Category Archives: It’s a Guy Thing

Brotherly love: the bruise that keeps on giving

The other night, after feeling the baby in Mommy’s belly, my son came over to announce to me that his little brother had kicked him. “What?” I asked. “You two are fighting already?” I knew it would come to this, but I’d imagined that we would have peace until his brother was born. I should have known better, because if there is one thing I have a little experience with, it is brothers.

I have four brothers, three of them older. Any toughness I have in my constitution is largely thanks to them. They did an outstanding job of terrorizing my childhood toughening me up. Every charred spot on the back lawn, its black silhouette exactly matching the shape of one of my model airplanes, made me a stronger person. Every one of my toy soldiers fed to the dog prepared me a little more for the hard knocks of life. Their mangled, tooth-marked bodies were a constant reminder of the dangers of getting too close to the men.

I have confidence that my son will do a good job in teaching brotherly life lessons to his new sibling. He will, no doubt, learn a few things himself. There are a lot of useful things that brothers teach each other. If you never had a brother, you might be tempted to retreat when someone jumps out at you from a hiding place. Retreat invites attack. A brother teaches you that you should charge and punch that someone square in the middle as hard as you can. Further, you should keep punching until the threat is adequately diminished.

Gettysburg

And they called this the brothers' war? Milquetoasts! My family could have shown these Quakers a thing or two about how to throw down.

Brothers teach each other how to sleep in defensible positions. Just because it’s dark and the house seems quiet, don’t assume that a heavy body won’t land on top of you of a sudden, pinning you down on your bed. Don’t tie up your limbs in blankets, making yourself vulnerable to attack. Keep an arm free, so you can at least get a handful of ear or something. A would-be attacker with an ear that still hurts from last time is more likely to think twice before he pounces.

I don’t envision adding three more boys to my brood, so my sons will have to work overtime if they hope to teach each other all the lessons my brothers taught me. I wish I could lend them a hand, but there are some things you can only learn from a brother. If Dad nails one of the boys in the back of the head with a snowball, it’s not so much a learning opportunity as it is child abuse.

A boy needs to learn how to anticipate an ambush from his big brother. If he has multiple big brothers, he may be fortunate enough to have this teachable moment reinforced with a second snowball to his neck. The neck snowball does not pack the same instant enlightenment as the skull snowball, but the red welt is a good reminder for up to a week.

If their shirts are any indication, these brothers were out back educating each other with dirt clods. Nothing brings home an important lesson quite like a dirt clod up side the head.

My wife did not grow up with male siblings, so I’m not sure how much she knows about the educational services brothers offer each other. One thing I do know is that, in the coming years, she will find out.

 

I’m waiting for you to become a reasonable human

My well-behaved, three-year-old punched me in the chest the other day. We were sitting in our recliner together when I gave him that look a father gives his son that tells the boy he should punch the old man as hard as he can. I’m not sure what that look looks like. I’m not in any position to see it, and then I have no idea when I’m giving it, until I get punched.

For the record, I must point out that the boy never hits his mother. Apparently, she doesn’t know how to give the “hit me” look. He’s pretty good around other kids too. He seems to save up all of his best testosterone surges for me.

Huge, anthropomorphic pigs are very scary, yet he'd never dream of lashing out at one.

I figure I must have given the boy some non-verbal cue that I wanted a good, hard punch. What other reason would he have to haul off and slug me in the midst of what should have been a tender moment of father-son togetherness? To punch me without any provocation would be almost irrational, and this would be completely out of character for a three-year-old boy.

Not realizing that I had commanded him to punch me with my hypnotic eyes, I demanded to know why he would do such a thing. My tone was not at all repentant, as the tone of the one responsible for all the trouble should be. In response to my unfair question, the boy donned his victim costume, puffed out his pouty lips, and declared, “You hurt my feelings.”

I end up hurting my son’s feelings whenever that urge to lash out strikes him. This is mostly because I am petulant and unreasonable. Little boys have a need to punch, kick, throw elbows, and head butt every once in a while. There are secret cues throughout the universe that control this need and compel little boys to act upon it without warning. The little boys have no say in the matter. A more reasonable dad would probably take this into consideration.

Some of these cues come from the strange, electromagnetic fields surrounding other little boys in close proximity, but most of them come from the universe seeing an opportunity to get a clear shot at one of Daddy’s soft spots. In the ultimate addition of insult to injury, the universe makes Daddy the transmitter of its cue to strike.

It can be a fleeting moment of eye contact that tells the boy, “Kick me in the kidney.” Sometimes it is just the hint of a squint that communicates my desire to have his forehead slammed into my nose. And nothing says, “Ram your boney little elbow into my gut,” like Daddy letting his eyes fall closed in sweet repose.

The first time I gave him that "hit me" look. You can see him wondering why I would want him to do such a thing.

By now, I should understand that my boy is not responsible for the cosmic forces that I am channeling at him. It is very unreasonable of me to scold him for things beyond his control. This causes his feelings to be hurt, which in turn causes him to stand, head bowed, with his back to me while he waits patiently for me to grow into a reasonable human with which one might expect fair dealing.

He is an extraordinarily forgiving soul though. It may take a while, but he always comes around to giving me another opportunity to show my growth as a human being with his fist, foot, or elbow. I only hope that I can evolve into such an even-keeled creature as he is some day.

This peace offering is for the birds

Last fall, while I was doing some yard work, my three-year-old son and his friend were playing nearby. They came over to show me something they had found in the dirt. “Look,” the friend explained to me, “we found a worm.”

“That’s a mighty fine-looking worm you’ve got there,” I said, or some such words intended to placate them, so that I could get back to my work.

“We have to protect him, so the birds don’t get him,” the friend said. He seemed righteously concerned for the fate of his worm.

“That’s a good idea,” I said, making movements with my yard tools to indicate that the time for talk had been superseded by the time for me to get back to my work without further interruption.

The boys took their worm carefully back to the place where they had been playing. I returned my attention to the work I’d been doing, giving no more thought to worms.

A few minutes later, I saw my son running around the yard, his cupped hands held high, calling out, “Birds! Here, birds! We have a worm for you!”

His friend was chasing him around, trying to convince my boy to quiet down and give the worm back to the protection of his own hands.

Maybe because he buys into all of our “sharing” propaganda, or maybe because the birds didn’t seem very enticed by a loud, young human offering them a treat, my son eventually gave the worm back. To my knowledge, nobody ate the worm, although you can never be sure with three-year-olds.

My first, society-tainted thought about this spectacle was that I had been blessed with a sociopath for a son. Where the other boy’s instinct was to nurture and protect, my son jumped right in to the hard facts of survival of the fittest and the rites of worm sacrifice.

I might have been slightly dismayed by this, except that I quickly figured out that this was not what I had witnessed at all. My boy is not a sociopath; he is a forward-thinking diplomat. He was presented with an opportunity to offer a gesture of friendship to either the worms or the birds. He measured the pros and cons of each carefully and made the informed decision that an alliance with the birds would likely be of more use to him if ever came the day when the animal kingdom were divided by strife.

On balance, I have to say I think he made a wise choice. Birds hold the potential to become dangerous adversaries. They can fly; they have sharp talons; they can peck your eyes out. Birds are loud and jumpy. They are not likely to have the patience to sit quietly through long peace negotiations.

Nobody really knows what worms can do. They appear to be no match for birds in single combat. They don’t have much of a record of pecking eyes out, and it is probably easier to mend fences with them than it is with birds, if it comes to that.

I have to agree with my son’s logic on this one. The world may see the other boy as a caring nurturer, but let’s see how far that gets him and his little worm friends when the skies are filled with angry birds.

Stand up and lie like a man!

We all want to make sure that our children don’t grow up to be liars. We go to great lengths to instill within them a sense of the value of the truth. We even agree to mitigate punishments for their transgressions if only they will come clean and confess the truth. “The truth will set you free [from time out],” we tell them in so many words. We lead them to resist the temptation of the lie in every way, except by example.

If our children knew how often we lie to them, and how easily we do it, they would never tell the truth again. In fact, we manage our children largely through deception. We do it without batting an eye, and without the tiniest pang to our consciences. I wonder how often we even know we are doing it.

Raise your hand if you’ve never told your child that the store with his favorite toy department is closed at 1 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon. Good. Now, who hasn’t tried to pass off some kind of vegetable on your child’s plate as just a different variety of some food that he loves? We brag up and down about how bright our child is; then, in the privacy of our own home, we secretly hope he is dim enough to buy a Brussels sprout as a green Chicken McNugget. It’s time to load up on some Vitamin Gullible, son.

You’re kid wants you to stay in his room with him until he falls asleep, but your favorite TV show is about to come on. “Lay down, Junior. I’m just going to put on my pajamas; then I’ll be right back.” Sound familiar? Do you always keep your pajamas in the TV room? It’s okay; if he doesn’t fall asleep before he comes looking for you, you can just throw out a couple more lies to cover your tracks. It’s easy. You don’t even have to break a sweat coming up with lies good enough to thwart your children.

I lie to my son a lot, and I will continue to lie to him at this pace until he becomes more reasonable. Those are my conditions: when he becomes a person who can be reasoned with, I will curtail the lying I do in order that I don’t have to go insane trying to negotiate with a three-year-old rogue state. Until he understands that we are not entitled to a treat every time we want one, I will continue to devise fictitious barriers, all beyond my power to overcome, that stand between us and the world’s treats.

Whether he believes me or not is another story. He often does not believe me when I am telling the truth. For example, the library really is closed at 10 p.m. What is my child doing up at 10 p.m., you ask. Simple, he’s bugging me about taking him to the library. And he cannot go to sleep because he is convinced that I am lying to him when I tell him it is closed. It’s very frustrating for an honest man to be disbelieved.

I’ve decided that it’s probably hypocritical for me to expect my son to always be truthful. If he’s going to grow up to lie, which of course he is, the least I can do for him is to help him develop into a competent liar. Right now, his lies are ridiculously childish. Anybody could see right through them. He needs to learn how make them plausible and then really sell them. His weak, baby lies won’t cut it in this cruel world. He needs to step up and lie like a man.

I think there is a lot he could learn from me. I see a lot of great father-son bonding moments ahead.