Poor Gabe

It’s been a recurring theme, this obsession with evil and mayhem in Gabe’s artistic efforts. (You recall the scarecrow?) It’s one thing, perhaps when his Four Food Groups worksheet comes home having been “interpreted” with all four groups on fire. It’s another kettle of fish when the drawings take a disturbingly realistic turn, where stick figures are firing weapons at other stick figures, lying sprawled on the ground with very sad faces and blood oozing down the page. That’s the kind of thing that might just disturb the dainty little preschoolers sitting around him, staring and gaping, while he works.

So his teachers and I have been gently encouraging him to branch out into other themes. Christmas trees, perhaps. With no avenging angels of doom on the top, preferably.

Today when I got to his classroom, one of his teachers saw me in the hallway and turned to call into the classroom that I was coming. “He’s been saying he missed you today,” she told me. I went in the room, looked toward the art table where he can usually be found, and saw him sitting with lips out and eyes near tears. I said his name, and he jumped up and ran to me.

His other teacher followed. To my questioning expression, she told me that he’d been trying to “draw war” again, and she asked him to stop. “Then he drew this,” she said, “and I told him we weren’t drawing weapons, so I folded it for him to take home.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s how he draws hands.”

To her credit, his teacher was mortified. She’d jumped to the wrong conclusion and brought Gabe near to crying because of it. She quickly smoothed the paper and apologized repeatedly to him, and he gave her a hug to make up. As we were leaving, she kept telling him how sorry she was; she must have felt terrible about it! Meanwhile, Gabe explained to me how the picture was going to be a robot…making him pizza and doing his work while he rested on the couch. No blood involved! Only minor tyranny!

So I feel bad for Gabe, having been misunderstood, and I feel bad for his teacher, who was only trying to keep the art table G-rated, and I feel bad for me, because my coffee tastes bad. Not that the last is related, except in how it’s affecting my mood in handling the rest of it. Sigh.