Playground blues

In many relationships there is a dominant person, and in the case of Lara and Rhea it is no secret that up until now Rhea has been the dominant one.  I give them each an object or item of food and Rhea often grabs Lara’s so she has two and Lara has none. It doesn’t matter too much: I can usually find something else that Lara would like, or Rhea loses interest after a few minutes so Lara can take the item back. Poor Lara sometimes fights back, but she doesn’t often win and most often gives up without a fight. I keep an eye on her and give her more/better/tastier things to compensate when something she had is taken away. I don’t often take the item away from Rhea and return it because I don’t want to provoke a fight or set up a confrontation.

Recently, Rhea stepped it up and started pinching Lara for no apparent reason, then watching with curiosity the floods of tears this produces. In this situation I tell Rhea that this isn’t nice, encourage her to be gentle instead and give Lara lots of hugs. Rhea looks at me blankly then trots off happily on to the next distraction.

What happened last week was another small event in the girls’ lives but it shook me and I am still processing it.

We arrived at playgroup as usual and the girls wandered off (yes, they’re walking now, and I’ve accepted that they are toddlers) to explore the toy scooters, cars, baby prams and the sandpit outside. They weren’t paying too much attention to the parents and carers or to the eight or so babies and children aged from four months to nearly three. We all sat under the big old pine tree outside on toddler chairs by the toddler table eating fruit for morning tea. Rhea sat at a little chair and Lara was on my knee. There was a new baby aged nine months and his mother and a new boy aged 22 months and his father and I had a chat to both parents, wanting to make them feel welcome.

After morning tea while I was following Rhea I heard a cry that sounded familiar and saw that Lara was being hit by the 22-month old. Lara has been pinched by her sister and shouted at by her cousin but she has never been hit. She sought refuge from me and soon she was better again.

I let her toddle away to play and kept talking with the new father for a few minutes before my attention was drawn to another commotion in the playground. From a distance it looked like one of the children, a chubby little two-year-old boy, was being hit by the new boy, this time with a plastic spade. The new boy was hitting the other’s behatted head repeatedly and the chubby boy was kneeling down, seemingly unable to fight back or run away. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought. ‘His carer needs to pay more attention to him. He’s getting quite a knocking.’ Then the familiar wail started up again and to my horror I saw that it was not the chubby boy being hit but Lara, dressed that day like the chubby boy in blue and white.

At the same moment that I reacted, the boy’s father ran over and separated them, telling off his son and receiving the same blank looks that Rhea gives in these situations. Lara was inconsolable. She sobbed and sobbed. Rhea was nearby and started crying too. (I think she was responding to the feeling that something was wrong rather than to any particular affinity for her sister’s anguish). Rhea calmed down but Lara took a long time to stop crying, and she climbed into my lap in the sandpit when the boy approached some time later. It was as if she was feeling for the first time that her environment can be unsafe and people can be cruel. Rhea pinches her but she knows Rhea. She didn’t know this boy.

I felt guilty that I hadn’t been watching out and hadn’t protected my baby and I felt terrible that I had put her in a situation that caused her such distress. I gave her lots of cuddles that day and decided that I would supervise her more closely in future when she is around other toddlers. I also watched her closely in the days afterwards to see whether there were any lasting effects.

I think Lara is OK and I was probably more shaken by her trauma than she was. Reflecting on it, this was the first time when I have felt fiercely protective of my child. I hope that the girls are not bullied at school and I won’t feel this way very often. I hope they grow up to feel protected and that they eventually become resilient enough to cope with knocks and setbacks, whether physical or emotional.

In the meantime, Rhea has last week started biting Lara, sometimes to see her reaction and sometimes to get something Lara has. But tonight Lara got a good grip on her toothbrush and hung on when Rhea tried to snatch it from her.

I gave her a secret encouraging smile, and she smiled back at her success.