Monday, March 01, 2004
Knowing when to take it to heart, and when not
By Russell King
Imagine this: You’re playing on your company softball team and you’ve taken your 5-year-old son along so he can watch his old man try to prove he’s not all that old. In the final inning, losing by three runs, you come up to bat with the bases loaded and two out. This is the stuff of beer commercials, legends and poetry: You actually hit that winning grand slam.
As you round third base, you look for your son, hoping to hold his expression of pride forever your memory. What you see, instead, is his naked backside as he--neither aware of nor interested in your grand heroics--goes #1 on a shrubbery.
Imagine this: You’ve taken a day off work when you really shouldn’t in an effort to prevent cabin-fever induced mayhem by taking the family on a three-day weekend to an indoor water park. It’s not cheap, and it means more—not less—effort by you and your spouse.
At the hotel, the kids have available to them: pools, bumper boats, slides, hot tubs, climbing toys, tube rides, video games, and even a three-story “romper” room with nets and tubes to climb over and through and air cannons that fire foam balls at whatever target you select, even Dad’s head.
You just know they’re going to love this. Then your 12-year-old daughter stands up and says with a pout, “I’m bored. There’s nothing to do here.”
I don’t have to imagine. I was there. If you’re a dad, you no doubt have a seemingly endless list of similar moments. These are the moments when, to the kids, you’re insignificant, wrong, out of touch, dumb, mean or just downright embarrassing. Such moments leave you shaking your head in defeat. “OK, it’s official,” you mutter. “As a dad, I’m a loser.”
Don’t buy it, brother.
Forget the “loser” moments. Forget them, because they’re not real. They don’t reflect what you kids really feel and think about you, and they don’t really reflect what sort of dad you are. Forget them, too, because they’re meaningless. Even if they went as planned, they’d still be meaningless. They’re simply not the stuff of which moments of genuine parenting are made.
Focus on those moments that do reflect on you as a dad, the moments that show how you are touching your children’s lives in ways that matter. For me, they’re usually odd, intimate moments.
Imagine this: You’re trying to talk your 14-year-old son through a rough spot he’s in with a bully. You’re trying to tell him, gently, that punching the guy’s lights out is the path of weakness, despite that fact that it seems to be an American male cultural imperative.
He turns to you and says, “You’re different, Dad. You’ve got all those muscles and you could pound anybody, but you’re all about love and stuff.” You’re stunned into silence. He continues: “Lot’s of people talk it up, but they don’t mean it. You’re for real. I can tell: It’s in your eyes; it’s in your voice.”
Imagine this: Night after night, year after year, you put your children to sleep with a series of stories, songs and poems recited soft and low in the dark. After the first few hundred recitations or so, you begin to believe that you’re no more than a comforting drone, a white noise that lulls them off to sleep. It’s not a worthless role, but you’d hoped it might be more.
Then, one night, you fall silent after the stories and, after a moment of quiet, your 2-year-old daughter reaches up and touches your face. “Sing, Daddy,” she whispers. “Sing me a poem.”
You thought they weren’t paying attention. You thought you didn’t matter. You thought you were a loser. Man, were you wrong.
By Russell King
Imagine this: You’re playing on your company softball team and you’ve taken your 5-year-old son along so he can watch his old man try to prove he’s not all that old. In the final inning, losing by three runs, you come up to bat with the bases loaded and two out. This is the stuff of beer commercials, legends and poetry: You actually hit that winning grand slam.
As you round third base, you look for your son, hoping to hold his expression of pride forever your memory. What you see, instead, is his naked backside as he--neither aware of nor interested in your grand heroics--goes #1 on a shrubbery.
Imagine this: You’ve taken a day off work when you really shouldn’t in an effort to prevent cabin-fever induced mayhem by taking the family on a three-day weekend to an indoor water park. It’s not cheap, and it means more—not less—effort by you and your spouse.
At the hotel, the kids have available to them: pools, bumper boats, slides, hot tubs, climbing toys, tube rides, video games, and even a three-story “romper” room with nets and tubes to climb over and through and air cannons that fire foam balls at whatever target you select, even Dad’s head.
You just know they’re going to love this. Then your 12-year-old daughter stands up and says with a pout, “I’m bored. There’s nothing to do here.”
I don’t have to imagine. I was there. If you’re a dad, you no doubt have a seemingly endless list of similar moments. These are the moments when, to the kids, you’re insignificant, wrong, out of touch, dumb, mean or just downright embarrassing. Such moments leave you shaking your head in defeat. “OK, it’s official,” you mutter. “As a dad, I’m a loser.”
Don’t buy it, brother.
Forget the “loser” moments. Forget them, because they’re not real. They don’t reflect what you kids really feel and think about you, and they don’t really reflect what sort of dad you are. Forget them, too, because they’re meaningless. Even if they went as planned, they’d still be meaningless. They’re simply not the stuff of which moments of genuine parenting are made.
Focus on those moments that do reflect on you as a dad, the moments that show how you are touching your children’s lives in ways that matter. For me, they’re usually odd, intimate moments.
Imagine this: You’re trying to talk your 14-year-old son through a rough spot he’s in with a bully. You’re trying to tell him, gently, that punching the guy’s lights out is the path of weakness, despite that fact that it seems to be an American male cultural imperative.
He turns to you and says, “You’re different, Dad. You’ve got all those muscles and you could pound anybody, but you’re all about love and stuff.” You’re stunned into silence. He continues: “Lot’s of people talk it up, but they don’t mean it. You’re for real. I can tell: It’s in your eyes; it’s in your voice.”
Imagine this: Night after night, year after year, you put your children to sleep with a series of stories, songs and poems recited soft and low in the dark. After the first few hundred recitations or so, you begin to believe that you’re no more than a comforting drone, a white noise that lulls them off to sleep. It’s not a worthless role, but you’d hoped it might be more.
Then, one night, you fall silent after the stories and, after a moment of quiet, your 2-year-old daughter reaches up and touches your face. “Sing, Daddy,” she whispers. “Sing me a poem.”
You thought they weren’t paying attention. You thought you didn’t matter. You thought you were a loser. Man, were you wrong.
