Making Contact/Gets Harder/As the Silence/Grows Longer

Yesterday evening, Mister
.                                              ;I just don’t like the way the kids treat you. The way they talk to you. Like you’re just at their service. They walk all over you
.                                                and it really rubs me the wrong way;

and I wasn’t saying it, but I definitely hit the joint to hide my face showing
.                                                                                                                                       ;no, you only like it when you do it;

‘And isn’t it only me
Who’d like us
To see each other
How I would hate 
To be a bother’

The 5 yo has lately decided he is going to die on the hill of only being passive aggressive and never to directly asking me for things he wants me to do.

First it was that I did not give him a snack I got for myself_{<to sit with him while he was already eating, of course>} because he refused to communicate anything other than
.       ;I want one of those. You have two;
I’m not going to give you my personal snack if you won’t even ask me for it. Go get your own if you can’t bring yourself to be polite. You know where they are.

‘I’m under no illusion
As to what I meant to you’

After our second round of this yesterday, I asked him in a calmer moment why he absolutely refuses to give me the same level of care that I choose to use with him because I love and respect him and his autonomy and choices. He furiously wiggled and huffed for a couple of minutes and it seemed like that was about it. I had mentally moved on when he grunt-howled
.                                                                                                       ;If I have to ask you for things then I’ll always have snow in my boots! Every day I’ll get snow
.                                                                                                         in my boots! I DON’T LIKE MY FEET WHEN THEY’RE WET;
.                                                                                                       Fascinating and baffling. I then haltingly got a long story out of him about how the 9 yo
.                                                                                                        makes him walk through snow when he doesn’t want to and doesn’t let him go in when he
.                                                                                                        wants to and was very frank with him that I could absolutely not understand how treating
.                                                                                                        me like a person when he needs something connected to him getting snow in his boots.

‘But you made
An impression
Sometimes
I still feel the bruise
Sometimes
I still feel the bruise’

It was hours after he’d gone to bed that I suddenly realized that his reasoning is that if he can’t be mean to me and push me around, then he’s always the one getting pushed around by other people _{<his sister, sure; but his shithead dad looms like Godzilla in the layers of subtext here>} and he doesn’t want to be at the emotional bottom of the heap. He’s scared there’s no one he can force to get cold feet regardless of their own preference if he can’t inflict this on me.

‘I’d be surprised
If 
You now
Showed
…
When you were not 
The dreamer’
– Mountain Goats