Yet More Tips for Clueless Fathers
Not that my fatherhood experience hasn’t been 25 months of pure joy. It’s just that it keeps getting interrupted by these episodes wherein I wind up standing shell-shocked in the living room, a wet diaper in one hand and an “Elmo” video in the other, as my daughter Jackie draws on herself and feeds the dogs Popsicles. That’s when my wife takes over.
Still, I’ve managed to accumulate some basic knowledge that other young fathers holding diapers and videos might be able to use in their daily fathering lives. To wit:
1) No need to encourage that speaking thing. The first few months that your child is trying to speak, it’s a novelty, mainly because at that point you can’t really understand her - she’s like a little Inspector Clouseau. But your pride as she masters the language tends to dwindle when you realize what she’s saying is, “I don’t want to go to sleep!,” “I don’t like it!” or, my personal favorite, “Get out, Dada!” Sometimes all during the same conversation.
Of course, she says nice things too, but mostly about Barney the dinosaur. Which brings me to:
2) Hide your VCR. Like many parents, we figured a little PBS viewing couldn’t hurt. Then, when our daughter loved Barney so much, we bought her a Barney videotape. This was a tremendous mistake, and if Dr. Spock were alive he’d probably have come to our house and smashed it with a ball peen hammer.
This is because, once your child realizes that she can watch a certain show any time of the day or night - unencumbered by the programming whims of PBS - she will pretty much want to make this her only waking activity. Because let’s face it, Barney has a lot more going for him on the interest-level scale than your sorry butt. First of all, he’s purple.
So you will have to decide between fighting with her or watching Barney again, and again, and again. Watching may sound easier than fighting, but you’ll realize why this is a bad idea the first time someone catches you singing “Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun” at the Xerox machine.
3) Be afraid. Be very afraid. Besides TV battles, pretty much anything that happens can lead to a temper tantrum or, as it’s referred to by most child psychologists, “a nutty.” You’ll know when it’s happening, because Cheerios will be flying in your general direction.
This leads to a common parental affliction, which is fear of your own child, who is much smaller than you and whom you could probably take in a fair fight. Unfortunately, she plays dirty by staging the majority of her fits for the benefit of your fellow Target shoppers.
After this happens a few times, every trip out of the house becomes like a Hitchcock movie. You can feel your pulse quicken and little beads of sweat appear on your forehead as you wheel her down an aisle; you know that anything around you could be the gamma ray that brings out your own little Incredible Hulk.
Most of the time she’ll be perfectly well behaved, of course, content in the knowledge that she’s keeping you on your toes, which she’s realized by this point is the reason she’s there.
4) Once they taste ice cream, that’s all they’ll ever want to eat. From what I can tell, this is pretty much true for the rest of their lives; I know I still pretty much feel this way.
5) If you love them, set them (partially) free. This means permitting certain kinds of experimentation, the kinds not involving heights or improper uses of the family pet.
For instance, the other day Jackie wanted to pull the dental floss out of the container and use it as a jump rope. On the one hand, this wastes a lot of floss, which does not send a good message - after all, there are children with bad teeth in Africa. On the other, it could lead to an interest in dentistry, which may bode well should I ever need her to spring for an assisted living facility.
All of this speaks to the bigger issue of accepting that your kid is becoming her own person, with her own shows that she likes, things she wants to play with and words she wants to say. For me, that adjustment was more than worth it the first time Jackie took it upon herself to look up and say “I love you!”
When she continued by saying, “You love me, we’re a happy family,” I knew she was just quoting Barney, but I’ll take it any way I can.