I got home from a three-day business trip last night, right around dinner time, and Jackson greeted me at the door with his usual level of excitement, yelling, “DADDY!” and throwing himself into my arms. Diego, on the other hand, sat at the dinner table, munching on a snack, and did not move a muscle, despite Jackson telling him, over and over, “Diego, Daddy’s home!” Diego just sat there, staring straight ahead.
“I was pretending to be a statue,” he explained. He smiled then; it had been a joke in his mind, but it had visibly shaken Jackson, and it troubled me a little as well.
Thinking on it now, it’s the difference between them in microcosm – a perfect laboratory specimen of their emotional profiles. On the one hand there’s Jackson, who wears every emotion on his sleeve, as they say. He feels his feelings to the extreme. When he’s happy his daddy is home, he lets anyone and everyone know it, smothering me in hugs and kisses, and when he’s upset at having to sleep alone in his bed (for example) he is screaming and crying almost to the point of hyperventilation. There is never any mystery as to what’s going on with Jackson.
Diego is no less sensitive; in fact, he’s probably more sensitive than his little brother. It will take a trained and careful eye to be aware of what he’s going through at any given time. We are usually pretty good at reading him, because we’ve known him for as long as we have, and he probably shows us more than he shows others. In other settings, like school, for example, he is already flying under the radar. His teachers give us comments like “Diego’s such a good kid. He never causes any trouble.”
Jackson is more of a celebrity in the hallways of Manor Elementary. People say things like, “Oh, you’re Jackson’s dad. Yeah, I know him. Funny kid!” From the moment he set foot in the school, Jackson was determined to know (and be known by) every person there. They’ve already decided that he and his best friend Travis must never be in class together again.
According to J., Diego is just like her when she was a child. She too was an emotionally guarded kid with a lot going on under the quiet surface. As a result, she’s very careful to check in with Diego periodically and to make sure he’s doing all right.
I’d like to say I was just like Jackson when I was six, but I was never as confident as he is. Any “swagger” I may have developed came later – like in college, maybe, and it was a forced, false swagger, masking a great deal of insecurity I’d always carried around with me.
Jackson’s swagger is real and comes completely naturally to him. It’s quite something to see. As his parent, my job is to make sure he uses his extreme confidence for the purposes of good and not evil.
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