Biter

I hang my head in Mommy-Shame. We have a Biter on our hands.

The first call we got was last week. "BB bit one of her friends," said the teacher on the line.

Immediately I thought, what the hell did her "friend" do to her? But what I said was, "oh no! Is the kid okay?" The teacher assured me that everyone was fine, and that these things happen. The next natural question of course was, "who'd she bite?" The teachers stay silent when it comes to "incidents" in the classroom, but I couldn't shake the feeling that the other kid must have been bullying my angel. Heaven knows what the other kid's mommy was thinking.

Since we had one of BB's teachers sitting for us that night, I grilled the poor girl mercilessly until she confessed that the Bite-ee was a kid named E who tackled Naomi and made her cry last month. Rooster and I decided that this was an appropriate scenario in which we should indeed blame the victim.

But today I got another call. BB bit a different friend. Twice. At pick-up, I asked one of the psychologist-student teachers what all this means.

"This is a perfectly normal developmental moment," said the psych-student.

"In what way?"

"The kids get frustrated when they can't communicate, and biting is a pretty common result."

"Other kids in the class bite?" I asked.

"Well no. Not yet. We usually see this sort of behavior when they're a little older."

"So my child is more sophisticated then the other kids."

Her are-you-crazy-lady face flashed for just a moment before she masked it, and suggested that we maybe try to avoid games that involve "play-biting" at home. Play biting? I told her that we do NOT play bite. She looked at me with pity and offered to print me some reading material from her text book in case I wanted to read it.

Shame, shame, shame.