I’m just going to come right out and say it. I have a hard time at kids’ parties. Mostly because I am reliving my own childhood horror of kids’ parties.
I find it incredibly difficult to be there with all the noise and all the stimulation and all the screaming. Yet at the same time I also really enjoy it watching these fine young human beings, some of them I’ve known since they were babies, grow up and become their own people and learn how to figure out life.
Though having grown up only knowing what it’s like to be a boy, I do find it difficult sometimes watching on as a man.
In my broad experience – boys usually come in two kinds. “Bam Bam” and ”other”.
The Bam Bam boys generally communicate and connect through pushing and shoving and punching and chasing and wrestling and screaming. Sometimes all at once. It’s easy to tell who is who.
Because a Bam Bam can Bam Bam with another Bam Bam, and there’s no sign of distress at all. From my perspective over by the folding table covered in fairy bread and cupcakes, it will look like a WorldStar hip-hop video, so I can get filled with tension wondering, if I should get over there and break it up.
But on closer inspection – I’m not seeing any distress. That’s just how they connect. These kids will be rolling around on the ground with headlocks intertwined, kicking and flailing around, and then just get up and carry on like nothing ever happened. They’re completely cool with it. I’m thrilled they’re cool with it.
I’m certainly not saying there’s anything wrong with it. But I just can’t understand it. Because I am definitely not, nor have I ever been in the Bam Bam category.
As I’ve written before, getting punched in the arm as a way to connect with me is not my cup of tea. As a kid, anything like what I’ve just described was only ever an assault that I needed to defend myself from. It was never fun. Never enjoyable, never playful, and I still can’t understand how it can be. But I see other people do it, so I know it can happen.
When I’m at a kid’s party with my son, and I can see the Bam Bam situation erupting, it’s really difficult for me. Because I remember wanting so much to connect and play with the other guys. Wanting to connect with them. But it’s like there was some unwritten rule of how hard those pushes and shoves are supposed to be.
I never knew where that line was, so as I’d try to join in and attempt to be a part of the Bam Bam, I would hit or kick or punch too hard and suddenly it’s no longer that, and then I’m by myself again.
I understand that I find it really confronting being at kids’ parties because I’m filtering what I’m seeing through my own experience. And I’ll only step in if someone’s in a great deal of distress, even then, only if it’s my son, and further still I’ll only ever take care of him and together we’ll figure out if he needs to make a bit of space from someone or if he needs to go and say sorry.
Now that I’ve been going to these parties for a little while, I’m finding it easier to discover earlier which kids oscillate on the Bam Bam frequency and which don’t.
If a birthday party is at a venue, there’s often a party room where they sequester the eating portion of the festivities lest the entire venue be covered in smash cake and tomato sauce. In one of these punishing echo chambers the other day with 12 excited kids, just as the chips and deep-fried chicken-like substances hit the table, the obviously hungry and quite excited kids started to scream. Ten of these little human car alarms all screaming at the same time as loud as they possibly could. Two of them put their fingers in their ears.
The two kids who put their fingers in their ears? They’re not the Bam Bam kids.
Once again – let me be perfectly clear, there’s nothing wrong with the Bam Bam kids. That’s just how they roll, literally.
And while it’s super-hard for me to be there, I have to remember that my son is on his own journey of figuring it all out. If there’s one thing Audrey’s really instilled in me, it is that his childhood is not my childhood, which is easier said than done.
Wolfgang’s only six, so he’s still figuring it all out, but he’s so self-aware and he’s able to put his feelings into words that I think he’s on the way to being able to handle whatever comes his way. In some ways, he’s the one that guides me through how to handle some of these really big energy situations.
Everyone else, including the kids and the other parents, are fine with the calamity. I just don’t understand it and causes such a strong feeling inside my body that I have no choice but to just sit there and have to be with it for the whole time.
This is why I can’t stand kids’ parties. So what now, what? Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Audrey is to let Wolfie steer the ship. Sometimes when we’re at a party and there’s been a lot of chaos, the young lad will come up to me and say he’s just going to sit down by himself for a second, and he’ll go back over there in a minute.
I’m just so amazed that he knows to disengage for a bit, have a couple of breaths and a cuddle with me, and then get back into the fray. That he can understand when he’s at his capacity at the age of five is incredible.
And this is where I appreciate the challenge of such an event. Because even though I find it physically very difficult to be in that amount of stimulation, I appreciate it as an exercise in pro-strength down-regulation.
I will happily stand there and chat with the other parents, all while doing the most extraordinary down-regulation breaths and secret muscle relaxation exercises.
No one needs to know that I’m clenching my butt cheeks, holding my breath, and then releasing all of that very slowly in between talking about the Roosters game the other night and the plans for the school’s upper playground renovations over the summer time.
One thing’s for sure: at every kid’s party, every child will get a party bag when they leave and cry at some point. Doesn’t matter who your kid is, it’s going to happen. And I want to be sure that when Wolf comes over and he needs that moment to have a cuddle and get a pat on the bum and head back into the melee, that I can be there for him and I can show him that I’m a space that is calm, safe, and secure.
Which I’ve found is a good thing to focus on when there are 130 decibels of combined six-year-old screaming melting my hearing aids. It’s not their fault they’re that excited. They’re six, and the food’s just hit the table. I still get excited when I see chips, don’t you?
As much as I love going to these parties with Wolf, I do not find it an enjoyable experience. It is an enormous amount of effort for me to stay as relaxed and calm as I need to be.
So what? Now what?
Instead of seeing it as an effort, I see it as a chance to train up my capacity for dealing with calamity. Keep up my ability to stay calm in a crisis.
The best part is that I get to do work on it while watching Spider-Man (with an Irish accent) make balloon animals and play tunnel ball with kids in a bouncy castle.
