The Mantra That I Need

I am not a big brother.

Well, actually I am a big brother;, I am the oldest of four children. But what I need to remember is that I am not my children’s big brother (I am also not my wife’s big brother, which is something that she tends to remind me about when I try to push her off the bed at night because she said something annoying). This is probably my biggest failing as a parent (when it comes to my failings as a husband, this is but one to choose from out of a veritable cornucopia of choices).

[it's really kind of easy for me to get confused, however, because when I was younger, I had 2 younger sisters and a younger brother; and now I have 2 girls and a boy; are you buying this excuse? me neither I guess]

For example, the kids and I were leaving to drive somewhere this morning, and after I shuffled them out the door onto the driveway, I realized that we had a full bag of trash in the kitchen trash, so I went back and de-leveraged and de-suctioned the bag from the kitchen can and carried it in my left arm outside toward the trash can. In the 30 seconds it took me to do this, my 2 year-old managed to find the puddles in the driveway and begin stomping in them, soaking her shoes and pantlegs.

So I said “Argh… what are you doing!” which is fine, but then I said “I am going to throw you in the trash can,” which is really not completely fine. My 2-year old laughed a bit at the fact that she made me “Argh” (which annoyed me a bit more) and I hurried over and scooped her up with my right arm. I then walked over to the trash can, to deposit the bag of trash.

As I walked over the trash can, my two-year old (utilizing the normal observational skills of a two-year old, and thus having no freakin’ clue that I had a trash bag in my other hand) began to think I was serious. She whimpered. She squealed. The problem is that, at this point, full-on big brother mode kicked for me in here (which I was able to recognize by my inadvertent smile). An actual, responsible adult would have stopped himself immediately and put the child down or something. I, apparently being a naturally evil person, however, went ahead and took the lid off the trash can, causing the two year old to shout “NO Daddy!” At this point, the big-brother-in-me said “now you should laugh in a really evil way” and I actually started to do that until the father-in-me finally, about 20 seconds too late, beat the shit out of the big-brother-in-me and I stopped being such a jerk and put the kid down.

This is not the only time I have done this. When my oldest (named Emma) was 6-years old, our old dilapidated garage was on its last legs and needed to be replaced (we had nicknamed it “deathtrap” and considered inviting the really annoying neighbor kid over to play in it). But trying our best to be fun, creative parents, my wife and I decided that the garage’s imminent demise meant that we could spray paint the fuck out of the old thing the day before it was scheduled to be demolished. My wife bought a can or two of red spray paint while I was at work at we were ready to go that night. While the kids played inside, we snuck out after dinner to get a chance to loose our inner graffiti artist before handing over the cans and allowing the kids to take over (knowing with a certainty that there would be no turns left for us once the kids started).

My wife drew a few shapes on the door and I watched until I burst needing my out chance. I sprayed a line or two and got an idea. I sprayed “Emma wrote this” on the garage door in large, red letters. I put the garage door up, so there was no evidence of any painting.

I called my daughter out of the house.

I told her she was punished for the bad thing she had done. She looked at me quizzically, having no idea what I was talking about.

I pulled down the garage door.

My daughter read it and became hysterical, screaming “I didn’t do it I didn’t do it I didn’t do it.” She then began to run. Fast and far. My daughter, the girl that had been going out and running 2 miles with me back then (and who now, at age 8, kicks my butt), was off to the races. Down the driveway, turning at the sidewalk and just going.

It began to dawn on me that overteasing your 6-year old isn’t cool. Not at all, not at all, not at all, not at all not cool not one bit. Luckily my wife eventually tracked my daughter down and, after about 20 minutes, she actually stopped crying.

Parents are supposed to be a comfort to a child. Parents are the two people that will always love their children and accept them for who they are, unconditionally. Yet here I am, screwing with a six-year old. Sigh.

I’d like to say that I’m cured; that I’ve stopped teasing my kids. The fact that I’m blogging about it (and posting a pic), however, suggests that part of me still, and inappropriately, thinks that it was kinda funny.

But I really am trying to remember that I'm not their big brother.

Teaching The Hatred: A Father's Duty

LeBron James has done it again. On Sunday I was in my living room, watching the Browns vs. Cowboys game, and there is LeBron on the sidelines at Cleveland Browns Stadium … unfortunately, he’s on the Dallas sidelines. LeBron famously showed up at an Indians vs. Yankees playoff game last fall sporting a Yankees cap, rousing the ire of Tribe fans, but later explaining that he’s always liked the Yankees. Maybe having your professional sports stars like other teams is OK when they are from somewhere else, but people most in Cleveland felt that, as someone actually from Cleveland, LeBron should “get it” and should be an Indians and Browns fan. So this new move should come as little surprise, at least.

Lots of people had takes on this. Some good. Some not so good. I personally always thought that LeBron had a legitimate built-in excuse: he grew up without a dad around. I mean, most kids learn about sports by seeing their dad watching the NFL on the tube Sunday afternoon, or by riding around in the back seat listening to the baseball game on the radio. Some even get taken to some games by their dads. Who took LeBron to a game? Did anyone ever tell him to like the hometown team?

We learn from history that racism was (is?) largely taught to children by their parents, probably more often than not by fathers. Hatred of something can, in this way, be passed on from generation to generation.

I am inspired by the example of our Southern brothers. If they could teach their kids from generation to generation something that is as freakin’ stupid as “black people are inferior,” then I should have no trouble teaching my children the plain truth that “maize and blue people are inferior” and the “Pinstripes suck.”

This is one of the best things about sports: it is the main place in modern society where you can pass an irrational hatred of something on to your children, where can put your mark on your children -- and, if you are a Cleveland fan, psychologically mar them -- in a way that, if you do it properly, will so impact them that they’ll similarly deform their own childrens’ psyches.

It’s great.

For example, I’ll be sitting around, watching let’s say a baseball game on ESPN Sunday night baseball or something. One of the kids walks in, and it goes like this:

“Daddy, who is playing basketball?”

“It’s baseball. And it’s the New York Yankees against the Boston Red Sox.” (I mean, why in the world would anyone show any other game on TV if you can show the Yankees Red Sox? Ack.)

“Who do we want to win”

“I guess the Red Sox.”

Pausing, “So we don’t like New York.”

“Nope. Nope. Nope. We don’t like New York.”

“Do we hate them?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do we hate them double?”

“Yes, we double hate them. Triple even.”

“So we like the Red Sox, right?”

“No, we hate them too, but just a little bit less than the Yankees.”

“Oh. That little guy Ped-Roy-A is annoying to me. I think maybe I hate the Red Sox a little bit more.”

“So long as you hate both of them, which one to hate more is up to you to choose. It’s a personal philosophical choice that each person has to decide for himself. Post-2004, there’s no correct answer when it comes to Red Sox and Yankee hating; both are valid personal choices.”

“Do you hate the Yankees more than Michigan and the Steelers?”

“Ummm…. Errrr.”

(This is where I normally pass out simply from the thought of the question.)

You see, LeBron didn’t get any of this crucial training at a young age. So he ends up a Yankees fan and a Cowboys fan. I mean, I almost feel sorry for the guy.

Not Quite There Yet

It happens to all parents. You are trying to teach your child something (or hoping that they’ll learn it without you having to go through the exercise of actually teaching it, via osmosis or TV or other really effective methods like those) and you get the impression that they’ve got it! You can see, with your powers of super-perception, that they’ve gotten it – even if it doesn’t seem like it -- and you tell your spouse or mom about it and … actually you’re just full of crap. I always thought that the kids were smiling at us well before they were. My wife once thought our 20 month old was reading (and even made me get out the video camera so her mistake is preserved for posterity). Every time we leave the kids with my mother alone overnight, she mysteriously claims that they’ve learned some new skill that we see no evidence of once we take them home. (It’s possible that she’s just fucking with me to get back at me for years of harassing her, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on).

My nieces, who live in the Middle East (not as in “Maryland” but as in “near Syria”), came to visit us and their grandparents again this summer. They are 13 and 10 years old, and my now-8 year old daughter (the oldest) absolutely loves their visits as she can have the older-sibling-type relationship with them that she’s deprived of otherwise in her life. The nieces go off to camps sometimes in the summer and come back with all kinds of interesting stuff to teach my 8-year old (none of it is the bad kind of interesting yet, at least as far as I know).

One of this year’s camp hand-me-downs was “five-minute mysteries,” which are basically short riddles. For example: “There is a man in a yard with a fence that no one can climb over that is locked from the inside and he is lying on the ground, dead, with a stab wound in his chest, and a giant puddle underneath him. How did he die?” You can ask questions in a 20-questions kind of way, ultimately trying to come up with the answer: “it was winter and an icicle fell onto his heart and killed him and then melted.” She had a half-dozen things of that genre. My eight-year old loved it and it seemed to me that my nearly five year old was kinda getting it too. I was kind of proud of him for being able to follow what was going on.

I often overestimate the walking that my son will be able to do. I figure “he’s almost 5, he should be able to walk a mile or two” and it never really works out that way. The other day we were going to an Indians game and hitched a ride downtown, thinking we would take the Rapid train home (something my son loves). Post-game (OK, really, post-7^th inning) he was able to walk the half-mile from the game to the train, but once off the train, it was shoulder-back time for the mile or so walk home.

So we were trudging up a hill on our way, and I spotted a dead bird on the sidewalk ahead of us. I hesitated, not really ever having to address death with the boy. Unfortunately, he asked.

“Daddy, look at that bird.”

“Yeah … it looks like it’s dead. That makes me sad.”

He paused. “Maybe it’s just sleeping.”

“I guess that’s possible, but I don’t think so, buddy.”

When a serious topic springs up out of nowhere, having a kid on your shoulders is rough. You can’t see their faces, their eyes. You have no idea if they are shaken up or have moved on. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I wanted to see his face so bad that I spent 3 or 4 seconds trying to roll my eyes up so far as to see the face of the boy sitting on my shoulders.

We walked past the bird and about 20 paces beyond.

My son drew a deep breath and said: “I guess it will always be a five-minute mystery.”

(maybe sometimes they don't get it when you think they do)

Family Friends

While you and your wife may have brought your own sets of friends to your marriage to begin with, if you’ve been married long enough, you’ve probably been around when your wife (or you) actually met someone and became their friend. And that new friend probably had a significant other. And somewhere early in the relationship, you probably went out as a foursome. And if it was her making the friend, if you hated the guy, couldn’t stand him, then her relationship with the female maybe never got off the ground, or was probably restricted to shopping or girls nights out or something like that. And vice versa. The basic standard that most people seem to have is this: you get to maintain the friendships you came to the relationship with (you don’t have to get rid of the high school friend no matter how annoying to your spouse), but all new friendships have to be cleared with the spouse before commencement. That’s just the way it goes.

Having kids takes this in a whole other direction, since now you have to find a family that is not just acceptable to mom and dad: you have to find a couple with kids to be friends with since you’ll bore regular non-childed people to death discussing diaper brands (or your top ten worst diaper “blow-outs”). And the kids generally have to be the same age as yours (your actual age no longer matters; in parenting terms, if your kids are older than someone else’s, then you’re the “older” parents). You may resist this restricting yourself to childed couples at first, but soon you’ll recognize the advantages of having another set of parents with kids to hang out with.

But first, you have to realize that in choosing these friends, how much you like them and they like you counts, but other stuff counts at least as much if not more. Perhaps most importantly, you need to make sure that they have a reasonable level of attachment to their kids and a reasonable discipline level. Some people believe that once the adults are talking with a cocktail in their hands, all adults are to pretend like the children don’t exist. These are the people whose kids are probably down in the basement, pulling your kids’ fingernails out with pliers when you aren’t there. That’s too far. Other parents, however, will actually follow their kids around your house from room to room and show them how to use toys and will pay more attention to the kids than to you. You might mention to these folks that if you wanted to follow kids around, you have your own. You didn’t need to invite their’s over. So you need to find balance here. Someone who when the kids play in the backyard proposes that the parents sit on the deck, or at least in the family room with the window. But not in the yard.

Another big test once the kids are older is how do the other parents react when you say to their kid “Frankie… stop standing on Julie’s head” in a stern voice. When you discipline their kid. If they’re OK with it, you’ve got family friends for life, even if their favorite band is ABBA and they watch CBS constantly.

This is one of the key reasons why, as you get older, adult brothers and sisters start to hang out with one another. Not because they’ve grown closer or actually like each other. It’s because they’re WAY more comfortable yelling at their own flesh and blood in the form of nieces and nephews when they do something ridiculous like tear up the garden. If it’s not family, you force yourself to think “I didn’t like those flowers anyway.” When it’s your nephew, you grab them by the scruff of the neck and deal with it.

So you’ve got these new couple friends. What are they for? It’s important to do the right stuff. For example, do not ever ever take your family of 3 or 4 out to dinner with another family of 3 or 4. That’s just a disaster. You’re now a table of 8, and you’ll sit in the lobby for 45 minutes waiting for the 2 tables in the restaurant that seat 8 to open up while your kids scream “I’m hungry.” No, what another family is ideal for is for breaking the monotony of weekends stuck at home or weekday summer nights. You go over to the other person’s house, you turn the kids loose and you drink a beer or a glass of wine and spend 2-3 hours together. That’s what these new friends are for.

I wondered why my dad never did anything solo with our “family friends’” dads. It’s because he didn’t actually like many of them as actual friends. And, look, you’re gonna have to lower the bar here. Sometimes you get lucky and you find some guys that you’d normally actually be friends with. When this happens, they normally have a kid who keeps trying to kiss your daughter’s belly or a kid that kills small animals or a wife who your wife hates because she’s really really hot, I mean smoking hot (despite the superficial attraction to that situation, don’t become friends with that guy: it ain’t worth it). There’s never an ideal situation. If you accept that, you can have a blast with the new friends.

The problem really arises when you get older. You not only need a guy that you’re ok with, you need a wife that your wife is ok with, and ideally they will have approximately the same number and ages of kids as you, and hopefully similar gender distributions. There probably are 17 families like that in the world, but only 3 of them speak English. So someone’s gonna get screwed, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. Just make sure that kid gets an extra Christmas present: preferably a Nintendo DS so they have something to play with when you go over to that family’s house and the rest of you have fun.