Boy Trouble

Ahhhhhh my son. My dear darling boy. My treasure, my gem, my little man.

My pain in the bum.

He loves me. He hates me. He tests me. He baits me.

Boy Seymour has been going through a tricky phase recently. I am not sure I know for exactly how long, but I have been finding him troublesome – on and off – for approximately one year, ten months and oh, let’s say, eleven days.

Hmmmm, funny… that’s about the same amount of time we have been living in The Shed. I wonder if a lack of space, a disorderly environment, shelf-sharing with his three sisters and a general undertone of chaos has contributed in any way to his current demonic attitude to life? Or is he just an utter twunt of his own volition?

I understand that he has his challenges, and our very lifestyle is possibly just the tip of the iceberg. He also struggles with walking, running, and anything involving agility. That must be hard.

But! In recent days he has done things that have rendered me speechless – things that make me concerned for the future.

He has:

• told Grandma E that Little Seymour Number Two disabled her iPad, in order to get Number Two told off and thence to grab said iPad, posing as the saviour of the day, when said iPad was re-enabled.
• promptly then locked Number Two in Grandma’s attic after she (Number Two) was so incensed by his brazen lie that she climbed two storeys to get away from him.
• rendered Mini Seymour catatonic with rage at regular intervals at the weekend whilst she was diligently making a mud garden in the soil. His maniacal laugh could be heard from The Shed, at which point I sent him away, to harass his father instead.
• been seen to kick Number One’s head with his shoe as he climbed the ladder to retrieve something from The Shelf. (This was no involuntary muscle spasm – of which he is sometimes capable. This was downright deliberate.)
• turned around and stopped in the middle of the pavement, next to a busy road in the dark, so that Mini Seymour bumped straight into him, and then he laughed maniacally. Again. 
• been sent out of class for general buffoonery.
• walked straight in front of the trainee teacher’s car as he jumped over a puddle and into the road.
• posed semi-naked in a home-made mankini, told me to take photographs, which I refused to do until he was vaguely decent, then got very cross when I took a picture and showed my friends – by way of a warning that such behaviour can lead to embarrassment later in life. (Or later that day, in this case.) 
• (…. and to trump all of the above,) “accidentally” stolen a money envelope from a church collection plate – it found its way into his pocket whilst I was talking to another mum at ballet, and he announced it was there in mock (?) surprise when we were half way home and past the point of no return.

The latter was the last straw. I am now in possession of a little blue envelope, etched with an old lady’s handwriting, containing a few pounds of a hard-earned pension that she thinks she has lovingly donated to her church. I will, of course, make Boy take it back in due course, but WHAT ON EARTH WAS HE THINKING? Is he simply a forgetful child who tucked the envelope into his pocket to see what it felt like (?) and then got distracted? Or is he, in fact, The Artful Twunting Dodger?

Do I call the police? Must I make him write a letter? Should we return the loot under the cover of darkness to avoid detection by the parishioners? God knows. Literally. 

This evening, my son has had a further meltdown. He was rendered red, sobbing and snotty after becoming very upset that he couldn’t have the iPad. He wishes he lived in a world with no rules, he says, and where I am not his mother. I never cuddle him apparently, he declared as he got off my lap, and his life sucks.

Luckily, he’s fickle and easily distracted. A quick Google search (yes – on the bloody forbidden iPad) of the new live action version of Aladdin and all four of my children are spellbound. Which is nice. But I am not so lucky. There’s a little blue envelope sitting in my bag, burning a hole in my conscience, and making me question my parenting skills big time.

Where did I go wrong?