I had the conversation I wrote about in my last post about a week before I wrote the post. The Prata Boy had been following the plan rather reluctantly, with a great deal of effort on my part in the form of constant reminders and daily reiterations of the entire train of logic from the top down. Then, a couple of days ago, he appeared at the door wearing his bike helmet.

"You're wearing your bike helmet," I observed casually.

"Yes," he agreed. "I'm wearing it to defend myself against people who want to take me away. When they look at it they will see the fire and they will stay away so they don't get burned into tiny little shrivelled pieces."

I nodded, simultaneously feeling a) dubious that many strangers would fear the cheerful sun motif which now adorned his head, b) stupid at not having thought of the idea myself when similar techniques have worked with PB so many times before, c) overjoyed that he'd independently worked out a way to manage his stress and keep with the program, and d) uneasy at the continued, if now latent, violence of his theme.

Once we were safely seated on our bus, I had a go at tweaking the concept. "PB," I started, "you know how you're a pilot?" (A little background: The Prata Boy has not actually been The Prata Boy since he was about two years old. Instead, he has expressed a variety of personas, both human and non-human, the latest of which is Captain Prata Boy - a pilot who flies with Emirates Airlines on their passenger routes in and out of Tokyo. It's a fairly specific fantasy.)

"Yes," he replied, fiddling with his chin strap. "This is my helmet." (More background: he has not yet ironed out all the subtle differences between military and commercial aircraft operations. But he will.)

"A great helmet it is, too," I enthused. "I was just wondering, though, what you think is the best way of greeting your passengers." I cast my hand around the bus to indicate 'his passengers'. "You know, as the pilot of a commercial aircraft, with paying guests on board."A look of realisation spread across his face, and he stared thoughtfully into the middle distance. After a long pause I continued. "I mean, you'd have to treat them politely, wouldn't you? Otherwise they wouldn't fly with your airline any more. And if nobody flies on your airline, well, pretty soon they won't need a pilot any more. You'll be out of a job and instead of flying planes you'll have to... well, I don't know what you'd do. Do you have a backup plan?"

"No! I'm a pilot!" he insisted.

"Well then." We sat in silence for a while.

"How do pilots greet their passengers?" I prompted at length.

"Very nicely," he replied. I nodded silently. We rode along, looking out the window.

Later that day, he started blowing kisses to everyone who met eyes with him. ("Is he piloting The Love Plane?" Mr Bea asked, when I recounted events to him later that night. "The pendulum may have swung a little far on the first stroke," I agreed.) And you know, though part of me still feels I should have thought of it sooner - way sooner - there's this growing gladness he was forced to put some of the work in himself. I can't always be on hand to write his life's screenplay, or cast everyone into their correct roles.

So if you're wandering around Singapore and you see a woman whose four-year-old is wearing a bike helmet for no discernible reason, you'll know it's me. You can wave hi, but maybe leave the little guy alone. His air kisses are much sweeter than his air kicks, but he still finds the interactions exhausting.

The Prata Boy has long had a problem with strangers. When he was a baby, it manifested itself in screaming when someone took him from me - even, at times, his own father. As a preschooler it manifests in shrieking at people whenever they glance his way.

"Don't look at me!" he screams, pointing an accusing finger at the offender. Then he supplies them - at similar volume - with an exhaustive list of the people who are allowed to look at him. It's quite embarrassing.

When he was younger, I tried to supportively acknowledge his feelings, and give him alternative ways to react. "You could cover your eyes and look away," I suggested once, to his apparent agreement.Ten seconds later someone looked at him and he screamed, "Hey! Cover your eyes and look away!"

Yeah.

Also? Sometimes he hits or kicks at them. (He doesn't tend to connect - it is a warning only, like a dog baring his teeth.) And? He has the same reaction when somebody looks at his sister, even though she, herself, doesn't mind. Woe betide anybody touch her.

Urrrgh.

I've got to admit, it is tough for him. He gets looked at way more than a lot of four-year-olds. For a start, people coo over young children in this country more than they do in The Old one. And although caucasians aren't exactly rare around here, we're definitely not the majority, so there's a touch of novelty about him. Then there's the old Chinese superstition that rubbing "golden" hair will bring wealth and prosperity. It persists amongst the older generation. ("Don't pat my head! I am not a dog!" he screamed at a kindly old grandmother when he was three years old. The woman didn't speak English, but she sure spoke Angry Toddler and she was definitely taken aback with what she heard.) So I feel for him, because it's tough enough being a shy kid without being in the spotlight every time you leave the house.

As he grows older, however, his actions not only become less excusable, but my tactics begin to look more and more futile. Lately, his ability to decode and express his feelings has become more sophisticated, so I decided to take it right back to square one to see if there was anything new he could tell me.

"Why do you yell at people to stop looking at you?" I asked, once again.

"Because I don't like it," he answered, as usual. But I persisted (again), hoping for something more.

"Why don't you like it?"

"Because I only want you and Dad and..."

"Yes, I know, but why only those people? How do you feel when people look at you?"

"Not good."

"Not good how? In what way? Describe the feeling to me." This time he paused, and I could tell he was digging as deep as he could, trying to explain himself so I could finally understand. I hoped, this time, he could find the words.

"I feel threatened."

"You feel threatened?" I wasn't expecting that. "Why threatened?"

"I think they're going to take me away from you."

I was stunned. "Why?"

"Because they're looking at me."

"Well, yes, but... where did you get the idea that people who look at you might take you away?" He paused again, and I let him think.

"I don't know," he said finally.

"You can't remember? Not at all?" He thought again.

"No."

"I think I do. Want to hear my idea?" He did. In addition to patting golden-haired children on the head, locals like to joke that they're going to steal your offspring. 'Oh, so cute!' they'll gush. 'Come, I bring you my house. Say, 'Bye bye, Mummy!' You come stay with me.' It's supposed to be a compliment. Sometimes, with SB, they offer PB an exchange - a lolly, maybe, or a small toy. 'I give you candy, you give me your baby sister, can?' Apparently PB has never seen the humour in this.

And you know, up til now I've been basing my actions on this idea that what he feels is completely ok to feel. It's a popular assumption in Western culture, after all - almost heretical to infer otherwise. But as I digested this new information, it struck me: I am totally not ok with him feeling like this. I don't just want to change the way he expresses himself - I want to change what he has to express. The trouble is, I'm pretty certain this fear of being stolen is just the skin of the bogeyman. He's shy - social interaction wears him out, causes him stress - and he's (presumably) taken this joke and constructed a fear of kidnapping around it. How do you make a shy person un-shy?

Conventional wisdom tells us this sort of change can only come from within. People say, "He has to want to change," as if that dismisses the responsibility from anyone around him, and places it squarely within his power. My experiences with infertility have taught me otherwise. I now know that wanting to change is simply one step on the path to healing - one you can be guided towards, though not via a shortcut. One you may have trouble finding on your own.

I thought hard. What comes before wanting to heal? According to this post, it is whining, and moaning, and crying, and getting depressed, and feeding a highly-developed ability to stress over things which are a) unlikely to happen and b) not under one's control anyway. What brought me from there forward? Well - it was you. It was the type of useful, constructive validation that allows one to take stock and gather perspective.

"Well, you know," I found myself saying to PB, "there really are nasty people out there who steal kids away." I've got to admit - from a certain angle, confirming to a kid who is afraid of being stolen that this kind of thing actually really happens seemed a bit counter-intuitive. PB looked at me seriously.

"What do they do with them?" he wanted to know. And I spared the goriest details, but there was certainly enough left to keep any four-year-old up at night. Eventually, I felt I'd answered all his questions to the best of my abilities, and we sat for a moment in silence.

"Maybe what we need," I suggested eventually, "is a plan to reduce your risk of getting taken by strangers." PB readily agreed. "Well, let's look at what we know about kids who get kidnapped by strangers, and kids who almost get kidnapped, but get away." And we examined the two groups closely, looking for commonalities and differences. And what we decided, in the end, is that PB should spend as much time as possible interacting with strangers (under my supervision, of course) because this way he will build up the kind of tacit knowledge about normal social interactions that you need before you can get that "funny feeling" when someone is acting suspiciously, but you can't quite put your finger on how.

He agreed to the plan. I don't believe it's going to change him from an introvert into an extrovert, but I'm hoping it'll motivate him to overcome his fear of strangers (starting with the aggressive displays) and allow him to practice to the point where he no longer finds interactions hugely stressful. And at that point, the bogeyman will finally be dispelled.

The curiosity of preschoolers is wonderful, in many senses of the word. Certainly, they are, themselves, full of wonder, and it is marvellous to behold. Frequently, however, it is a wonder where The Prata Boy gets the things he comes out with, and I wonder how to respond.

Maybe nine months ago, PB was paddling in a wading pool when a woman stepped in to join us. She would have been around forty years old. She'd seen me struggling to divide my attention between a toddler and a baby in the water, and had come to entertain the toddler on my behalf. Imagine how I felt when The Prata Boy piped up to ask her where her children were.

"I don't have any children," she answered mildly. "None at all!"

"PB..." I cautioned, but she gave me a smile and a shake of the head to let me know it was ok.

"I'm married," she continued, "but I don't have any kids. But I like kids. Very much. I like to play with kids like you in the pool. Shall we sail your boat?"

"Yes," PB affirmed, but his attention hadn't been completely redirected, because about twenty seconds later he piped up and said, "Don't worry. You might start growing a baby soon."

I died. But the woman just said, "Well, we'll see, won't we?" And that was that.

It is hard to explain to him that these questions can cause offense, when they never seem to cause any offense.

"Why do you have that stick?" he asked a visually impaired man at the bus stop, and the man smiled warmly, explained his situation, and demonstrated his use of the stick.

"Why are you using that wheelchair?" he asked a woman at the supermarket, and she, likewise, gave a warm smile, and explanation, a demonstration, and a sweetie.

"Why do you have darker skin than us?" he asked a friend, who laughed and called him cute and turned into an enthusiastic tourism advertisement for her country of birth, right there on the spot. "Why does she have the same colour skin as you?" he asked in followup, loudly pointing out a random passer-by, and the two waved a cheery hello in their native language before my friend explained that they came from the same country.

"But you shouldn't really go around asking people that kind of thing," I tell him. He wants to know what kind of thing, and why not? Both questions prove more difficult to answer than they seem.

Last week I emailed backwards and forwards with Mel, she (whether she knew it or not) playing the mother and me channelling my inner preschooler. What is it about calling something "kosher" in the colloquial sense (as opposed to the religious sense) that offends some people? What about using the words "God" and "Jesus" as exclamations? Where is the line between those who are allowed to use a word or make a joke and those who are not? Why do Mel and a stranger dance around the fact of their Jewishness? And when does it become not ok for a little boy to innocently break these types of taboos, which, to him, don't yet exist at all?

When do they start existing? And how... no - why am I helping to bring them into existence?

My experience of infertility tells me that, whilst it can be awkward (especially in the initial stages) to broach problems and differences, in the long run, it is more awkward to let them sit between people as an unspeakable divide - the metaphorical white elephant, to whom we often refer. Moreso, perhaps, for the obvious differences - if you use a stick, or a wheelchair, or have a certain colour skin, it's hardly a secret, so what's the use of being coy? What message does it send when we are? Is there something wrong with being unable to see or move like the average person that makes us hush up, as if it's a shameful non-secret? Is there something wrong with having a certain colour skin, or being married, without children? The important thing, surely, is not whether we observe that somebody has one trait or another, but how we let this change our perception and treatment of them afterwards.

The Prata Boy gets away with it because, at four, he observes these traits completely without judgement - either perceived or actual. Over dinner he asks Mr Bea what country he comes from. "Australia! You know that," Mr Bea replies with surprise.

"Well, but, how come you have darker hair and skin and eyes than the rest of our family?" PB wants to know. He wants to know, but he doesn't care, as such. Dad is still Dad, even if he goes to the hairdresser and comes back hot pink. In which instance, the wonder would be mostly mine. "Who is this man I thought I knew?" I would be asking myself. "Suddenly I have no idea what to say to him."

So I dropped The Prata Boy at kindy today, and on the way home I felt I needed a boost, so I swung through the servo near his school and decided, after not much deliberation, on an iced coffee. Caffeine. Sugar. The sort of formula that gets you through the day.

But whilst I was standing at the register waiting to pay, the magazine rack caught my eyes and I thought, "Ooh, maybe that's what I want." Little brightly-coloured mind-candy, you know. Something to stimulate the imagination and excite the appetite of the soul. So I looked through the options to see what I should buy.

The teen genre was an easy pass. Awkward questions about boys and periods are *cough* half a lifetime behind me now. And I've been married thirteen years this week, so the bridal magazines weren't exactly topical to me. The conception and pregnancy stuff has lost its relevance, and the parenting ones seemed to be aimed at rank beginners, so I left them on the shelf, too. We've completed our home renovation as of a couple of weeks ago, and I've already thrown my small library of research into the bin with a sigh of triumph and relief, so I moved past those offerings quickly. The homemaker magazines made me pause, as did the one on personal finance, but a closer inspection revealed no promise of anything that might interest me except what I'd already been over many times before. I stared, without compulsion, at the travel section, happy with my holiday plans for the next twelve months and not really wanting to glimpse any further.

And I thought, this is where I'm at, then. I'm at the place where I don't know which lifestyle magazine I should buy.

Then the woman behind the counter said, "Hello, Ma'am, just the iced coffee, is it?"

And I said, "Yes."

Who would have thunk:

"Australia and New Zealand have shown that in the right policy environment a voluntary change to SET practice is achievable" [my italics]

Thus reducing maternal/child health risks. Seems like infertile people aren't too obsessed to make sensible decisions after all, just too underinsured.

Full article here.

Also, I am/was late catching up with the fact that Mel was the daily deal recently! Sorry I didn't get to tell you in time. I did read her book and it was fun.