How do you explain when it hurts?

James's bus stop is down the street at the main road, at the foot of a pretty steep hill. We usually use the van to go down and drop him off and pick him up -- between the weather, the hill and having the baby as well it's just much quicker. Now he's half-day kindergarten, so when he goes in there's only one other little girl at his stop. Coming home however, he comes home with all the other elementary school kids. Now he loves all this interaction and riding the bus to and from school is the highlight of his day.

My neighbor's daughter Kaitlyn gets off here too, along with a few other children. Now since the hill really is a bear, if it's not an inconvenience I usually do offer them rides up to the top of the hill, so they can go home from there. Then if the weather is nice, the children often go over to Kaitlyn's to play for awhile before dinner. She's right next door to me, they have a swingset also, as well as one of those netted in trampolines. So it's become a sort of a habit that James will go over there for an hour before dinner. He looks forward to this all day and as soon as he gets off the bus he'll ask me, "Jamesie go play wif friends?"

Now in a stroke of irony, my neighbors are quite Christian -- I am not sure the denomination, but he's actually the minister and the church owns his house. Being a family of practicing pagans this can make coffee talk a tad awkward. His wife is pleasant and we'll chat over benign topics, but I do get the distinct impression that the minister doesn't care of us. Yes, my son is smitten with the Preacher's daughter, go figure. Add to that James's hearing I am a bit overcautious with his playdates. However she tells me that he plays nicely and he comes home promptly at 5 each day.

Now considering she's the minister's kid, one would think that she'd have a nicer disposition -- but she does have a tendency to be quite the bossy little thing. I cut her some slack because she's 8, and obviously going to be the alpha blonde heartbreaker type but that's no reason to be rude. But James is nuts about her and I let it go for the 15 second trip.

Today I go to the bus stop and they come piling off. James comes running for his hug and we're walking to the car. Ms. Thang comes and says, "Do you still have all that junk in the car?" The "junk" she's referring to is the couple of boxes in the minivan that have the daily stuff -- dvds, my papers for work, cds, etc. A little taken aback, I tell her that of course my stuff is in the car. She says (quite snotty I might add), "I'm going to walk, I don't want to ride with all that junk and papers anymore." And she grabs the other kids and they start hiking. James is confused and frankly so am I, but ok.

So we get up to the house and he gets ready to go over to play, but we have to wait for them to get up the hill now. So James and I hang out on the front porch and talk about school. They round the bend and head next door. So James tells me very solemnly, "5 o'clock Momma, 5 o'clock," and wanders over to join them. To be sure, I watch him get over to the kids as they're milling about. Just before I'm about to head in I hear Ms. Kaitlyn call out, "Excuse me! Excuse me! HE wasn't INVITED." And as I watch pretty much helplessly, he's ejected from the group and shooed back home. So I keep a smile on my face and he comes to me when I call him ... but as I go to take him to the house he realizes he can't go play and becomes horribly upset, crying and sobbing and begging me to let him go play with his "friends." He just can't understand why he can't go play. That they don't want him there.

We get back to the house and he goes to the end of the deck and sits there, forlornly sobbing as he watches them play in the yard and jump on the trampoline, shrieking and laughing. My heart was breaking, I swear -- I just couldn't explain to him why or make it hurt less. So I put on my sneakers and we ended up playing together on our swings and sitting out back reading together for awhile until he felt better. I didn't let him see me cry. He's over it now I'm sure, but how do I tell him that it's just the first in a long line of equally painful episodes at the hands of other children (and adults)?

Because of his speech and his hearing aids, my son is just different enough that I know he will unfortunately end up taking a measure of abuse as a result -- it's human nature, especially with kids who have no filters yet. I can do my best to assuage the sting and help him bear it, to move past it and have his own dignity and self-confidence.

But it still hurts.

As an aside, the minister's car was home today. I've noticed that whenever he's home they haven't come out to play, I'm sure I'll read too much into that but just the same ...