Good Cop, Bad Cop: Justice at Playground Sprinklers

Last Saturday Boo Boo and I had a play date in the West Village. We met up with one of my best friends from college and her daughter. While the West Village is a great playground for grownups, playgrounds for kids are not as easy to find, but they definitely exist. We found a playground off Bleeker Street, near the trains and IFC.

I don’t know what the weather people say but anecdotally this spring has been the wettest on record. But last weekend’s weather was a gift from the gods. Sunny and in the seventies. Did not have to worry about bringing x number of spare jackets, did not have to bring our pitiful, crumpled plastic rain cover, the kind of thing that you will never be able to put in the case you purchased it in ever again once you take it out the first time because there is no way you can fold plastic like origami and so therefore it manspreads itself in the entire stroller; we did not have to wear my rainboots, which make me feel like I’m wearing tires, or Boo Boo’s rainboots, which are really hard to put on, but also really hard for him to take off.

 

The playground was typical. A couple homeless people slept on benches by the sprinklers and a guitarist on the corner provided a soundtrack to the kids’ play. Now that Boo Boo can walk the theme for late spring this year is that sprinklers are a conspiracy to make Boo Boo hate his mother. I know where the sprinklers are at our local park. I had been keeping Boo Boo far from them. What is it like to take a half-drowned water rat home with you? I don’t know, but I imagine taking Boo Boo home after running around the sprinklers would be a similar experience. The stroller gets wet, I get wet, Boo Boo is cold and wet and no one is happy.

But when I go to other parks, ones whose terrain I’m not as familiar with, in neighborhoods that aren’t mine the sprinklers have ambushed me. Does every playground have a sprinkler and are they all turned on now? Sometimes it feels like it. Does every toddler want to play in the sprinklers? So far that seems to be the case. The sprinklers caught me off guard. The second he saw them Boo Boo wanted to play in them. The other kids were doing it, so why not us?

 

“Well, son,” I’d explain if he could understand, “these other kids live closer to this particular park and probably won’t have to wait in wet clothes for who knows how long while they wait and see how messed up the trains are on their way home. Their mommies and daddies clearly don’t care about foot and mouth disease, and they clearly don’t wonder if people wash themselves in the fountains, or if dogs pee in them. Also I just don’t want to change your diaper once it’s waterlogged with fountain water.  Also don’t we need Crocs or some other type of waterproof shoe that is expensive and will only last two seconds?”

There were only so many times I could say no. The NYC sprinkler baptism had to happen sooner rather than later. What made it easier to say yes at this particular moment in the West Village was seeing some other kid running around the sprinklers in his bare feet. I’m not averse to bare feet. I spent my childhood in bare feet. I don’t think I wore shoes once school was out. We did not have rats at the park where I’m from, and people only urinate in public outside bars. The only concern was stepping on a bee, which makes my childhood sound pastoral.

I was averse to bare feet here.

 

Since I did not want to admit to my friend about my paranoia about Boo Boo scampering around barefoot in New York City I scanned her face for clues that would belie any pro or con barefoot sprinkler-romping stance, but none were forthcoming. Clearly I was the only weirdo in this joint for wondering where the homeless people use the bathroom, or if rats have orgies at this particular site. So I took off Boo Boo’s shirt and shoes, knowing there was a stash of extra clothes in the diaper bag.

 

You know when you take a dog to a dog park and you take that leash off, and your dog needs no words to express how elated they are to run around like a maniac? Like joy distilled to its purest essence? Well, little kids in sprinklers are the same way.

 

One of the sprinklers shot up maybe eight feet into the air, and the other one resembled a dream catcher, with water spouting toward the center of a circular frame that was about five feet in diameter. Only the bravest big kids ran through the center of the circle, and the rest, mostly a handful of toddlers and pre-school aged kids, scampered through the resulting shallow streams and puddles. My friend’s little girl did not want to take off her shoes so, still dressed in her pink canvas shoes and dress, she jumped up and down like a pogo stick and squealed with delight. She did this in the same puddle, for like twenty minutes, circling back every five minutes to show her mom how wet her shoes got.

 

Boo Boo alternated between stamping in the water and crouching down to splash it with his hands. His baby beer belly glistened in the sun. Older toddlers pointed at him and said, “baby!”

 

Yes, my baby. One older toddler started running circles around Boo Boo. Boo Boo acknowledged him with a smile and kept stomping in the water, giving jubilant OOOOOH! when his tiny feet produced an exceptional splash.

 

My friend and I are usually extremely garrulous when we’re together. That day we were happy just to sit and watch our children play. Other grown-ups had gathered around to appreciate their gamboling children.

The next thing I know Boo Boo is on the ground, belly-up after being pushed by the older toddler who had been hovering over him. Maybe Boo Boo’s exuberance was off-putting. Maybe he was being too loud. I hear toddlers like to push boundaries, maybe he was still learning about forces and gravity and feelings. I had noticed earlier that the little boy’s mother was pregnant. Maybe he feared his reign as tiny but lovable dictator would come to an end after being usurped by a tinier dictator and he wanted as much attention from his dad as possible, and so therefore spent time pushing babies so that his dad would run up to him the same way he did after Boo Boo fell.

 

For whatever reason this kid pushed Boo Boo, and he smiled as he did so. I witnessed the first violent act against my son, done with that special aplomb that only another toddler with no fucks to give could muster. I raced over and scooped Boo Boo in my arms. Other nearby adults looked startled and concerned. The offending toddler looked started, too, perhaps thinking I was charging him. I hope he was scared. Fear is a good teacher in some cases, especially fear of pissing off someone else’s mother. I would have yelled at him, except his father got there first. And that’s not what Boo Boo needed from me at that moment, anyway.

 

I scooped him up and he clung to me in a way that made me feel how scared he was. Most of the time people are kind and warm to him, ready with big smiles and chirpy voices. He had scrapes on his back and elbow. They were small but significant in that they were the first scrapes he received as a result of someone’s bad intentions. Granted, that person was a toddler with growing pains, but these were certainly not good intentions.

 

My friend immediately offered Boo Boo blueberries, which he readily accepted with a sniffle. The perpetrating toddler was dragged over to us by his father. The boy did not cry or resist.

 

“Apologize to the baby,” he told his son. The kid was wearing swimming trunks and a waterproof shirt. He was wearing a sun hat. His big blue eyes were fixated on Boo Boo. Meanwhile, an older woman, perhaps someone’s grandma, maybe even this kid’s grandmother, started babywhispering to Boo Boo in French and stroking his arm. Boo Boo was mesmerized.

 

“You hurt the baby, say sorry,” repeated the father, firmly, when an apology did not materialize.

 

“Sorry,” the boy said in a small voice.

 

“It’s okay,” I said. I don’t remember if I looked at him or the father when I said it. I don’t know why I said it. It was not okay. I think I said it to help the father save face, to avoid confrontation, and so I could continue to focus on Boo Boo.

 

“Can I go play now?” the toddler asked his father, and off they went, leaving me to what, if anything, the kid had learned.  

 

By simply saying that everything was okay the incident was not as much as a teachable moment as it could have been. The boy was hearing one thing from his dad–that pushing is bad, and an entirely different thing from me, that the whole thing was okay. By sparing everyone’s feelings in the moment was I inadvertantly vindicating violent behavior?

 

I’ll never know.

 

But I do know what happened when I did the exact opposite the following morning at our local Sunset Park watering hole, which I finally decided to take Boo Boo to after the West Village sprinkler baptism. Boo Boo was prancing in the puddles. A set of triplets in matching floral dresses also scampered around, joined off and on by another toddler in a red dress. The triplets were amused by Boo Boo, pointing at him and waving. Boo Boo pointed back and them and smiled. The younger girl observed Boo Boo from a distance at first, but them came up to him and kissed him on the cheek before running off to splash in a puddle by herself. Soon, Boo Boo ambled over towards her puddle. She put her hand on his shoulder and then looked at me. Her circling Boo Boo reminded me of the way that the little boy was scoping him out before he pushed him the day before. I moved closer towards them. Then, apropos of nothing, when she thought I wasn’t looking she started to push him.

 

I rushed towards the two of them.

 

“HEY!” My tone was sharp. Maybe I was even snarling. “No. No pushing,” I said, firmly.

 

In the little girl’s mind I was certainly snarling, and she ran away towards her grandmother who seemed to scold her in Chinese. I wondered if the girl would remember me, a stranger, yelling at her more than she would remember he grandmother yelling at her. Would she refrain from pushing other kids if she knew there was a chance their mothers would bark at her?

 

I don’t know what it is about toddlers, how they can be affectionate one second, and then physically aggressive the next. At the same time, life for babies and toddlers is one big science experiment. What will happen to this rock if I throw it in the water? Does grass have a sound? What will a baby do if I push them? Does gravity work the same way on babies as it does on everyone else? They seem to be made of blubber, so surely not, and there’s only one way to find out!  

 

The girl didn’t quite get to push Boo Boo, but he fell anyway. Babies fall even in the best of times, but probably especially when they’re startled. Boo Boo seemed a little confused about why mommy was being so loud, but there was little time to dwell on that with the sprinklers on.