We Need To Talk About Joel

I just finished reading "We need to talk about Kevin". It's a book about the mother of a teenager who killed a bunch of people at his junior high, a la Columbine. Not a true story, but based on a composite of many middle school murderers.

I didn't even know what it was about when I reserved it; it was just recommended as a good book. But not too many pages into it, Kevin as a small child started to seem terribly familiar...

impossible to discipline, because nothing seems to phase him...

argumentative, simply for the sake of causing conflict...

a loner, because nobody wants to be friends with the troublemaker...

destroys things in his house out of maliciousness, just to see how mad his mother will get....

only obeys when his mother has reached the point of physically harming him (and later tells his mother he was 'proud of her' for standing up to him when she threw him across a room and caused a compound fracture of his arm)...

his sibling gets hurt when they play together...

behaves well around his father, but acts out when mom is the only parent around...

a mother who is at such odds with her son all the time that she grows to dislike him, suspect him, and turn him against her...

I don't think Joel is going to grow up to be a murderer, but I do worry that Naomi or Daniel will be the victim of Joel's thoughtlessness. He simply doesn't think about how his actions will end.

And how many times has he told me he was going to kill someone....

The author of the book has said that reviews of her book fall into one of two categories: people who think the son is inherently evil, and people who think the mother drove her son to become a monster.

I'm in the first group.

Joel has more normal emotional responses to me than Kevin has to him mom, but I know how it feels to have a child that there is Just Something Wrong With.

No one believes me. The child psych says he won't diagnose him because 'you didn't say he was getting worse', and dad says "he's a boy", but there is something wrong with Joel. I know other boys. I have other boys. He's not "just a boy".

Anyone who thinks differently needs to spend more time with him.

And reading that book makes me hope the people spending more time with him won't be prison guards.