‘You are seven and a half. Why are you still acting like a looney?’
The Wee Lad will be seven and a half years old, almost, at the end of this month. Yet the way he was carrying on the weekend, you would think he had yet to reach the milestone of four.
Still, there is an explanation in there somewhere, I think, and yes, I AM going to point to the unusual lunar activity on Friday as the probable cause of the Wee Lad’s tricks and treachery. I could blame myself, and like lots of mums wring my hands and wonder what I did wrong to cause this behaviour, but I’m not going to. I’m going to look at the sky and blame the ‘enumbral lunar eclipse, a full snow moon and a comet’ that spiced up the sky on Friday night.
One of my friends at work mentioned to me before we left for the weekend about the ‘ triple header’ in the sky. It did, I have to admit, cross my mind that the Wee Lad might be a little bonkers, but it wasn’t until I collected him from the childminder’s house to take him to see his beloved GamGam that he first showed the signs of lunacy.
He was jumping around in the back of the car, interrupting his older and far less affected by lunar events brother, when the Big Lad was trying to tell me something ‘interested’. I had shouted about ten times in ten minutes by the time I got to the house. At the dinner table, he spilled his drink, landed most of his food on the floor, argued again with his brother and started something that he had not done for a long time - squaring up to me. The Ma gave me ‘ the look’ from over the top of her glasses, and I tried to rectify the situation by squaring back up to him.
But he was being powered by the full moon and was giving as good as he got. The following day, he started again, arguing flat out with his long-suffering brother and refusing, point blank, to do anything he was told. And he really knows how to push the brother’s buttons, when, as I cleared out his schoolbag on Saturday, I discovered a Valentine’s card. I opened it, fully expecting to see ‘ To Mamo, I love you’ written in his far too big handwriting, but instead, it said: ‘ To Catherine’.
It took me a moment or two to realise that Catherine was not a wee one in his class, but rather the child of a friend whom the Big Lad had swooned over last summer and had been very definite about how much he loved her. And here was the Wee Lad claiming her for himself. What on earth was he thinking? The Big Lad, unfortunately, saw the offending item before it was hidden away, and it took him a little moment or two to cop onto what was happening.
The Wee Lad, under intense interrogation from his brother, admitted that yes, it was the same young one that the Big Lad had fallen for, and he liked her too. The Big Lad spluttered a few insults and stomped upstairs, crying. The Wee Lad stood there, shrugging his shoulders. I told him to apologise to his brother, but he refused - he wasn’t sorry about anything.
Upstairs, angst prevailed, with the Big Lad wondering why the brother was writing Valentine’s cards to his would-be girlfriend. ‘He’s winding you up’, I said. ‘Don’t worry, Catherine thinks you are a great fella- your brother is too immature. You’re not. And the mature thing to do is to go back downstairs and forget all about it’, which, in fairness, he did.
Except the tension remained for the whole weekend, the pair of them were sniping and nibbling at each other every single moment. On Monday, the Husband was informed of all of the weekend’s events so it didn’t take him long to lose the head when the Wee Lad digressed on the way home from school.
There was ‘a day of reckoning’, where the Wee Lad felt the fury of his father who could only raise his eyebrows when I tried to explain to him about the snow moon and the comet and their effects. The Wee Lad got straightened out, for now, without any intervention from the heavens.