all over the doorknobs and sink taps. All over me. I think their goal was more to make the world's largest mess of tempera gook than to create anything artistic. But it was amazing for me. I loved watching the mixture of color they made, the weird shapes and hues and all that. Everyone was an artist. I really felt that. Too bad they'll grow out of it. They'll grow up and get a job doing data entry at some boring financial office. They'll forget about creating. Just copy/paste like the rest of the herd.

Those kids really were bratty. Don't get me wrong, I'm just telling it like it is. But I really enjoyed monitoring them for a half hour. There was something strange and powerful at work. I don't like kids, meaning, no, I won't do this again. However, I never once let myself get mad at them, even though my knee-jerk reaction to their violent kicking in the shins was to beat the shit out of them.

The girls who helped me babysit thought it was extremely miserable. They told me half the kids had ADHD and I responded, "They're kids! I was like that when I was their age (nine), and I grew out of it. We can't just drug up every kid with a label and sedate them with a diagnosis! They're acting like this cause they need attention. Not amphetamines." If America is so drug-free, why do we use drugs to solve everything socially unacceptable?

I had an epiphany when all the kids were picked up their mothers; the only reason these good church going men get to celebrate Father's Day is because of these brats. I shuddered. But later I laughed. What a stupid un-holi day.