Category Archives: Random Toy Box

Posts on the general topic of family.

Who stole my beautiful moment?

Normally our three-year-old is still asleep when I leave for work in the morning. One recent morning, he woke up before I left. As I was picking out a tie in the bedroom closet, he walked in and sheepishly asked me if I were going to work. I told him I was.

“You shouldn’t go, Daddy,” he said. “I’ll miss you.” His head was down, so I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear him sniffling between his sentences. He was crying.

I dropped to my knees and gave him a hug. He held me tightly. “I don’t want you to go,” he sobbed into my ear.

Beauty and sadness are first cousins. They often come as a pair. This was our beautiful, sad moment – beautiful in its expression of affection, sad because neither one of us wanted me to have to go to work. Sadder still because I had to go.

But I have dealt with the sadness born of having to go to work every day for more than 20 years, so I was able to look past it (just like I do every other morning) and enjoy the beauty of a boy wanting to spend his valuable time with his dad.

Beauty is fleeting, especially after it has been shorn of sadness. Our beautiful moment started to decay as soon as my wife entered the bedroom. My son and I happened to be sobbing it up like madmen just a few feet from where the baby was sleeping in his cradle. Being a mother, my wife is the guardian of silence within earshot of the sleeping infant.

“What’s all this racket? Don’t wake up the baby!” she demanded in that urgent, motherly whisper that is specially designed to be heard loud and clear by non-babies while skirting the infant ear altogether. “Take it out in the hall!”

A mother, of course, has no time to weigh the nuances of a father-son moment when she is shooing disturbances away from her sleeping baby. That much is clear.

My son and I picked up our hug and removed it to the hallway. Our beautiful moment had been relocated, but it might still be salvaged. I took up the mantel of salvation by explaining, “I have to go to work to make money so we can buy groceries. Work pays me so I can buy food for us.”

Every payday, Daddy sets off down that lonesome track to bring home his sack of groceries. (Photo: Marion Post Walcott/US Farm Security Administration)

“No,” the sweet little guy insisted. I heard his disagreement as proof that he would rather go hungry than have me leave him. It was actually the noise of the cracks in our beautiful moment spreading toward the shattering point. “Work pays you so you can buy toys.”

“They don’t pay me enough to buy food and toys,” I explained.

“Then we can just buy toys,” he replied, now completely comfortable with the notion that Daddy had better get himself off to work before he got his toy money docked.

Our hug dissolved of its own accord. Economics had won out over sentiment. Parents have to work in order to afford toys for their kids. My son understood this now, and he wished me well.

Beauty is fleeting.

Basking on borrowed time

My wife is due to give birth to our second boy in March. People ask her how she is feeling, which is a perfectly sensible question. Some people ask me how I am feeling too, which makes no sense to me at all.

How am I feeling? Of course, I’m feeling great. I am basking in the limelight of an impending miracle. I am receiving congratulations, getting patted on the back, and being tolerated far above what I deserve by people who have no solid reason to tolerate me. And what is it costing me? Nothing. I have no aches or pains and I sleep like a rock. I am enjoying the loan of good will that I will not have to begin to pay back for months yet.

The pregnancy time is an expectant father’s grace period. Everything difficult about the new baby is still theoretical. The diapers, the lost sleep, the marital stress are all miles away yet. There’s nothing to do but sit back and soak up the congratulations. Life is good before the interest on the borrowed time is called in.

I imagine that this is kind of how it was for dashing young men at the outbreak of the Civil War. The horrors of war were still a ways into the future, and not necessary to be thought about yet. Meanwhile, all a young gallant had to do was announce his enlistment to afford himself the glow of the young ladies’ attentions. “Oh, you’re going off to war? How courageous of you. I will reward your bravery with a brief glimpse of my stocking below the ankle.” Cha-ching!

Those guys had no idea what they were getting themselves into. They thought it would be a few months of roughing it in the woods, just the way a first time father innocently believes that his new baby will be a nearly-self-sufficient toddler after about 90 days. Fools — all of them. It was only the men who re-enlisted after having seen the face of war that deserved to score some ankle for themselves.

Like me, those 19th century rakes were living high off the news. They hadn’t been brought down to earth by the reality yet. But I have an advantage. I’ve been through this war before and I know its horrors. I know what happens in diapers, and I know it doesn’t always happen in a diaper. I’ve seen a baby boy lie in wait for some unsuspecting parent to carelessly peel back his diaper and unleash a merciless ambush of pee. Here’s mud in your eye! Only, it’s not nearly as pleasant as mud would be. I am a veteran, hardened by the destruction wreaked by little babies. I know that I will not make it through the coming conflict unscathed, untainted, un-puked-upon. I know it and I accept it as my fate.

In the meantime, I intend to sit back, relax, make the most of my grace period, and maybe see if my wife will condescend to showing me a glimpse of her ankle.

Only the one-zillionth blog about parenting; maybe someday the idea will catch on

Q: Why do we need yet another blog about parenting?

A: We don’t. But when has not needing something ever stopped us from having it?

There are a lot of blogs in the world. Many of them are parenting blogs. I haven’t done a scientific survey or anything, but it seems to me that the bulk of the parenting blogs are written by, and for, mothers. This blog is written by a father. It may not be read by fathers, because we all know that fathers would much rather take a sharp stick in the eye than bother reading a few words about parenting. Nevertheless, I’m using the fatherhood angle as my justification for adding more noise to the clogged up Internet.

This blog is not so much meant to inform, unless you are seeking advice on how not to parent. From time to time, it might entertain, but I wouldn’t even count on that. It’s main goal, to the extent that it has a goal, is to reassure parents of both sexes that no matter how many mistakes they have made raising their children, it could be worse.

For women, this blog just might reassure them that the father of their child is not the worst parent ever to walk the earth. All fathers let their kids go outside without their mittens. It’s what we do. We waited through millions of years of evolution for somebody to invent mittens, just so we could leave junior’s in the closet. And every time the kids come back inside without having suffered any long-term damage from frostbite, we are just that much more encouraged to send them out without mittens next time. The second-rate parent in your family is just one of millions of second-rate parents whose children will make it to adulthood in spite of him. Take heart.

For men, this blog might give them confidence that no matter what they’ve heard around the house, they are probably not the worst parent in the world. Fellow fathers, we are all brothers in our lax and lazy parenting. Buck up, my friend. Deep down, you know that even though the shirt you dressed your toddler in doesn’t match his socks, he will make it through the day. Our job is not fashion; our job is to meet the basic needs of the children until they turn 18. If they are looking stylish when they are old enough to be turned out of the house, good for them, but that’s not our concern.

Whether you are a mother, a father, or neither, please don’t attempt to learn anything from this blog. I don’t need that kind of pressure. Be entertained, if you can be; be reassured if you need to be; but please do not try any of the parenting stunts you see here at home. Nothing good can come of it.