Sunday, September 25, 2005
Scenes from the life of an American dad
By Russell King
I heard 5-year-old Jaden’s voice through the window, so looked out to see what was happening. There he was, alone in the backyard, throwing his football into the air and then running and diving to make heroic catches for imaginary first downs and touchdowns against tough imaginary opponents.
The scene whisked me back almost 40 years when I spent countless hours bouncing a rubber baseball against my parent’s house and catching imaginary fly balls in my imaginary Tiger Stadium. If the ball bounced far enough to clear the shrubs on the far side of the driveway, it was a home run.
Maybe, despite all the world’s changes over the past four decades, today’s kids aren’t so much different from yesterday’s. I don’t believe that we grew up in some golden era, and I do believe that our world has improved in many important ways, but there’s still something comforting about these little glimpses of continuity.
Logan,11, is playing his first year of youth tackle football this year, and his team has yet to win a game. They’ve been blown off the field, they’ve lost close-fought contests, and they’ve lost in the final seconds when victory seemed sure. This past week’s game was lost despite Logan’s best individual performance.
The long ride home from the game took me back to my freshman year in high school, when the team I played for not only failed to win a game, we failed to score for the entire season. I can recall a game in which I played my best, with multiple tackles, blocked passes and interceptions, we was defeated by a score of something like 40 to nothing.
Not only are kids the same, losing is, too. It doesn’t feel so nice, but it’s actually better for you than winning. Winning doesn’t teach much, in part because there’s a tendency, in the thrill of the moment, to think winning means you did things just the right way. It’s natural, in every endeavor in life, to think that positive results validate (or justify) what we did to get the results, but it’s just as wrong as it is natural.
Losing, if you can keep from sinking into a swamp of negative emotions, usually sparks you to examine what you might have done better. Losing, especially losing lopsidedly, provides practice in perseverance that pays off big later in life. Most importantly, losing can teach that it’s the game, not the score, that really matters.
Losing when you’ve performed well has its own lessons: life can be unfair, team performance is more important than individual performance, and life is full of ambivalence (you can feel great and rotten at the same time about the same thing), and how you feel about and respond to life is all your own choice.
Being an American dad, however, has brought more than nostalgic and Reader’s Digest-style observations. Being a dad has allowed me to see things with metaphysical and theological implications, too.
Holding my infant children in my hands, and looking into their faces, I clearly, immediately, saw the error of the doctrine of "original sin." In their eyes I saw no sin, no guilt, but only the light of God. They are utterly innocent, and I cannot be convinced that God sees them as sinful or sullied in any way. We grownups, who have more than enough to feel guilty for, project our flaws onto the young (which is what I think St. Augustine did when he cooked up the doctrine). Maybe it’s our way of absolving ourselves for some of mistakes and missed opportunities: We couldn’t help it, we tell ourselves – we were born this way.
In fact, infants are the equivalent of the metaphorical Adam and Eve, who were innocent because they had not yet eaten from the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." Because we are born knowing nothing about right and wrong, we can be said to be in a state of "original righteousness" or "original purity."
This past week, one of our neighbor boys, Nick, broke his leg. Maya, 4, leapt into action: drawing with colored markers a cheerful picture, selecting one of her own stuffed toy animals, and headed out the door on her mission of mercy.
I watched her skipping up the sidewalk, listened to her singing voice dance across the breeze, and saw her golden hair gleaming in the sun as she happily went off to care for another – and I knew, finally, what Genesis meant in its poetry of humans being created in the "image of God." And that’s no small payoff for being a dad.
By Russell King
I heard 5-year-old Jaden’s voice through the window, so looked out to see what was happening. There he was, alone in the backyard, throwing his football into the air and then running and diving to make heroic catches for imaginary first downs and touchdowns against tough imaginary opponents.
The scene whisked me back almost 40 years when I spent countless hours bouncing a rubber baseball against my parent’s house and catching imaginary fly balls in my imaginary Tiger Stadium. If the ball bounced far enough to clear the shrubs on the far side of the driveway, it was a home run.
Maybe, despite all the world’s changes over the past four decades, today’s kids aren’t so much different from yesterday’s. I don’t believe that we grew up in some golden era, and I do believe that our world has improved in many important ways, but there’s still something comforting about these little glimpses of continuity.
Logan,11, is playing his first year of youth tackle football this year, and his team has yet to win a game. They’ve been blown off the field, they’ve lost close-fought contests, and they’ve lost in the final seconds when victory seemed sure. This past week’s game was lost despite Logan’s best individual performance.
The long ride home from the game took me back to my freshman year in high school, when the team I played for not only failed to win a game, we failed to score for the entire season. I can recall a game in which I played my best, with multiple tackles, blocked passes and interceptions, we was defeated by a score of something like 40 to nothing.
Not only are kids the same, losing is, too. It doesn’t feel so nice, but it’s actually better for you than winning. Winning doesn’t teach much, in part because there’s a tendency, in the thrill of the moment, to think winning means you did things just the right way. It’s natural, in every endeavor in life, to think that positive results validate (or justify) what we did to get the results, but it’s just as wrong as it is natural.
Losing, if you can keep from sinking into a swamp of negative emotions, usually sparks you to examine what you might have done better. Losing, especially losing lopsidedly, provides practice in perseverance that pays off big later in life. Most importantly, losing can teach that it’s the game, not the score, that really matters.
Losing when you’ve performed well has its own lessons: life can be unfair, team performance is more important than individual performance, and life is full of ambivalence (you can feel great and rotten at the same time about the same thing), and how you feel about and respond to life is all your own choice.
Being an American dad, however, has brought more than nostalgic and Reader’s Digest-style observations. Being a dad has allowed me to see things with metaphysical and theological implications, too.
Holding my infant children in my hands, and looking into their faces, I clearly, immediately, saw the error of the doctrine of "original sin." In their eyes I saw no sin, no guilt, but only the light of God. They are utterly innocent, and I cannot be convinced that God sees them as sinful or sullied in any way. We grownups, who have more than enough to feel guilty for, project our flaws onto the young (which is what I think St. Augustine did when he cooked up the doctrine). Maybe it’s our way of absolving ourselves for some of mistakes and missed opportunities: We couldn’t help it, we tell ourselves – we were born this way.
In fact, infants are the equivalent of the metaphorical Adam and Eve, who were innocent because they had not yet eaten from the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." Because we are born knowing nothing about right and wrong, we can be said to be in a state of "original righteousness" or "original purity."
This past week, one of our neighbor boys, Nick, broke his leg. Maya, 4, leapt into action: drawing with colored markers a cheerful picture, selecting one of her own stuffed toy animals, and headed out the door on her mission of mercy.
I watched her skipping up the sidewalk, listened to her singing voice dance across the breeze, and saw her golden hair gleaming in the sun as she happily went off to care for another – and I knew, finally, what Genesis meant in its poetry of humans being created in the "image of God." And that’s no small payoff for being a dad.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Everything I need to know I learned in my kid's kindergarten
By Russell King
Jaden started kindergarten this week. Should be no big deal, right? After all, he’s the 5th child in this family to take the plunge into public schools. You might think we’d be used to this. You might think we’ve got it down to a science. You might think it’d be just another day. You might be wrong.
Those first days just don’t get any easier. No matter how well the predecessors have done, it’s a scary thing to expose another of my precious little ones to such prolonged and unsupervised (by me or Rhonda) influence of the world "out there."
In fact, this first day might be a little bit tougher because the world, this time, seems a lot meaner, a lot colder, a lot more dangerous. We are in the midst of a natural disaster made magnitudes worse by our past greed and poorly ordered priorities, and worse still by our current callous disregard and bigotry. We live amidst people so desperately twisted by fear and hatred that they’re willing to die by driving airplanes of innocent people into buildings of innocent people (or by rental trucks, cars and clothing packed with bombs). We are in the midst of a war that has no apparent end, had no justifiable beginning, and is serving only to make the world less safe, less peaceful. We are in the midst of a dramatic rise in poverty and rise in prejudice of the most vile and violent sorts. And those are just the headline-grabbing threats (there are so many more that don’t attract so much attention).
As an American dad, I’m feeling like this is not a good time to be turning children loose in the world. I realize that this is probably more of an emotional reaction than it is a rational evaluation. But it’s emotion that I’m talking about.
Jaden went out to the bus stop early so he could be first in line. When the bus doors opened, he hoisted his backpack and climbed aboard without even looking back. Rhonda and I can take it as a good sign – maybe we did something right – that Jaden was so confident and courageous embarking on this new adventure. Still, we stood in the drive way: my arms around Rhonda as she cried, as she has so many first days before.
When Jaden got off the bus at the end of the day, we were there to check him over and make sure the world hadn’t done too much damage. And then Rhonda found a note from his teacher inside his backpack. This is what it said:
"When I am introduced as a teacher, I am usually asked what I teach. I reply, "I teach the little ones." Often the response is a flat "Oh." I can never tell whether it is an expression of sympathy or disinterest. I wish I had a chance to say something like this:
"Where else would life look as bright to me as it does having an energetic group to whom nothing is impossible?
"Where else could I walk into a room and see so many eager faces turn to greet me?
"Where else could I wear something time after time and be told I look pretty?
"Where else could I guide the first letter formation of a chubby hand and think that someday it might be a book or an important document?
"Where else could I so quickly forget my own aches because of skinned knees, bumped heads and broken hearts that need my consolation?
"Where else could I feel so close to my maker when little children learn to read because of my help?
"Yes, I am a teacher, with apologies to none, and I love it!"
OK. The world is not entirely dark, cold and spooky. There good people out there doing all they can to make the world a good place for your kids and mine. First days of new adventures, such as this one, are one of those things that make life worth living. Watching your children start these adventures is one of the things that makes parenting worth doing.
And I have a kindergarten teacher to thank for teaching me a lesson I’d forgotten.
By Russell King
Jaden started kindergarten this week. Should be no big deal, right? After all, he’s the 5th child in this family to take the plunge into public schools. You might think we’d be used to this. You might think we’ve got it down to a science. You might think it’d be just another day. You might be wrong.
Those first days just don’t get any easier. No matter how well the predecessors have done, it’s a scary thing to expose another of my precious little ones to such prolonged and unsupervised (by me or Rhonda) influence of the world "out there."
In fact, this first day might be a little bit tougher because the world, this time, seems a lot meaner, a lot colder, a lot more dangerous. We are in the midst of a natural disaster made magnitudes worse by our past greed and poorly ordered priorities, and worse still by our current callous disregard and bigotry. We live amidst people so desperately twisted by fear and hatred that they’re willing to die by driving airplanes of innocent people into buildings of innocent people (or by rental trucks, cars and clothing packed with bombs). We are in the midst of a war that has no apparent end, had no justifiable beginning, and is serving only to make the world less safe, less peaceful. We are in the midst of a dramatic rise in poverty and rise in prejudice of the most vile and violent sorts. And those are just the headline-grabbing threats (there are so many more that don’t attract so much attention).
As an American dad, I’m feeling like this is not a good time to be turning children loose in the world. I realize that this is probably more of an emotional reaction than it is a rational evaluation. But it’s emotion that I’m talking about.
Jaden went out to the bus stop early so he could be first in line. When the bus doors opened, he hoisted his backpack and climbed aboard without even looking back. Rhonda and I can take it as a good sign – maybe we did something right – that Jaden was so confident and courageous embarking on this new adventure. Still, we stood in the drive way: my arms around Rhonda as she cried, as she has so many first days before.
When Jaden got off the bus at the end of the day, we were there to check him over and make sure the world hadn’t done too much damage. And then Rhonda found a note from his teacher inside his backpack. This is what it said:
"When I am introduced as a teacher, I am usually asked what I teach. I reply, "I teach the little ones." Often the response is a flat "Oh." I can never tell whether it is an expression of sympathy or disinterest. I wish I had a chance to say something like this:
"Where else would life look as bright to me as it does having an energetic group to whom nothing is impossible?
"Where else could I walk into a room and see so many eager faces turn to greet me?
"Where else could I wear something time after time and be told I look pretty?
"Where else could I guide the first letter formation of a chubby hand and think that someday it might be a book or an important document?
"Where else could I so quickly forget my own aches because of skinned knees, bumped heads and broken hearts that need my consolation?
"Where else could I feel so close to my maker when little children learn to read because of my help?
"Yes, I am a teacher, with apologies to none, and I love it!"
OK. The world is not entirely dark, cold and spooky. There good people out there doing all they can to make the world a good place for your kids and mine. First days of new adventures, such as this one, are one of those things that make life worth living. Watching your children start these adventures is one of the things that makes parenting worth doing.
And I have a kindergarten teacher to thank for teaching me a lesson I’d forgotten.
