My Son, The Psychopath

Most people who meet my 10 year old son think he is a very polite, charming boy. He loves animals and can coax even the grumpiest baby to laugh. In fact when he left kindergarten to move to grade school, his teacher cried. To be fair, when Sid left a couple of years later, she cried then too, but for totally different reasons.  What they don't know is that beneath that pleasing exterior lurks the heart of a psychopath.

When Sid was born, I spent a lot of time watching the Dr. Phil show. Not that I liked the man, in fact I couldn't stand him, but at that time of day, when I was nursing Sid, that program was the only option other than day time soaps, which will never see the light of day in my house. Anyway back to Dr. Phil and my son. One day his show was about psychopaths, or maybe sociopaths - I was sleep deprived and can't remember the exact details. However, what does stand out in my memory, was when Dr. Phil listed the seven character traits of a psychopath, I realised with horror that my son had at least four or five of them. After the initial shock had worn off, and cooler heads prevailed, I later recognised that those were attributes shared by most two year old boys.  

Now that I am older and wiser, I am beginning to wonder. Not content with owning a machete, I discovered this week that Grady has been inserting thumb tacks into his foam nerf bullets, turning otherwise harmless missiles into weapons of mass destruction. To be fair he hasn't used these on his sister - yet - but it is only a matter of time. It was Lindsay that sold him out. She showed me a box he had been using for target practice, peppered with tiny little holes. He had also been shooting his nerf gun at balloons left over from a birthday party, and although I was surprised he was able to burst them with only foam bullets, it didn't occur to me to investigate further. I was just elated no one was fighting. Stupid ! Stupid ! Stupid ! You would think by now, I'd know that the time when they are not fighting, is when they are at their most dangerous.

When I questioned Grady about his latest endeavours, he replied glibly "That's OK, Dad knows about it."  Now, why am I not surprised ? I guess it's not much of a stretch for a man who gives his son a machete (and no, I have not got over that yet) to give permission for booby trapped nerf bullets.  When I took my husband to task over this latest debacle,  he admitted that he was aware of it, but thought it was just one, bullet that had been doctored,  and only for the purposes of popping the previously mentioned balloons.  Poor misguided man or village idiot ? You be the judge.