The First Ten Years, Matthew Kennedy, Books, Real Stories

O’Leary was just beginning to discover his power as a nuisance to his brother. He was short of two years old but already a master in the ways of causing discomfort. He had just discovered the power of slamming a door, and he loved to do it, over and over. He would run into their bedroom and slam the door, for no reason. We would go in there to find him just waiting for someone to come and get him. He would be bouncing up and down on the verge of a seizure; he was so excited over all the control this activity elicited.

I could just hear him, “look at what I made you do,” except he wouldn’t really say that, since he was in no hurry to talk, he would garble about something. He would stand there at the door with a touch of madness and the pacifier only made him look crazier.

There would be those times when he would take the pacifier out of his mouth and just like a six-shooter from the Old West he would pop another one in. We were constantly amazed and tried to figure out where he was getting these from. He had an endless supply. He stands there with his pacifier and just stares at you, feeling satisfied with the door slamming. You tell him “no’ and somewhere in his mind he hears, “the minute I turn my back, please slam the door again.”

As if slamming the door wasn’t enough fun, he discovered new ways to get Ronan to chase him just so he could slam the door in Ronan’s face. Poor Ronan, he isn’t a tormentor at heart so he doesn’t understand the mentality. Because of that he continues to be O’Leary’s victim. O'Leary will grab Ronan’s juice cup and take off only to get Ronan to chase him to the bedroom and “CRASH” the door slams. Then O’Leary laughs from behind the closed door.

This morning was no different than any other. O’Leary is trying to torment the Chief and I have to keep putting the brakes on it, because I am sure the people below us don’t enjoy the running back and forth. It is so loud you would think the two of them are wearing deep-sea diving boots. I had to go to a meeting and had warned her of their game and maybe it is a good idea if they don’t do it so early in the morning. Poor Alison, it's too early and she just thinks I’m nagging, which I probably was.

So I say my goodbyes and make my way out the door. I don’t even get ten feet down the hallway and I hear it, “BANG,” only to be followed by the most blood-curdling shrill I have ever heard in my entire life. I ran back as fast as I could and when I got back in the apartment, it was like the world had turned on its axis.

She is standing there holding the Chief and he is holding his head and blood is gushing out between his fingers. I look down to my left and O’Leary is standing there in the bedroom doorway looking up at me with a confused look on his face. The pacifier is bobbing back and forth the whole time.

She is too scared at this point to do anything but to hold the Chief, but now is not the time. I need to see the cut. She is going on and on about what happened or what to do and how bad he is hurt. I am not really hearing her. She’s terrified, I get it.

I grab the Chief out of her arms and bring him into the bathroom so I can see where the blood is coming from. It is pouring out and his beautiful hair and hands are soaked. He is crying in a way I have never heard before, this is the kind of crying that teaches a parent that his child is really hurt and the child needs them.

I start running the water in the bathtub and tell the Chief I have to get his head in the water so I can clean it off. I am holding him tight the whole time to let him know I am there and not going anywhere.

She and O’Leary are off to my right watching, she is crying and O’Leary takes it in. If I didn’t know better, I would say based on his look, he knew that this was somehow his fault. That is unimportant right now.

I get the Chief’s head under water and he starts screaming and screaming and I am telling him to stop moving and hold him tight while looking down on the gash.

“Oh my God, I can’t look at that” Alison says while turning away. She gets me a cloth and some ice.

It is so deep, I want to throw up. It was like someone tied a cinder block around my neck and then threw it to the ground. I never felt such a weight before. It just hit me like a manhole cover right in the back.

It looked like someone hit him with hammer. There was a giant gash on the top of his head, all the skin was pushed back and to the side and blood was flowing like a river. Apparently O’Leary had taken something of his and took off. When Ronan chased him, O’Leary had slammed the door and the door handle hit Ronan right on the head and opened him like a cantaloupe.

I put ice and a towel on it, picked him up and held the ice and towel on his head with as much pressure as he could stand. We raced down to the car and off to Midway Hospital as soon as my piece of crap car could get there. He was so tough, he just sat there with me pushing the towel down on his head and talking to me about how much it hurt, but the odd thing was, he did it so calmly.

We got into the hospital and we were quick to get into a room and the attending physician comes in. “Hi I’m Doctor Nick.” He extends his hand and all I can think of is the Dr. Nick from the Simpsons and I hope this one went to a different med school than the “Upstairs Hollywood Medical School.”

I tell him what happened and the really cool thing is, he is listening but he is focused on Ronan, he is talking to him and distracting him while examining him. He makes sounds like “ohh” and “hmm” neither of which I like.

“That is a nasty little cut, we are going to have to staple that.”

“What?” I say with surprise.

“The cut, that is how we close it up, we have to staple it.”

“Jesus Christ, are you kidding me?”

Ronan is looking at me, obviously he is apprehensive but thank God he has no idea what it means to be stapled.

Dr. Nick gives a quick lesson on how it’s done and tells me to stay calm for Ronan so he doesn’t pick up on the anxiety.

“You have a choice, I can give him a painkiller shot in the cut to keep him still while I staple that up or we can ice it for a while to numb the area, it is up to you.”

“What is best?” I ask.

“I would prefer to let him ice it to see if that works.”

“OK.”

So the Chief and I sit in the emergency room while putting ice on the cut, which is really gross. We are talking about Batman Beyond and how tough the futuristic Batman is and how stuff like this happens to him all the time. We sit there for an hour applying bag after bag of ice to the cut. He has no idea what is coming. I do and it makes me want to throw up.

Finally, the moment is here. Dr. Nick brings in a cart with something like a staple gun on it and the sight of it is too much. The Chief watches nonchalantly as he and Doctor Nick have a conversation about Batman Beyond. Dr. Nick has no idea what the hell Batman Beyond is. It really adds to Ronan’s confusion and serves as a nice misdirection. Amidst the conversation, Dr. Nick is telling me what to do and what to expect. He holds Ronan down with the assistance of the nurse who seems completely unfazed by the whole thing.

The Chief has no idea what is coming as the doctor places the gun just over the cut and then “SNAP.”

The Chief's body goes instantly rigid and he screams so loud and starts crying. He looks at me and I will never forget this look as long as I live. “Why, Why?” He is just staring right through me, in the midst of his pain, he doesn’t take his eyes off me.

I stand right next to him, cheering him on, telling him why it has to be done and “SNAP” he screams louder.

“NO, NO, NO!!” he is screaming, looking at me the whole time.

The whole time he never takes his eyes off me. He reaches out his left arm from underneath the doctor, “SNAP” and his little hand and arm shake and he screams again and the tears run hard.

His beautiful little face is looking up at me and he is saying “Dad, no, no Dad, no more it hurts, it hurts” and “SNAP.”

He then has a resigned look, he can’t figure out why I am I not helping him. “You’re my Dad why are you standing there?” I can see it in his eyes. “SNAP”, the screams again. I am helpless. He feels abandoned and I am right there.

Seven more times his head is stapled, twelve in all.

I am here for him but in a lot of ways this is the most painful moment in my entire life. My heart broke this day in a way I don’t think could ever be put back together. I can still feel it like I am standing right there. My son, my boy reached out to me in his own little four year old hell to make the man stop and I didn’t, I didn’t stop it. I let him down and he knew it, something shifted for him in those moments.

I know it was for his best. I’m no fool, I know how it works. But any parent who has been in that situation knows what I mean. To have your child think you have abandoned him in the midst of what that child thinks is a nightmare is the loneliest feeling I have ever known.

Here lies your greatest love, the one thing on this planet you would drink battery acid for if it would alleviate any pain and you stand by the doctor while he staples him. I would do it again and again if need be, but it doesn’t change the fact that on that morning, a little bit of the innocence between me and the Chief was gone.

Sometimes that innocence dies through no fault of your own and sometimes it dies because of you. I contributed to it for O’Leary, I didn’t want fate to intervene and steal that opportunity from me. Like every good jackass, I took it for myself.

Like many of life’s lessons, this one began with kindergarten, but this isn’t the kindergarten of my youth. It’s a whole new ball game nowadays. Back in my days, it seemed that the whole point of kindergarten was to do everything you could to avoid spending time in the red circle. I wasn’t too good at that. There also was the pressure of show and tell. But getting into Kindergarten wasn’t the pressure-filled exercise it is today. Back in my day, if you had a pulse, even a weak one, you were in and I got in by the skin of my teeth.

The Kindergarten of 2005 is a bad, bad place. First things first, before you are ever eligible for Kindergarten you have to get clearance from NASA that you are even competent to take the Kindergarten entrance exam. I know, that phrase doesn’t work, a Kindergarten entrance exam, go figure.

We were very lucky with the Chief, he proved right out of the gate to have an affinity for school, and a memory for letters and numbers, we never got the sense that it was a pain for him. In nursery school, he would plow through any exercise they gave him whether it was letters or trying to figure out where the hell Waldo went. He took to it like a fish to water.

O’Leary, well let's just say, that it wasn’t for him. He knew what nursery school was all about, only one thing, play time. Any interruption with letters, numbers and square pegs in round holes was a huge inconvenience for him. Teacher Tara would use a “letter jar” with him and pick out a letter for him to identify. She would hold the letter up, go over it with him and then ask him what it was a few minutes later. He would just tell her he didn’t feel good or he was tired and get around it. For Christ’s sake, four years old and already playing the system.

This was an epic battle between the Gods of Nursery School Knowledge and the Gods of a Willful Child, and the child gods were winning. He just didn’t care and he wouldn’t retain a damn thing. But he could tell you exactly how Batman Beyond ended when the Joker gang attacked an elderly Bruce Wayne. Oh my God, I am raising the Rain Man of DC Comic Books. So this went on and on for months.

I started to question if we did something wrong. Did we potty train him too late? I had such enormous anxiety about this. I talked to the principal at Cathedral Chapel School and she told me not to worry about it.

She wouldn’t dream of separating the Kennedy boys. She would test O’Leary personally. It didn’t matter, I was headlong into having a stroke about this and nothing would stop me.

Because I was such an ass about the whole process, it turned out to be a very powerful lesson for me as a parent and I am certain a really awful experience for O’Leary as a child. I was already struggling with the idea that O’Leary wasn’t learning the way Ronan did and maybe Ronan’s taking to school had considerably less to do with my abilities as a super parent. I couldn’t understand why O’Leary didn’t get things immediately like Ronan, I got frustrated.

It is a terrible thing I fell into with O’Leary. I’m sure other parents fall into the same trap but I can only speak for myself. It was a time when I treated the two of them as if they were “one person” instead of the two people they are. I thought Ronan did this in school, so O’Leary would do the same. That is not how it works, I know that is not how it works. Coming from a family of seven children, I understood that truth at its core, but it didn’t matter, I just ignored all that.

I knew their nature, their approach to the world, they are so different, but here I failed to see it. Of course, O’Leary will learn the same way Ronan does - Fat chance.

I tried to go over letters with him and it made no difference. I had these little flash cards in the car with me and I would test him from time to time. I would hold up a letter and tell him what it was and then have him repeat it. I would then ask him again a minute or two later and he would just look at me. Crickets are all I heard. He just didn’t care, he would shrug his shoulders and mutter “ggermmpplphh.” He was completely unfazed by the whole thing. This is all complicated by the fact that the entrance exam was right around the corner.

On that fateful day, I picked up Ronan at his school and made my way over to pre-school to get O’Leary. As was the norm, when I got to pre-school he was playing some outrageous game that involved some whacked-out fighting style not duplicated anywhere in the known world. The greatest thing about these fighting techniques is that they all come with their own sound effects, which are always funny, but no matter what, they always sound the same, like a gun. When he kicks, punches, jumps or rolls, he makes it all sound like a gunshot. Even more amazing was that these battles could take place with just one person, O’Leary fighting an invisible world of warriors.

After a dynamic display of fighting skills, I manage to corral him and we are off to the car. I get him in his seat and he is still wound up from the battle.

“How was school Bud?”

“Good”, he says but he isn’t listening, he is looking out the window and messing around with his Batman figure in the back seat.

“Did you work on your letters?”

“Hhmmpphh,” or something like that was all he said.

“What?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Do you know the letters? Your test is coming up soon?”

“Yeah” but really he is more intent on the battle between Batman and the lady out on the sidewalk corner. I wish I could explain but he was making the Batman action figure battle with the lady outside and she had no idea she was getting her butt kicked.

“What is this?” I held up a card with the letter “C” on it. I thought this would be an easy start.

He just looked at it. It seemed like a minute passed and nothing. I ask again,

“What’s this Bud?”

Nothing, he just looks at it.

So I told him what it was. I make him repeat it, again and again.

“What’s this?”

“C”

He gets it. We go over it a few more times and he keeps saying “C.”

I feel a litter better. I give him a few minutes and hold up the “C” card again and I ask, “What’s this?”

He looks at me.

I ask again, and again he looks at me.

At this point I am starting to get mad. This is pissing me off.

“O’Leary we just spent ten minutes going over this stupid letter, what is it?”

I hold the card up again and I am shaking the “C” card for emphasis.

I hear Ronan, being the good brother, trying to help him and I snap at him to stop. He looks like a dog that had just been kicked. Because I feel bad about that, I do the opposite of what I should; I get madder that O’Leary isn’t getting it.

Now O’Leary is picking up on the stress and he is getting worked up.

We do the drill again but this time I am loud and I can see O’Leary is confused. I can just see it in his eyes, which are now starting to get a little misty. His big blue eyes are looking at me in the rearview mirror and his feelings are obviously hurt. But now I am in a lather. Why the hell can’t he figure this out?

This time I yell, “What is it?"

Now Ronan is scared.

And then I hear it, he mutters it so quietly and so slowly that that I can barely hear it. But when he does it, he does it in the form of a question, “is. . . . it. . . a. . . C?”

“Yes, finally” I say. I look in the mirror an O’Leary is trying his hardest not to cry and he is just staring at me. He doesn’t know what to do next. Now I am a mix of emotions and all are bad. I am infuriated, not at O’Leary, but at myself because I had no control. I am frustrated because I couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get it, and relieved because he finally got it. Like an ass, I was too worked up in my own mess to say anything. We just ride home in silence.

The two of them sit in the back seat, quiet and tense, not knowing what to expect. We get home and open the doors, I help Ronan with his books.

“Come on O’Leary let's go!” I turn and walk toward the house. I get the door open and Ronan goes in, I turn to tell O’Leary to come on and he is still sitting in his booster seat.

“Come on O’Leary” he just sits there.

I go to the car and he is trying so hard not to cry, but he isn’t having much success. He is just looking down at this point.

I reach out to him, “Come on Bud.”

Now he really starts to cry hard and looks up at me with his beautiful eyes and says “Sorry Dad.”

Now I start to cry. “Don’t worry about it Bud. Dad was acting like a jerk, I’m sorry for that.”

I pick him up out of his seat and carry him into the house and he is holding on to me like his life depended on it. He really feels like he disappointed me and it is too much for him. I apologize repeatedly and explain to him over and over what happened and that he did nothing wrong. But it’s too late.

I made my boy feel less than because I didn’t appreciate his capacity and the way he learns.

I had no right, and it was a huge lesson for me that my two children are not the same, but are clearly individuals with strong personalities of their own.

When I put him to bed and he is starting to fall off on his way to sleep, he looks at me with his little four year old head and lazy eyes and says “sorry” one more time and then he falls asleep.

I never felt so awful, his last feeling before going to sleep was that he felt like he needed to apologize to me because I was a jerk. I try to be really aware of that, to know that they will gather their own baggage in life and just because I have a hard time carrying my own doesn’t mean I get to make them carry it for me.