I so want to be the perfect father. I want to be a source of strength and wisdom for my son; I want to show him unfailing love and generosity; I want him to be able to depend on me, and trust me, and know how important he is to me.
In writing of fatherhood, it’s always important to remember and acknowledge the Father above all others. As hard as I try to be the perfect father for Ian, I will fail, as all fathers do. It’s a wonderful blessing to know that, when I fail my son, his eternal Father will be there to comfort, to guide, and to love. If I teach my son nothing else, it will be this: Christ will never fail.
Below is a short excerpt from, and a link to, an essay by John W. Fountain, for NPR’s series, This I Believe:
‘I believe in God…who allowed me to feel His presence…or that voice, whenever I found myself in the tempest of life’s storms, telling me (even when I was told I was “nothing”) that I was something, that I was His, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.’
(I highly recommend listening to this essay as read by Mr. Fountain. Click here, and click ‘Listen’ in the top-left corner of the essay, under its title.)
Max and Ruby are brother and sister. Max is three years old, Ruby is seven. They are also rabbits:
‘Max & Ruby celebrates the triumph of the individual against the impossible odds of being little… What goes on in the mind of a three-year-old boy is very different from what goes on in the mind of a seven-year-old girl, and Max and Ruby enjoy working and playing together in spite of their conflicting agendas. The brother and sister relationship is at the heart of these stories….’
Unfortunately, Max & Ruby is also one of Ian’s favorite shows on Noggin. Kelly and I hate this show. I have nothing against bunnies, or rabbits. Or bunny rabbits. I also think Max is awesome. My problem is with Ruby, and with the siblings’ parents.
Every episode is about Ruby having fun with friends, and Max tagging along. No one likes to feel left out, especially toddlers, and so when Max is bored and wants a little attention, Ruby just pushes him out of the way with a box of toys. They never play together, and Max never gets his way.
She belongs to the Bunny Scouts, and once took Max on a camping trip with the troop. Just as the girls were making s’mores and were about to tell ghost stories around the campfire, Ruby tells Max to go to bed. And then gets upset when he won’t stay in bed. Marshmallows. Ghost stories. Fire! She expects her three-year-old brother to stay away from fire?
Max gets the shaft. Always. It’s Ruby’s way or…nothing. Max can’t even take the highway - he’s only three. Ruby and a friend were painting, and Max was only allowed to be their model. When he kept trying to paint, Ruby only scolded him and said that Max was too young.
Ruby is a harpy. She’s a shrewish hare whose loving attention I wouldn’t wish upon Cinderella’s wicked step-mother. I know these are strong feelings toward a cartoon rabbit, and I’m dealing with that, but I really can’t stand her. She’s selfish and unrepentant, and is a vine strangling her brother’s childhood.
What bothers me about this show is that it’s supposed to be about the relationship between a brother and sister. This isn’t a relationship, it’s a dictatorship. Ruby and Max, like all siblings, have their conflicts, but they’re never resolved. Ruby never compromises with Max, nor does she apologize for her actions. Max is not taken seriously, and never has the chance to express himself.
And who’s responsible for Ruby’s reign of terror? The parents, whom we never see. Ever. There’s food in the fridge, clothing in the drawers, and a roof over heads, but there’s never a hair (Ouch. Sorry.) seen of the parents. Occasionally Grandma stops by, and the Bunny Scouts have an adult leader, but for the most part Ruby and Max on on their own. Who’s raising these kids!
I know these are probably subtle issues which Ian won’t notice until he’s lost interest in the show, but the reason I won’t allow him to watch Max & Ruby again is more tangible.
This weekend Ruby and her friend, Louise, were painting a banner for a party. Because Ruby can’t be bothered to take an interest in her brother, she tells him to play with the Louise’s little cousin, Morris, who’s also been forced to tag along. Morris takes a page from Ruby’s book, hordes the best toys for himself, and won’t share with Max. ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’ is all Morris can say. Is Morris’ boundless greed ever checked? Of course not. Ruby and Louise just tell the two boys to share, and no discipline ever takes place.
After the show, Ian reaches for our camera, with which he knows he is not allowed to play. I ask for it, and he looks at me, frowns, and says, ‘Mine!’
Ian: ‘Ian a pirate!’
Daddy: ‘Oh, you’re a pirate?’
I: ‘Yeah! Daddy is Thomas.’
D: ‘Me? Daddy’s not Thomas. I thought Mommy was Thomas.’
I: ‘No, Daddy’s Thomas!’
D: ‘Who’s Mommy, then?’
I: ‘Mommy is a lemon!’
D: ‘A lemon? Mommy’s a lemon?’
I: ‘Noooo. Mommy is a…lady! Mommy’s a lady! Daddy’s a man!’
D: ‘What is Ian?’
I: ‘Mommy’s a lady! Ian is a…big boy! Ian a big boy!’
D: ‘That’s right! Ian’s a very big boy!’
I: ‘Mommy’s a lady.’
As we arrive at Ian’s Sunday School classroom, his teacher says to us, ‘Hi! Ah…we need to have a talk about Ian.’
Have a talk? As a son and husband, this is one of those phrases that cause my stomach to drop. Good news is never preceded by ‘have a talk’, and it usually means I’ve done something wrong. Or stupid. Or both. Usually both. In this case, I assumed Ian had done something wrong - because I knew he had.
Kelly and I sing with the choir at the 8:00 and 9:30 services. We stay for the full 8:00 service, but head to the choir room after the anthem at 9:30. During the later service, Ian is in Sunday School, and his room is just down the hall from the choir room. This is when I spy on my son. Rarely do I get the chance to see Ian away from a controlled environment, so I like to see how he behaves when he knows thinks there’s no possible way for me to catch him.
Plus, I just love watching my son.
So, about twenty minutes before the end of class, I was peeking around a corner, spying on my son. Ian and his classmates were seated at tables, each child with a napkin, cup, and two vanilla wafers. Ian had only his napkin and a smile; he’s on the Orek Diet: inhale everything until you can no longer breathe.
After playing with this napkin for a few seconds, Ian stood and swaggered to the opposite side of the table. There was an empty chair next to Anna, who, being enthralled with her cup, had failed to notice the two uneaten cookies in front of her. Ian is an observant child, and so he sat in the empty chair.
And took one of Anna’s cookies.
He leaned forward, stretched his arm, and took a cookie right from under Anna’s oblivious nose. In my mind, I was watching World’s Dumbest Videos on Fox, which featured grainy security footage of a towheaded cashier wearing Thomas the Tank-Engine sneakers, grabbing a handful of Root Beer Barrels from the Brach’s Pick-A-Mix display, and innocently smiling and waving a the camera.
Ian slowly brought the cookie toward his open mouth…and stopped. He closed his mouth, and replaced the cookie on Anna’s napkin. And took the cookie again. And put it back. If Woody Allen were to rob a bank, I imagine it would look like this. Ian grabbed the cookie a final time, asked the teacher if he could have it, and, since the teacher hadn’t even been looking at Ian and therefore didn’t respond, he put the cookie back.
Shocked, I walked back to the choir room and told Kelly what had happened. She asked me if we should talk with the teacher. ‘Nah,’ I said. We can’t always be there, and he didn’t, after all, eat the cookie. We made our way to the choir room window, which happens to look into Ian’s classroom. The class was now coloring, and there was our son, coloring…and pushing his table’s crayons, one by one, onto the floor.
All of this - and his recent sharing tiffs with other kids - was spinning through my head as Ian’s teacher stood there, telling us that we needed to ‘have a talk’ about Ian.
I know Ian isn’t perfect. I mean, look at the title of this site! I know he misbehaves, and it’s often on my watch. But this was a third-party, an independent source - someone else telling me that my son had been bad, to the point where the teacher felt it necessary to ‘have a talk’ about the problem.
I didn’t care what anyone thought of Ian, and I wasn’t worried about how his behavior reflects upon me as a father. I just want my son always to be be the sweet, considerate, caring boy I know he usually often can be is. The boy whose face crumples when he knows he’s disappointed someone, or who will pat your shoulder as he asks concernedly, ‘Okay?’, or who greets me with ‘Hi!’ every morning - this boy cannot be the Cookie Crisp bandit.
Shoulders drooping, I resigned myself to ‘the talk’ and we asked what Ian had done. ‘Oh, nothing!’ said Ian’s teacher. ‘He’s certainly a little performer! He stood up and led every song, and danced and clapped next to the CD player. He was wonderful.’
The relief and pride I felt in my son was surpassed only by my surety that there are better ways for a teacher to deliver good news.
(Oh, and hon? Remind me to talk with Ian about the cookies. Because he really shouldn’t do that.)
In a concerted effort to make others feel more welcome, Ian now addresses people by their common nouns. If he doesn’t know someone’s name, he’ll use the next best thing: man, lady, cat, dog. Kelly said that yesterday a woman jokingly asked Ian where his mother was (right next to him). She received an enthusiastic, ‘Hi, lady!’
The problem is that he’s also started throwing in adjectives. A couple weeks ago, Ian spotted a man in a crowd and for some reason chose to greet him instead of the dozens of other people. ‘Hi, old man!’ I don’t remember the circumstances, and I don’t recall the man, but I do remember feeling that man was far from ‘old’. Thankfully, he didn’t hear Ian.
The next noun on Ian’s list: discretion. There are a lot of adjectives out there.
Ian has what I can only describe as a full-body smile. His eyes crinkle, he dips his chin, and wrinkles his nose. His cheeks are chubby, his teeth have those cute little gaps, and when he smiles you feel as if you’re in an Old Navy commercial.
Don’t be fooled. Stay alert and on your guard. Be on the lookout for a three-foot tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy named Ian. Also known as ‘Fatty’ [Lumpkin], ‘Eanie-Beanie’, ‘Budgimus Maximus’, or ‘Stop that!’, the suspect is to be considered armed and dangerous.
It will come as no surprise when I say that boys are naughty. We start at one-year-old, and we never stop. I once wrote about Ian’s naughty tells, about how he would give himself away before actually doing anything wrong. His poker face has improved, and he’s now on the offensive.
Because she loves me, Kelly made cupcakes last weekend. We were all in the den, watching television; the cupcakes were on the stove, fully-frosted. Kelly asked Ian if he would like ’some cupcake’, meaning, of course, that she was willing to share the cupcake she was already eating. Ian shook his head, turned around, and walked calmly from the room. We should’ve known something was going on.
He returned a few seconds later, cupcake in hand.
First, Ian knows he is not allowed near the stove, let alone the stovetop. Second, he also knows that if he wants something to eat, he is supposed to ask Mommy or Daddy (who then asks Mommy). This is espeically true of anything frosted.
In short, Ian was being naughty; flagrantly so. He didn’t sneak off and eat the cupcake in a corner. He didn’t even start eating the cupcake on the way from the kitchen. He walked to the kitchen, took the cupcake, walked back into the den, looked at us…and smiled! He tilted his head, and smiled! You have to admit, the kid has guts. Or maybe not, since his parents let him eat the cupcake! We didn’t even put up a fight. We just rolled our eyes, and said, ‘Okay.’
What happened? Were we simply caught in the emotional Tilt-A-Whirl that is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition? Were we too tired (and lazy) to fight another battle, knowing that the week was only beginning? Or perhaps, just this once, we wanted to enjoy a cake-based food without having to share with Ian? I think not! Read that last paragraph carefully. No, further. Further. Wait, go back. There. There! You see? He smiled! There was nothing we could do! Have you ever seen anyone being denied a cupcake in an Old Navy commercial?
I now realize that Ian has discovered the power of his smile, and of being cute. Whenever he does something wrong, he just tilts his head and smiles. It reminds me of Twilight Zone: The Movie and that freaky kid with the bowl-cut, and the naive stranger who just can’t understand why the family is so nervous. And let me tell you, folks, Kelly and I are the family, and everyone else is the stranger.
After Ian finished his cupcake, he stood and walked back to the kitchen. I followed. As he reached toward the tray of cupcakes, he noticed me and stopped. ‘Go back,’ he said, in a tone that implied that he had the situation under control and didn’t need my help, but thank you, Father, for caring so much about me. I stepped back, out of his field of vision, and saw him walk toward the stove again. I stepped forward, and he spun to face me. And he smiled.
Ian walked back to the den, sans cupcake. I’m on to you, Jack!
By: Barbara Crooker, Radiance
A black and yellow spider hangs motionless in its web,
and my son, who is eleven and doesn’t talk, sits
on a patch of grass by the perennial border, watching.
What does he see in his world, where geometry
is more beautiful than a human face?
Given chalk, he draws shapes on the driveway:
pentagons, hexagons, rectangles, squares.
The spider’s web is a grid,
transecting the garden in equal parts.
Sometimes he stares through the mesh on a screen.
He loves things that are perforated:
toilet paper, graham crackers, coupons
in magazines, loves the order of the tiny holes,
the way the boundaries are defined. And in real life
is messy and vague. He shrinks back to a stare,
switches off his hearing. And my heart,
not cleanly cut like a valentine, but irregular
and many-chambered, expands and contracts,
contracts and expands.
By: Robyn Sarah, Questions About the Stars
Asleep, the two of you,
daughter and son, in separate cribs,
what does it matter to you
that I stand watching you now,
I, the mother who did not smile all day,
who yelled, Go away, get out, leave me alone
when the soup-pot tipped over on the stove,
the mother who burned the muffins
and hustled bedtime, tight-lipped.
You are far away,
beyond reach of whispered
amends. Yet your calm
breathing seems to forgive,
unwinding
into the air to mesh
like lace, knitting together
the holes in the dark.
It makes of this dark
one whole covering
to shawl around me.
How warm it is, I think,
how much softer
than my deserving.
The first time I can remember Ian actually giggling was during his first year. He was sitting in his baby-bouncer, and for some reason I started rubbing the top of my head against his stomach. And he giggled. It wasn’t the squeal of delight so common to babies, or that high-pitched, Tim Allenish grunt that means your child is either happy or bloated. It was a full-fledged giggle.
So I did it again. And again. (Parenting isn’t so much about raising a child as it is a series of psychological experiments.) Soon the giggle turned into one of those spasm-like, silent laughs, when your lungs are ready to burst and you want to breathe but you can’t because everything is just so darn funny and won’t someone please make it stop!
Two years later, and Ian hasn’t stopped laughing. I’ve never seen a happier (or more easily amused) kid. Last night we took him to Burger King, which had a play-area. Soon after, another toddler arrived, who was about six months older than Ian. This kid could run circles around Spider-Man. As he raced through the gauntlet of rope ladder/crawl tube/slide, he passed Ian again and again and again, and each time Ian had an apoplectic fit of laughter. Whenever the two would meet at a corner, or glance at each other through the netting, Ian would squeal and laugh.
He has the same reaction with cats, and we have three. They can do anything - anything - and Ian will laugh. Walk, jump, lift a paw, blink, inhale…We have a tank of oxygen on hand for those times when they actually play with him.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine claps and cheers for a pair of spinning tires in front of an auto shop. Should I fear for my son’s sanity?
Every night I lift Ian to sit on top of a cabinet in our bathroom, so I can brush his teeth. He can just reach the light switch from this position, and if Ian loves anything as much as laughing, it’s switches. Last week he put his hand on the switch, scrunched his shoulders and smiled. We both knew what he’s going to do, it’s not as if he’s being creative or clever…and I laughed when he flipped the switch! I didn’t just laugh - I guffawed! I put my head into his lap and laughed and laughed, every time he flipped that stupid switch. We were both in fits of giggles by the time Kelly came into the bathroom, wanting to know what was so funny.
I have no idea.
‘Ms. Dehl whisked him from his highchair…past the sign warning the cafe’s customers that “children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven,” …so simmers another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry little ones with them.’
(via Robbie)
I think (and Kelly agrees) that I often overreact toward Ian’s untoward behavior in public. Compared to other children I’ve seen, Ian’s an angel, but I tend to get upset when I know that, for him, the behavior is unacceptable and over-the-top. This article makes me want to cut him loose, and let the grabby-feely hands fly.
Ironically, I generally don’t mind when other kids misbehave. My tolerance is inverslely proportional to the age of the child, but kids are kids, and I thought it was kinda funny when that little boy opened the emergency exit at Bandana’s. I’m surprised, though, at how some people seem to just despise kids. Social Security being what it is, you’d think people would be clamoring for another Baby Boom.
Thankfully people seem to be more tolerant in the Midwest. I’ve never noticed any offensive glares, and no one’s ever asked us to leave or to keep Ian quiet. Once we waited a bit too long to get Ian in front of pancakes - food was the issue, not the pancakes - and he had what can only be described as the China Syndrome (sans Jane Fonda, though the guy behind us sorta looked like Jack Lemmon). He was screaming, snot was running, tears were welling, and I was seriously worried about one of us being stabbed in the head with a fork. The waitress simply asked us if she could be of any help, and brought a box for whatever would be left when Ian had finished berzerking.
Parents, do the best you can. Kids, do whatever you need to do. Everyone else, relax and be thankful that you don’t have to take the problem home with you.
