Hate Mail

I have been receiving quite a lot of angry letters from my eldest son lately. They all basically send similar messages. 'I don't want to be part of this family anymore.' 'I want to go to another family.' He also is really upset with his name, specifically his middle name. It's Elliott. It's funny that names are so important to me, and I try so hard to give my kids the most amazing name I can possibly think of, and he doesn't like it. Funny.

He says that kids laughed at his middle name at school. I don't know exactly what that scenario entailed. How did the children even find out his middle name? Why would five-year-olds laugh at it? It's a cool name! Maybe because they were unfamiliar with it, they laughed. I don't know. But Kobe mostly just brushes stuff like that off. He's a pretty confident kid.

But when he's tired, that's usually when all of this childhood trauma comes to the surface. So here's some of his letters to us lately. Most of them written from bed at night. He's really a well-adjusted, kind kid. But tiredness seems to bring on resentment and self-loathing.
This note says, "Don't say Kobe Elliott. Name me something else. Kobe."

I asked him what he wanted to be called, and this is the name he chose for himself. "Jackson Lite York." Lite to be interpreted as 'Light'. I understood why he chose Jackson because he has many friends named Jackson. I asked him why he chose Light, and this is what he said: "Well, there's the dark side. And the opposite of the dark side is the light side. And I don't choose the dark side, I choose the light. So that's my name, Light." See, I told you he's a good boy. Just trying to figure things out.

In the last letter, he's just making sure his point is clear by scribbling out his old name numerous times, and then drawing the new happy boy, Jackson. We started calling him Jackson, but he still wasn't happy. He wrote, "No more Jackson in the family. I want to go to another family. From Jackson." We said we'll talk about it in the morning, and it hasn't come up since. The next morning, however, we said 'Good Morning' to our eldest son, Jackson, and he quickly changed his mind about that name. He was back to Kobe, but wanted to keep the middle name Light. Fine by us. Now Luke wants to change his middle name, too. First he chose 'Toot'. Then he chose 'Poop'. But those names were obviously unacceptable. So he settled on 'Jawa'.

My goodness, raising these boys is hard right now. I think it's unfair that the mental angst and parental annoyance of teenagers has begun already for me. All my boys are going through their 'phases' right now. They usually don't happen all at once. Luke's are tantrums and whining. And Jude's are neediness and frustration over communication. And he has also discovered that a finger up his nose gets him some laughs and attention.