Not far from the tree

My son turned five years on Sunday and it seems just months ago when he was this tiny thing on my belly, squealing in delight as I rolled him off and caught him. I was usually the one to put him to sleep, rocking him while his mother - exhausted - slept.

Earlier tonight, or last evening rather, I was trying to explain to him that I couldn't pick him up from school so I asked his grandfather to do it for me when, after patiently listening to me, just calmly and emphatically said "But that doesn't make any sense."

I have been told time and time again by people, the women who happen to get close to me in particular, that I have this arrogance when it comes to my rigid application of logic in human behaviour. If something does not make sense in my head, I viciously interrogate it and very often the other person at the end of the dissection usually ends up feeling like shit. Last night, my son gave me a small dose of my own medicine - for the second time in about a month.

I usually take people at their word and my credulity usually stretches in a self-conscious way until I can take no more and that is when I become vicious, cruel. It is not one of my better qualities, in fact it has all the hallmarks of a tragic flaw. My incisiveness is valuable in that it helps me to cut through the layers of bullshit that is such an intrinsic part of human nature, but the problem is that when I cut, I cut without discretion and regard for who is under the knife, despite my emotional connection to them.

There are certain situations in which being right is a hollow victory, and I have had many hollow victories over the past year. I feel a certain sadness that this penchant for incision, for intellectual haughtiness, is the first notable characteristic of my own that I see in Aidan, he who reminds me so much of his mother in so many ways, from his good looks, to his adoption of her mumbling of "Pardonme" during conversation.