Chapter Six: In Which Daddy Learns a Lesson

Being a parent is hard, hard work sometimes. You have to constantly guide your child through the pitfalls of life, lest she grow up to become the head of an international shoplifting ring and end up suing you for poor parenting practices and blaming you for her inability to love any being that isn’t covered in fur and stuffed with Styrofoam balls. Hey, it can happen.

While trying to accomplish the successful raising of a child, you often get . . . well . . . irritated. Kids confound you. They react to things in ways that you’ll never understand.

Case in point: Child splits her lip outside while playing. Blood is pouring everywhere. She comes inside, you clean her up, and she goes outside. Painless. Few tears, tough disposition. She stubs her shoe-clad toe on the way to brush her teeth in the morning and she screams for two hours, sobbing, holding her toe. When you finally say, “Okay let’s try to calm down” I swear she replies:

”Jabba mega nagala zo chabo!”

My child, in anger and frustration, has begun speaking Aramaic and has become possessed by the spirits of ancient children who have also stubbed their toes. She is angry because I do not recognize that there is a slight possibility that she has cause structural damage to her skeletal system and she may be plagued with a dull ache in her big toe for at least twenty minutes.

Now, keep in mind that I’m not talking about dire pain here. She stubbed her toe. WITH her shoes on. At the most it hurt a little bit. Not screaming for an hour pain.

But that’s beside the point. I didn’t recognize the pain and, therefore, I am a bad father.

Consequently, as a parent, you fear that your entreaties to become a better person are becoming like a rhymed boredom for the child. She’s heard it. She clearly doesn’t want to do it. Much like the Brian Wilson song, you end up sounding like this to her:

Eat a lot sleep a lot brush 'em like crazy
Run a lot do a lot never be lazy

But, let’s face it. She doesn’t want to go to sleep. She feels it needless to brush her teeth more than once a day because she’ll just eat again and they’ll get dirty. Run? Screw that. Drive me to the corner bus stop. And laziness? Hell, that’s a child’s right. “My coat is on the floor. Why I’ll step over it for six weeks rather than pick it up. Oh, and if I trip over it and hit my head, YOU are to blame. You’re a parent, pick it up damn it.”

Last night we spent the evening with the in-laws for my mother-in-law’s birthday. We ate, we had cake, and we watched a video I had made. Throughout the whole thing Matilda pouted. We didn’t eat cake when she wanted. We didn’t open presents when she wanted. Her sister was featured a little too much in the videos and then, to add insult to injury, we chose to watch something in which she was not the feature performer.

Throughout the whole thing I was aware that she was jealous. Jealous that her grandparents were sharing attention. That she wasn’t the queen of the moment. That her sister was getting laughs too. This was hard on her. She has been the reigning princess for years and now this little upstart who soils herself routinely is getting attention. That little bastard. Like hell she’s a princess too. She’s a mere Duchess. Matilda is the ruling princess. And we fear to disagree.

Her concerns are valid. And, I also realized that she might not be used to this feeling of jealousy. That being jealous is a totally new emotion for her. She doesn’t know how to rationalize it, or even swallow it for later bitterness. It was a pulsing, open nerve that we kept touching over and over.

Finally it was time to go. She sulked to the door and announced, very morosely, with drama, that she would wait for us in the car (siiiiiiiiiiigggggggggghhhhhhhhh). I followed her out the door with a speech planned.

“Matilda, I understand that you are feeling a little jealous because Grandma and Gertrude were getting a lot of attention tonight. It happens sometimes! Even adults wish they were the center of attention sometimes. It makes us feel good. However when you act negatively to gain attention, you get negative attention, etc. ad nauseum.”

To her it would have sounded like this:

“Blah blah blah blah blah. You aren’t valid. Blah blah blah blah blah. You aren’t important anymore. Blah blah blah blah blah. We’re selling you to the gypsies for half a goat and some plastic beads. Blah blah blah blah blah.”

To a kid, that’s what these lectures sound like. Constant invalidation of their feelings and, in some respects they are right. We don’t mean to do that to the kid. But sometimes in trying to teach right from wrong, good from bad, positive from negative, we forget that completely valid emotions are the source of the actions. That there is a good chance that the child simply has no other way to deal with the emotion. They simply don’t know how.

But it’s the Ward Cleaver in us that makes us act like, well, adults. We understand things through words. Kids don’t. Emotions are complicated and, damn it, they hurt sometimes. They hurt a lot. As parents we tend to accidentally forget that. In our quest to teach, we forget to get on the kid’s level. We forget to see where they are coming from.

Now, I’d like to say that I was stricken by a moment of brilliance or compassion. That suddenly I was super Dad who knew that the kid needed some reassurance that she was, indeed, valid.

But I can’t say that because it isn’t true.

I did, however, for reasons unknown to me, abandon that speech.

On the porch I stopped her and said, “What’s wrong?”

She placed her arm around me, her head in the middle of my stomach and sobbed, “I don’t know!” We hugged for a little while and went back inside.

On the drive home she proclaimed, “I like daddy. He respects my feelings.”

Without even knowing it, I did the right thing. I gave the child her voice back, her sense of importance. Not by lecturing, not by explaining. But by listening and recognizing.

Looks like I was the one who learned the lesson last night. Final Score: Child 1 Father 0.

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