By The big one woke up at half past five this morning. By the time I’d switched on his bedroom light he was already about 250 words into one of those sprawling, run-on stream-of-consciousness monologues that three-year-olds tend to be so bizarrely fond of.
“….yeah but the snowman is a ball in the garden and he’s got feet and his friends are the deers and the horses with horns…” were the exact words he greeted me with. I quickly fell into my well-practised role, which primarily involves going “Really?” whenever there’s a lull. And then the conversation took a turn.
“…yeah and then we’re getting a plane to the jungle and another plane will go ‘MYOWWWWW’ and crash into us…”
Hold up. What? We’re going to be in a plane crash? “Yeah and we’ll be up so so high in the sky”. And the two planes will crash together, and we’ll all be on it when it happens? “Yeah”.
Sweet mother of god, my kid’s got dark.
I wish this was the first time that something like this has happened, but that isn’t the case. A couple of weeks ago, when we actually were on a plane, he did something just as spooky. As we were coming in to land, I reassured him about what was going to happen. “It might get a little bit loud in a minute, and we might bump around, but we’ll be OK”, I told him.
“No, the plane will crash”, he replied in a weird dispossessed sing-song voice. “It will break and crash.”
In the bath last week, he said that our house will soon collapse and everyone will be trapped in the rubble. My son is barely even my son any more. He’s a 'Stars In Their Eyes' cover act of the kid from The Sixth Sense.
Obviously, I know what’s actually happening here. His brain is has reached the point where it can predict sophisticated examples of cause and effect. He knows that if a car is going fast on the motorway, it could crash into another car. Or if a giant picks up our house and wears it as a hat, we might all fall out and die. I’m proud of him for this, in a way.
But holy shit kid, would it kill you to pick something more mundane? The branch will bend when the bird sits on it, the juice will spill if the cup tips over, that sort of thing. Because, at the moment, you’re starting to sound like Nicolas Cage in whatever that film of his is where he predicts the end of the world. And I don’t really want to be Nicolas Cage’s dad.
A tiny part of me worries that this is how it’ll be forever now. That he’s going to grow up into one of those morbid kids who constructs Saw-style torture devices for daddy long legs then forms an emo band called The Agony Of My Existence. And, if that happens, I’ll totally blame myself. I’ll track it back and pinpoint the genesis of his dark streak as the time I took my eye of the YouTube Kids app for a minute and let him watch five seconds of one of those unofficial Paw Patrol cartoons where Marshall dies in a house fire. I know it.
On the other hand, it’s probably good that he already understands that the world is cold and unpredictable, right? That’s all the Green Cross Code is, anyway, isn’t it? It’s a reminder that you have to be hyper vigilant at all times, lest a speeding missile of metal and glass murders you without warning. A little bit of awareness never hurt anyone, did it?
Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe this is a phase, just like the phase where he really got into blueberries, or the phase where he kept roaring like a demon at anyone who made eye contact with him in his pram. Maybe it’ll pass, and soon my sweet funny boy will have moved on to something new.
But for the meantime, while he’s still waking up shouting things like “I’VE LOST MY LIFE!” at nobody in particular, it’s creeping the absolute fuck out of me. Usually these columns are designed to reassure other parents that they’re not alone; that weird stuff happens to the best of us. Not this time, though. This time it’s just a naked casting call. Hollywood, if you need a stereotypically spooky kid to star in your terrible horror movies, and you’re filming within the next six weeks, I promise I know just the guy you’re looking for.
