Tag Archives: children

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.

Cleanup on aisle two

This has gone beyond the point of coincidence. It’s beginning to feel like a conspiracy.

As soon as I finish making something to eat, one of the boys needs my assistance with a poop event. It doesn’t matter if it’s lunch, dinner, a snack, dessert, whatever. I’ve got my hands all washed up; I’ve got my food, hot and tempting, on the plate; and I’ve got a kid who can’t hold it for 10 minutes.

I use the broad term event because the poop assistance needs of a three-year-old and an infant are very different. The older boy can do most of it by himself, but it really isn’t going to matter until he can do all of it by himself. Until then, a hot lunch will have to always be a dream deferred.

In many ways, the three-year-old’s events are more disruptive to my meal plans. He really only needs me at the very end (unless he forgets his toddler potty seat), which means I’m on call for however long it takes him to speak those three little words that stir every parent’s heart: “Daddy, I’m done!”

Dinner is ready. Now who’s been waiting all day for this moment to go potty?

I really don’t want to start eating, knowing what I am likely to be called away to do halfway through the meal. I could just make him sit there and wait, but that seems like a cruel and unusual form of time out. It’s better to just delay eating, or maybe forget about it altogether.

If Big Brother doesn’t put me on standby, the baby is sure to pick up the slack. He announces his event by starting up his motorcycle. We call it that because it sounds like he’s revving up a Harley when he lets it rip. Big Brother thinks it’s hilarious. I think it means the salad dressing is going to make my lettuce get all soggy before I can taste it.

The baby’s poop events can be dealt with more quickly, unless he decides to enjoy an open-air pee in that free and wild moment between diapers, or he holds something back with which to christen the fresh diaper. Whenever he needs to quake out an aftershock, he always has the courtesy to wait until I’ve washed my hands once more before he hops back onto that motorcycle.

“Uh, excuse me, Daddy. You might want to put your fork down for this one. I’m gonna try to hit the high note here.”

These boys are so reliable in upsetting my meal plans that I begin to think I must be cursed. I’ve tried to comb through my past, searching for any incident that might have resulted in my insulting some sort of boom-boom gypsy. What offensive act might I have committed to inspire the potty time wizard to open up his book and cast spell number two? Did I cut in front of some sorcerer in the line for a porta-potty in my untamed youth? I don’t remember.

If you are out there, offended one who put this hex on me, please accept my humblest apology for whatever my crime, and let me once eat a hot meal with fresh air in my nostrils.

 

Why can’t you see what I’m thinking?

Precision is not a trait easily mastered at age three. My son has a lot of things he’d like to discuss with me, but he sometimes has trouble making me understand just what it is we are discussing. He knows exactly what he’s talking about, and it makes little sense to him why a grown man can’t follow his train of thought.

My son will ask me a question like, “Daddy, what kind of engine was pulling that train?”

Instead of just saying it was a diesel engine, like any sensible father would, I ask, “Which train?”

He’s very willing to supply details: “That one we saw the other time. The one that was on the railroad tracks.” Then, to make absolutely certain that I will know exactly the right one, he’ll add, “The one I’m thinking about.”

“Oh! That one!” I say, finally learning the first thing about becoming sensible. “That was a diesel engine.”

Often he will ask important questions from the back seat while I’m driving. In heavy traffic, he might ask, “Daddy, what kind of car is that?”

Since I never learn, I ask, “Which car?”

“The one I was looking at.”

“It’s a diesel car, son.”

He even points things out with the vaguest of gestures. This is not really his fault though. His mother has always tried to discourage him from pointing, since pointing can be considered to be rude in certain contexts. Instead of using his index finger to point things out, he has been schooled to use an open hand, in the same way that a spiritual guide might show the pathway to Nirvana.

This is either the general direction of path to enlightenment or an invitation to watch a dog peeing on a fire hydrant. It is difficult to tell because neither is exactly in the direction indicated.

The boy looks like one of the apostles whenever he points at something. It tickles me, but it also leaves me wondering to what sight he is attempting to draw my attention. Open hand pointing is an imprecise art form, and its practitioners tend to turn it into a flowing gesture that encompasses up to 180 degrees of the possible horizon.

Whenever my little Holy Man points at something, I am filled with the urge to follow him toward a spiritual awakening, but I am given only a very general idea of where that awakening lies. This would be fine, as I never expected enlightenment to be an easy thing to find. The problem is that he is actually pointing at a funny-looking squirrel across the street, which I will probably also never see.

I don’t care about missing out on entertaining rodents though. My road to happiness will, more or less, be pointed out to me by the sweeping gestures of my children.

My boy wouldn’t make a very good recruiter. People would think that he was pointing at the guy standing next to them. (Artist: James Montgomery Flagg)

Please, please, please, don’t abuse the magic word

“Can I sit in the front seat?”

“No.”

“Can I drive?”

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“I said a good word.”

“Yes, you did, and that was very nice of you. I appreciate it. But three-year-olds aren’t allowed to sit in the front seat or drive the car.”

Please is indeed a good word. It is a very polite and useful word. Also, I don’t blame the boy for dreaming big. If he’s going to ask to sit in the front seat, he might as well request to take the wheel.

Well, he did say please.

We all want our kids to learn to use nice words like please and thank you. We want them to know when and how to say excuse me and I’m sorry. Speaking of dreaming big, I have pipe dreams about my son learning to say sentences along these lines: “Daddy, I am truly humbled by the sacrifices you and Mommy have made in the name of my happiness.” (This one might be a long shot.)

Of all the words and phrases we want our kids to learn the habit of using, please is the trickiest. Please is a trap. It baits us into presenting it as the universal door-opener. How often do we hear an adult ask a child for the magic word? I’m sure I’ve made that mistake myself and I regret it.

Please is not a magic word. It is nice word, but it holds no more power than any of the other nice words. It only works when used by a reasonable person, making a reasonable request upon another reasonable person. Please won’t get a little boy into the front seat of the car. It won’t get him behind the wheel. It won’t get him cupcakes for dinner, and it won’t allow him to live in my house until he’s 40. None of these are reasonable requests, and there really are no magic words to make them so.

I don’t know how he got hold of a whole package of cookies. All I can figure is that he must have said pretty please.

My son doesn’t recognize please as a magic word when his parents use it. It is little more than the waste of a syllable when we use it on him in requests like these:

  • “Please eat your dinner.”
  • “Please don’t poke your baby brother to see if he’s asleep.”
  • “Please stop asking if you can drive the car.”

If there is a silver lining in his declining our polite requests it is that maybe he really can understand that getting the things you want in life takes a little more patience and effort than throwing around some magic word. Getting him to finish his dinner certainly does.

I’m trying hard to get away from please as a magic word. Magic is fun, and there is a place for it in a child’s world, but it is no substitute for respect, character, or kindness. To anyone who will show my kids examples of these traits, I say please and thank you.