Tag: family

Rilalities XII

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Story, Harrowing Story

“Our son overdosed on Tylenol,” a mom and dad said entering a hospital’s emergency department. When they were directed to a room, they informed the nurse that the family experienced a dispute in their home. Their teenage son didn’t deal with it well. “He overdosed to teach us a lesson,” the parents informed the nurse. The argument, it turned out, was based on a huge misunderstanding. After emotions subsided, the three put the missing puzzle pieces back in place and realized what happened. (The author doesn’t know the particulars.) The parents and their son concluded their Q&A with the nurse by telling her they were in the emergency room that day to get their son’s stomach pumped.

“Okay,” the nurse said after the parents explained what happened in their home. “When did he take the Tylenol, and how much?”

“It’s been a couple days,” the mother said, “and he took almost an entire bottle.” She had the near empty bottle with her, and she informed the nurse that it was full before the incident. The mother finished that explanation with a compassionate smile directed at her son, and she mouthed, ‘It’s okay,’ to him.

The nurse made a mental note that she later shared with the doctor “that the three appeared almost happy, or maybe relieved in some odd way.”

The doctor agreed, and he said, “I think they were relieved that the heated argument was over, and they were just happy to have their son back.” 

 

“The treatment for an acetaminophen overdose is a drug called acetylcysteine,” the doctor informed them when he sat in the emergency room, about a half an hour after the nurse left, “but it only shows maximum effectiveness within an eight hour window of the overdose. We will use acetylcysteine, and we will also perform a gastric lavage or nasogastric tube suction, or what you call a stomach pump, but there are similar time constraints on the maximum effectiveness of those procedures too. The problem with ingesting so much acetaminophen and leaving it in the system for so long, is that it has been absorbed by the liver.”

“So, so, what does that mean?” the family asked.

“Our medical team is going to do everything at our disposal today,” the doctor said, “but my job is to make sure you are well aware of the facts of the situation here.”

“And the facts are?” the mother asked.

The doctor had sympathy for the patient and his parents inability to grasp the severity of the matter, and he tried to describe the ramifications as delicately and with as much sympathy as he could. He chose his words carefully while repeating everything he said about the effectiveness of acetylcysteine and stomach pumps after a couple of days, and he repeated what he said about the medical team at that hospital doing everything they could do to help their son, “But if your son took as much Tylenol as you’ve described here today, this is going to be as difficult a situation as you can imagine.”

We can only imagine how difficult this was for the doctor, and we can imagine that the parents put the doctor through it over and over in excruciating detail, asking questions we might regard as obtuse, but what was, in fact, a couple of parents and a son having a difficult time digesting the grim reality of the situation. We have to imagine that they interrogated the doctor, until he finally broke down and said, “In cases such as these, the normal life expectancy is around two-three-days.”

After the initial hysteria broke down, we can also imagine that the parents and their child enjoyed their final moments together. The reports suggest that this is a painful way to die, but if the son was able to manage the pain to a certain degree, we can imagine that the three of them did everything they could to celebrate his last days on earth. 

The team of medical professionals tried acetylcysteine, they performed the stomach pump, and anything and everything at their disposal. The teenage boy died two days later. 

I heard this story decades ago, and it still haunts me. It’s the da Vinci of stories. It doesn’t matter the angle, or perspective, it stares back at you as hard as you stare at it. How could the parents not know their child overdosed? For a couple of days? Was the argument so intense that they were not on speaking terms? I don’t know much about overdoses of this nature, but how was he not showing concerning symptoms, concerning to him in particular? We can only imagine that the parents have dreams where they spot something and do something sooner.

As much as the parents probably went through, and still go through, we have to imagine that no one involved in this situation will ever forget it. Everyone from the nurse, to the doctor, to anyone else involved still have nightmares about it. It’s also a harrowing reminder that no matter how bad the fight, or how profound the disagreement, get it out, get it all out, speak to the ones you love, and straighten it all out before it’s too late. 

Heart Attack

Those who were there know that I had a rocky relationship with my dad. We were two stubborn, ornery, Irish roosters butting heads. He kept me in check by threatening to kick me out of the house. I didn’t want to leave my home, and I didn’t want to be known as the kid who got kicked out of the home. My plan, once I got out on my own, was to never forgive him and never forget what he did to me. Years into the plan, my dad had a massive heart attack. His chances of survival were slim. I visited him and saw him hooked up to a variety of machines, and I realized that no matter how awful he was to me, he was the last parent I had left in life. He survived, barely.

We spent the next eleven years rectifying everything that happened during my youth. During these eleven years, I thanked him for assuming the role of step-father for me when I was two-years-old. That was so hard. It was difficult to avoid qualifying it, and placing “But you did this to me” type of asterisks. I left it as a standalone thank you. 

It was the best thing I ever did. I wish he would’ve lived for another ten to twenty years, but he didn’t. When he eventually passed away, however, I said goodbye to him with a heart free of anger, without the need for some sort of retribution, and hatred. If he died after the first heart attack, I would’ve been an absolute wreck. The moral of the story is, no matter how bad the fight between you and your loved ones is, get it out, speak to one another, and straighten it out before it’s too late.

Why I Write

Ever drive down the road and see a bumper sticker with exclamatory statements on their car? How about that guy who wears a T-shirt, in public, that says something meaningful? And what about that guy we all know who debates his friends on a variety of topics, with a palpable sense of frustration. “No one will listen to me,” he shouts. Everyone who talks to that guy feels his underlying sense of frustration, and they know how angry he is. We begin to interact with him less and less, because we know he can turn everything from a discussion on geopolitics to whether or not the snap pea is a delicious food into an uncomfortably confrontational argument. Every time I meet that guy, I’m so glad I’m not him anymore. That guy has no venue. He needs to express himself all over you. Whether you deem the material I discuss valuable or not, I found my venue. 

I always valued friendship over the temporary feelings one can derive through defeating another in an argument, but I felt a certain sense of frustration when no one would agree with me. When I expressed some anger and frustration, people would give me that extra look. If you’ve seen that look, you know it. That look follows you, and it says something uncomfortably revealing about you. It’s a double-take that precedes most rational, sane people just walking away. Others, who care about you, say, “Maybe you need some counseling.” Tried it, didn’t work for me. I wouldn’t say the counselor was stupid, or I am more intelligent, but she didn’t understand me. I didn’t understand me, until I found an outlet. I wouldn’t say I was complex, or anything extra ordinary, but there was no question that I needed to do something to get everything that was in me, out. 

“Music sets the sick ones free,” Andrew Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, once wrote. That was me. I didn’t just love music, I needed it. I could drop the cliché that I needed music, like some people need oxygen, but it wasn’t that severe. I prefer to think of my need for music to help balance my mental stability as one might view a farmer living out on the prairie with little-to-no law enforcement. I needed music the way those farmers need to be armed to protect their land, their livestock, and their family. The only issue was I never wanted to be anything more than a music listener. I didn’t know how to play an instrument, and I didn’t have the patience to learn one. Yet, I was in desperate need of some form of self-expression in some sort of artistic manner. 

If “Music sets the sick ones free,” and I believe it does, writing was directed neurological therapy for me. Music was equivalent to a neurologist prescribing necessary over the counter pain medication. Writing, would prove the directed neurotherapy a neurologist might prescribe after repeated visits and extensive study of my reactions to everything prior.  

I was never ill, compromised, or depressed in any substantial manner, but I had an internal itch that ruined days. Writing felt substantial to me. I wanted it all, but when it didn’t come, I kept writing. I was no prodigy. I wrote some awful stuff, but I loved it, needed it, and I kept wanting to do it no matter what. Writing anything and everything I could think up is what has led me to the definition of sanity I now know.

No Hugging and No Learning

When I watched Seinfeld, I had no idea why it appealed to me so much. It was funny, of course, but there were dozens of situation comedies on the air at the time, and hundreds of them throughout history. Seinfeld was special to me, and I had no idea why. When I learned that the writer’s room had a “no hugging and no learning” thematic approach, I said, “That’s it” to myself.

Seinfeld was special, because it wasn’t “special”. Everyone from the creators, writers, on down to the actors made no effort to be special, nor did they add special ingredients into the mix. The special ingredients for most writers on most situation comedies involved the “very special episodes”. These episodes made special connections to the audience through special issues. A character, in their narrative, discovers that they’ve been so wrong for so long that they now question their foundation, and the audience understands, agrees, cries, hugs, and leaps to their feet in “clapture”. Clapture is a framing technique used by comedy writers to get the (Emmy!) audience to clap with laughter, or to agree with them more than laugh. I didn’t realize, until Seinfeld, how cringeworthy those special, meaningful messages were. The Seinfeld writers maintained that there would be no hugging, no learning, and if I might add, no special understandings in their show. They just tried to be funny. When we watch such shows, we always wonder if they reflect our values, or if we begin to reflect theirs. I think Seinfeld, more than any other sitcom I’ve watched, reflects my values. I prefer a good steak with very little seasoning and nothing else! Unless steak sauce is used to cover up the quality of the meat, I want nothing else on my steak. If you’re going to come at me and tell me what you really think of me, I prefer that you come bold with no qualifiers. I also prefer music that is complicated, fun, interesting, creative, relatively brilliant, unique, and utterly meaningless. Don’t tell me what you think of the domestic economy of Istanbul, the mating habits of the emu, or anything else that you wished you put in your college thesis. Just write lyrics that fit the music and be done with it. Seinfeld, in my opinion, met all of those standards.  

Ten Rules of Parenting

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You’re a parent, congratulations and my condolences. It might be hard to picture now, if your kids are little more than screaming sacks of flesh but you will eventually be glad you had them. When that prospect becomes a reality, it’s a life-altering event to realize that someone is going to be dependent on us for everything for life, and for life. We’ve never had someone dependent on us for everything before, and we’ve all heard someone talk about that dependency, but we’re never prepared for it when it hits home. It’s a shocking revelation that occurs in phases and layers. The first layer of dependency involves money, food, shelter, and all of the superficial needs that humans require to survive. Those needs can be hard to fulfill, depending on the situation, but compared to the other, deeper layers of need, the superficial ones are cake. If you are a scared first-time parent, this formerly frightened, first-time parent of nearly ten years, offers ten rules to working through those layers.

Don’t Die

This first rule of quality parenting is a result of experience-based wisdom, because I survived, and I am a better parent for it. Neither of my parents followed this rule, but my step-dad did. He decided to not die of a massive heart attack one day, and he did that long enough to correct most of the errors he made as a parent. The explanations, descriptions, examples, illustrations and testimonials of why a parent should live has filled other books, but let’s just say that if my step-dad died as a result of that massive heart attack, I might be more wrecked than I already am. In the decade that followed that massive heart attack, and his eventual demise, my step-dad went from being a step-father to a dad. He was a flawed human being, but he taught me things that inspired this list.

Spend Time with Them

The second rule of quality parenting might be more important than the first, but if you’re dead, spending time with your kids will prove more difficult. Those of us who lived long enough to see it know that the steps involved in raising, training, refining, and redefining a small human into a halfway decent person requires a boatload of time. It’s also fraught with failure. First-time parents should know that they will fail, loudly, and often. If you don’t see this now you will, you will. If you want to correct the record now before that day of personal reckoning arrives, there is a cure. The best and worst model we have for parenting is our parents. “I might not be the best parent in the world, but I am light years better than my dad,” might be a refrain you tell yourself, and you may captain your ship in such a way that you don’t repeat his errors, but you’ll make others, and when you do, expect to hear time-honored laughter from your father, “It’s not as easy as you thought is it?” Quality parents will try to correct their errors, of course, but those corrections will be as flawed as we are. The best way to make a difficult situation better is to spend so much time around your kids that they’ll eventually weave our mistakes and flaws in with our admirable efforts and qualities that they mix them together in an big old soup bowl of memories. I normally despise new age terms like being present, but there is a huge difference between being in the same room with them and living in the present tense with them, and we cannot achieve the latter with a device-colored nose. I saw an illustrative example of this when I went to a friend’s house, and I saw my grade-school friend chatting it up with his parents. My friend and his siblings weren’t talking about awful grades, discipline, or sports, they were talking about stuff, interesting, uninteresting, and funny and funny stuff, and their parents were listening. There were no raised voices, neither party required the other to take them more seriously, and there were no clever, demeaning jokes about the other. Those parents knew things about their kids, and I’m not talking about the important things either. They knew about the stupid things their kids liked, and they appeared to enjoy talking about those things with them. They had what we call a relationship, a relationship that was outside what I considered the normal parent-child framework. I wasn’t jealous, because I didn’t really want a relationship with my step-father, but being among normal kids discussing normal matters with their parents did make me feel like a stranger in a strange land, and they accomplished that simple feat by spending massive amounts of time with one another. It was weird. 

Be a Hypocrite

“Do everything you can to make his youth last as long as possible,” someone told me when my son was too young for that advice to apply. I didn’t know what that meant at first. How do I make their years of youth last longer? We’ve all heard that phrase, and we all know and don’t know what everyone is talking about.  What do kids, preteens, and teenagers prize more than anything else? That’s easy: Fun. Next question, what’s their definition of fun? We, as parents, will always be the primary influence on them, but friends provide their primary definition of fun, and that changes with age, sometimes dramatically. We might not even know about the progressive changes in his definition of fun as he ages, but it can change them and bring about a premature close to their naive, carefree youth. After a certain age, the only role, influence, or power a parent has in the arena of fun is adversarial. Our job, as their parent, is to sniff such situations out, slam the door on them, and take all the slings and arrows that follow.  “They’re going to do it anyway,” my friends’ parents said when we were teens. “I’d prefer that they do it around me, where I can keep an eye on them.” I had some great times in those cool parents’ homes and under those rules, and my definition of fun changed dramatically. I went from thinking that all I had to do was throw a ball around to have fun, to needing a beer, a girl, and whatever substance I could find to further explore the definition of fun. Now that I’m an old man, I no longer see those progressions as inevitable, and when I think about how damaging those inevitable progressions were to me, I cringe. Those years of innocent, naive youth could’ve lasted a lot longer if I made different friends in high school, and those kids had better parents. I heard my friends’ parents further justify their actions by saying, “We can’t tell them not to do it, because we did it. What kind of hypocrites would we be if we didn’t allow them to do it?” Wait a second here, how did you make this about you? It’s not about you anymore, and I’ve even heard you acknowledge that on different topics, but you make this decision based on you? If we take a step back and analyze that now, age-old excuse for not being a better parent, we could view our fear that someone, somewhere might see us as a hypocrite, as somewhat narcissistic. In lieu of the carnage I inflicted on my youth, as a result of these justifications, I now challenge other parents to be more hypocritical for their kid’s sake. “Call me a hypocrite, because that’s what I am,” we should say to our kids. “Give me the badge, or scarlet letter ‘H’, and I will wear it proudly. You might thank me one day when you’re old enough to appreciate what I’m doing here and why, or you won’t. I don’t give a bit! We can talk about the things I did at your age, and I will detail for you why I don’t want you to do them. I’m not going to allow you to do the stupid things I did to wreck my life and end my youth far too early.” I don’t know if the ‘they’re going to do it anyway’ message started in the movies, daytime talk shows, or if it simply passed down from generation to generation, but some parents I know suggest that they’re willing to permit their children to do the dumbest things, under their roof, with the hope that they never hear their children call them a hypocrite. “Why do you care if they call you names?” I asked one of them. “You did it too!” they say, reminding me of what we all did together, and they say that with all sorts of exclamation points and index fingers pointed at me, as if I haven’t examined my life properly. “I did,” I say, “and I know how it wrecked me. Why would I stand back and allow him to wreck himself in the same way?” “Well, he’s going to do it anyway,” she said. I could’ve asked her how she knows that, or I could’ve said no he won’t, but the truth is she doesn’t know, and either do I. I do know that I’m not going to concede to that supposed inevitability to such a degree that I permit him to do it in my home, with the fear that he might one day call me a name, like hypocrite.

Respect Your Authority

You provide the definition of authority in your child’s life, and they will hold onto that definition of authority for the rest of their lives. I didn’t think any of my bosses knew what they were talking about, until they proved otherwise. Was this a reflection of how I viewed my step-dad, or was I just an overly skeptical person? Someone suggested that a child’s definition of an ultimate authority figure in life, reflects their definition of God. If they viewed their dad as the ultimate authority figure in their lives, and that dad was a mean, unforgiving man, chances are the kid will view God in the same manner. If their dad was loving and kind, they will view God in the same manner, generally speaking. So, if a parent wants to see how their children view them, they might want to ask their child how they view God. It’s an interesting theory, whether 100% true or not, and it is a nice addendum to the idea that you provide them the definition of an ultimate authority figure.

Needless to say, these are formative years for your child, and what they believe at six-years-old will have a profound effect on what they think when they’re thirty-six. This is why I dismiss those who view my definition of authority as ego-driven. I see it as the opposite. I see it as my job to provide my child with a level of consistency that will hopefully lead to a sense of clarity. He experiences confusion now, and he will experience inconsistency and confusion throughout his chase of happiness and success, but if he has a, “I know what my parents would do in this situation, and I know what they would think” base, it could help him make better decisions.

Thus, when he experiences confusion, I see it as my job to help him end that, and I try to answer him with as much objectivity as I can. My kid knows this particular answer so well that he repeats it with me whenever he has a question, “Some people believe this … Some people believe that, and I believe this …” I then back my answer up with as many facts and opinions as I know, and I try to provide as much information about “the other opinions” as I do mine. I try to answer his questions comprehensively and with as much objectivity as I possibly can, because I do not want someone else to tell him things he’s never heard before. I approach these questions from the perspective that other people don’t care about him as much as I do, and they will tell him the other, negative things for their own purposes. I try to tell him about all things beautiful and wonderful, but I also want him to know about the ugly and awful, and I want him to hear it from me first before some less responsible person tells him about it.

If you’re one who puts a focus on the beautiful and the wonderful, and you shield them from the awful, because they’re kids, and they don’t need to hear that mess. They’ll learn it from someone, somewhere. They’ll then consider that purveyor of the awful a cool truth-teller who treated them like an adult, and you’ll never be able to recover your role in that arena. 

I also try to keep it concise enough to adhere to the constraints of his attention span. (The latter can be challenging at times.) One of the simple keys to success and happiness, I’ve given him, is to try to enjoy being around people as much as they enjoy being around you.

One of the numerous challenges to your authority will be excuses. Excuses work, because we love and care for our child, and we know that they have challenges. One of the primary challenges in their life is, of course, grades. One thing we hear in our home is, “Well Jerry and Judy got worse grades than I did. Jerry got a 60%, and Judy got a 45%. I know this is hard to believe, but I actually got one of the best grades in the class.” This, of course, is the time-honored excuse for bad grades, and the time-honored response is, “I don’t care about Jerry or Judy, or anyone else in the class.” I’ve repeated that line a number of times, but I put an end to that excuse with one heart-felt response once, when I repeated that line, but added the addendum, “I only care about you. You might live your whole life and never run across someone who cares about you as much as I do.” I meant all that, and I looked him in the eye when I said it, and he held my gaze as I said it. He saw how true it was to me, and he hasn’t tried to drop that meaningless excuse on me again. “She always had my back,” a friend of mine said at his mother’s funeral. “Even when I was wrong, she took my side.” He was right, of course, and I saw it on numerous occasions. His mom was as loyal to he and his sister as any parent I’ve witnessed, but by always taking their side without qualification, she failed to hold them accountable for their actions. It led the two of them to commit numerous criminal and self-destructive acts, and they were only held to account for their actions a few times. The only damage they received, in my opinion, was to their character. As one who has yet to manage the arena of excuses, the only thing I can add here is it takes a deft hand to learn how to manage their excuses and their challenges, because we can’t accept or refuse to accept excuses with a broad brush, for that would be a reflection on us, but we also don’t want them to use excuses as a crutch for not adhering to guiding principles or performing to the best of their ability.

As a child of an older parent, who spent most of his life as a bachelor, my dad wasn’t exactly honed in on parenting. As long as I didn’t embarrass him in front of other parents, teachers, or any other authority figures by doing something awful, I was on my own. My friends envied me for that, and I loved it for a while, but I began to view my step-dad’s laissez faire style of parenting as him not caring as much as my friends’ parents did.

Get Old

If it’s too late for you to get old, physically and mentally, because you’ve already had the kid, I suggest you try getting old spiritually. What’s the difference between old parents and young? We can answer that question with another question, what’s the difference between parents and grandparents? Older people, in general, have more of a ‘been there, done that’ mentality that suggests they no longer have that unquenchable need to do ‘it’ so often that they become ‘it’. Older people, generally speaking, are satisfied, settled, and they tend to be happier. Older parents and grandparents give young kids more time and attention. They actually listen to the nonsense that comes out of a kid’s mouth, and they interact with them on a level younger parents rarely do. Older parents also don’t resent this new ball of flesh and bones standing before them asking stupid questions and taking up so much of their time and limiting their freedom with such nonsense. If we boil all of the elements of parenting together, the big difference between older parents and younger ones is resentment. Younger parents love their children from beginning to end, and they probably love their child as much as any older parent can or will, or it’s so relative to the person that it’s often tough to suggest that one is better than the other. The younger parent still has an almost incurable itch to do things, see things, hang out with their friends, and pursue their career to its fullest extent, and they can perceive that child as inhibiting them from enjoying their younger years as much as they could. If I had a child as a young adult, my guess is that resentment would’ve influenced my relationship with them. How much of an influence would it have had? Impossible to know, but I still had a lot of youth to get out before I got old. Having a child as an older man was perfect for me, because I already had most of that out of my system by the time he arrived. So, my advice is to get old before you have a child, and if that’s not possible, get old mentally and spiritually. 

It’s Not about You Anymore

This fourth rule of parenting is more of a mindset than anything else. Your life’s not over of course, but if you’re going to try to be a decent parent, you should at least concede that it’s not all about you anymore. “It was never about me,” a parent said. “My parents never paid attention to me, my whole life, and I turned out just fine.” The very idea that you would say such a thing tells me that even if your parents didn’t pay attention to you someone else did. Someone felt so sorry for you that they filled the gap. They showered you with sympathy, because your parents didn’t pay enough attention to you, and you now want us to feed your sympathy fix? We’re talking about devoting attention to your kids, and you want us to pay more attention to you? My first response to someone who offers me such a figure eight is, ‘So, due to the fact that your parents did nothing for you, you’re going to compound that error by doing nothing for your kids?’ Before I say that, however, I realize that as confused as I am by such a reply, I’m probably not half as confused as the person who gives it. If it’s possible, I suggest we try to stop the narcissism and realize that in the grand scheme of your life, it’s not about you anymore.

Do no harm

“My actions aren’t harming the kids,” one parent said. I’m going to make an outrageous, bold, and opinion-based (as opposed to fact-based) statement that just about everything we do affects our children. They might not be paying attention to us, and they might not react to what we do, but some of the whims we have to be something other than a good parent have a collateral damage effect that might not be apparent on day one or week one, but like those old dot-matrix selfies we used to make of ourselves in the 70’s, the tiny, insignificant things we do, could end up forming a relatively dysfunctional child over time.

Read, Listen to, and Talk about Parenting

The very idea that you’ve read this far suggests that you’re probably a good parent. The idea that you’re open to considering another person’s ideas on parenting, no matter who they are, suggests that you’re interested in learning, developing, and eventually becoming a better parent today than you were yesterday. Being interested in others’ ideas suggests that you’re trying, and you’re probably already doing a relatively good job as a parent.

Become Wise

The difference between intelligence and wisdom is the that latter involves learning from experience. Our grades in school suggest that if we had any intelligence in our youth, we rarely applied it, and some of the moronic decisions we made after school suggests that our scores haven’t improved much. The eighth rule of parenting suggests that if we learn anything from our past, and we’re able to pass that along, we’re imparting wisdom. Parents are the beacon in their darkness. They’re as confused about the way the world works as we were at their age, so they ask us questions, and we answer, and they learn the ways of the world from us. Your kid is not an online message board for all of your ideas. Be careful and as thorough as possible with the ideas that you plant in their head. It’s almost impossible to be objective, and some say it’s impossible. We all have knowledge, ideas, and positions that are subjected to us and our upbringing. If it’s near-impossible-to-impossible, why try? If we don’t make some effort to teach them in the most objective manner we can, they might end up making all of the same mistakes we did.

Keep it Simple Stupid

The ninth rule of quality parenting leans on the eighth in that our kids view the world through our lens. They will learn from teachers, their friends, other family members, and they’ll learn various nuggets of information from too many people to list, but we are their primary influence. If we’re doing it right, every piece of knowledge they learn will pass through you, both positively and negatively. “Don’t underestimate them,” was the piece of advice a three-time parent told me when I became a first-timer. I valued that advice for a time, until I realized that a better course of action might be to underestimate them and let them surprise us. If we underestimate them, we keep it simple. This is not to suggest that we dumb it down for them, but that we exhibit some patience for the gradual time frames it takes a young human to learn. I’ve heard social commentators talk about the learning process that animals go through. “How long does it take a horse to learn how to walk after it falls out of the womb?” they ask. “How long does it take for a young chimp to learn what it needs to know? It takes the human being eighteen years, sometimes longer, to be able to competently exist in the adult world of their species.” I considered that a humorous profundity, initially, until I compared what those other species’ need to learn and what a young human needs to learn to compete among their peers. If we choose to underestimate them, they will surprise us with their knowledge, and when they drop those big questions on us it could be a hint that they’re ready. That’s when we leap to action. I prefaced my answer to one of these big questions about the reproduction process with a word of caution. “I’m going to launch, until you tell me to stop, and I want you to stop me when this becomes too much for you.” He did tell me to stop, and he added, with a pained expression, that he thought he probably waited too long. “Ok, when you’re ready for more, don’t go to your friends, or any other adult. You come to me.” Another element to keeping it simple is to try to avoid introducing our confusion into their thoughts. The confusion involves fact versus opinion and all of the variable truths we know that underly our definition of fact. We might think we’re helping them achieve some of the advanced intelligence it took us decades to achieve. Depending on their age, of course, they’re still trying to grapple with how one plus one equals two in math, and we’re trying to teach them our advanced knowledge on human interaction. There are all sorts of exceptions to the keep it simple rule, of course, as we need to test them and push them if we want to help them learn and advance, but if we allow them to dictate the pace of their learning, we might increase their retention level tenfold.

Lie to Your Kids

When one of my friends got pregnant, she was glowing internally and externally. One of the beautiful, wonderful things she whispered to her newborn was, “I will never lie to you.” The thing with beautiful and wonderful whispers is that they often turn out to be flawed. There’s nothing wrong with being honest with your children, but there’s honest and there’s brutally honest. There are some circumstances when the truth has diminishing returns. Example: Your daughter is a strong, independent woman who has strong ties to her flawed father, your ex-husband. She has become a relatively successful woman, and a well-rounded adult that other people enjoy being around, and although it grates on you, you know that 50% of her admirable qualities are due to her strong relationship with him. So, the next time she swerves into some sort of character assessment of your ex-, you’re going to drop the bomb on her. You think she finally deserves to know the truth about the man she reveres. If you view this in an objective manner, you’ll know that it does nothing for her to learn the truth, but you think she’s been in the dark for too long, and you think she’s old enough now to know the truth about him. Stop right there, before we go another further, does she love him, and will she love him forever, and does she need him, and will she need him forever? Will he make her so happy for the rest of her life that your testimony might actually do more harm than good? Are you going to drop this bomb on her for her own good, or yours? We all have competitive instincts in any given situation, and this is a situation in which our loved one does not know that we were the “good guy” all along, because we’ve been fudging the truth to her for so long for her benefit, and to promote the good relationship she had with him. These competitive instincts kick in when she constantly reminds you that she sees your messy, spiritually devastating divorce as an amicable one, and she’s done this for far too long in your estimation. She deserves to know the truth, you say to yourself, or do you want vindication, validation, and all of the terms you could loosely define as synonyms of narcissism? You tell her. You drop the bomb on her, and the bomb, and all of its shrapnel has a devastating effect on her. Now she won’t talk to him, and the other day she said something along the lines of “Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner? It feels like my whole life has been based on a lie.” And she now has a hole in her soul that’s as deep as yours that threatens to eventually mirror your wound, but you got all of the validation and vindication you wanted, as she now sees her dad as a father, and a bad guy. Congratulations, and my condolences. Some of the times the truth has diminishing returns. I write the latter, because I met a woman who would never disparage her ex-husband to her daughter, even though he wasn’t a good guy, and he was largely an uninvolved parent who was ambivalent to her existence for much of her maturation, and her daughter forgot almost all of that. The daughter apparently doesn’t remember examples of his negative attributes or characteristics, and her mother would never do anything to spark those memories. The mother considers her daughter’s uninformed relationship with her father as beneficial to the daughter, even when, EVEN WHEN, the daughter’s faulty memory has proven falsely detrimental to the mother. The daughter will also never have an epiphany on subject, and the mother has vowed to never remind her. “I think I’m going to nominate you for parent of the year,” I told this mother. “I know I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put up with it. Especially when she ignorantly claims you were the one at fault. I would eventually break after one of her ignorant little comments, and I think there might be some infinitesimal nugget below 100% that wouldn’t eventually break. I don’t know how you do it.” She said something about doing it for her daughter, even though the daughter won’t speak to her, has rejected her mom almost completely, and she shows no signs of ever reversing her stance.

Bore Them with Consistent, Quality Parenting

“Parenting is one of the most difficult jobs in the world,” people will tell you.

“Really?” I say now, ten years in. “I really enjoy it.” There are times when it’s frustrating, confusing, and time-consuming, but I really like being a dad. I enjoy spending time with him. I like being there for him, and I love letting him know that I’m one of the few people he’ll ever meet who genuinely and comprehensively cares about what happens to him without conditions. He might take all that for granted now, but I have firsthand knowledge that taking a parent for granted is one of the best backhanded compliments he can ever give me. He knows I’ll always be on the sidelines, figuratively and literally, cheering him on. He knows I’ll always be there for him no matter what, and right now that bores him so much that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

If you are a first-time parent, and you’ve heard that it’s the most rewarding job in the world, it’s not. It’s not, if you’re seeking immediate rewards. That kid will probably avoid rewarding you with any forms of gratitude, compliments, or outward displays of love. And if you ever complain about that, someone will probably say something that is impossible to define like, “Parenting is its own reward.” I still don’t know what that means, but it might have something to do with the idea that you’ll always be there for them, as the consistent beacon in a world of confusing darkness, and you’ll always be “so you that I can’t imagine you doing what you said you’ve done.” If you do it right you’ll be so boring that you might become the one thing, the only thing, they can count on life.

Platypus People Need to Watch TV

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When my best friend’s mother pushed her husband down the stairs that wasn’t the only strange event I saw over the course of the years I spent in their household, but it was the exclamation point I needed to develop a new species to describe them. I called them Platypus People. They weren’t just weird, strange, and just plain different people. To my mind, they defied scientific categorization in the same manner the duck-billed, amphibious Australian mammal does. They were a housefire of strange, and I was the fireman, running into what everyone else fled. Yet, as with any veteran fireman who has run into so many fires that they become commonplace, I didn’t see their aberrant behavior for what it was back then.

When Ellis Reddick entered the room wearing his wife’s tattered, old wig and a pair of vampire teeth, I didn’t understand why it was so important to him to terrify us. He would walk slow, real slow to punctuate the terror. As a likely result, my favorite horror movies involve slow, subtle psychological terror that allows the viewer to fill in the blanks. 

His daughter, someone who knew him as well as anyone, was terrified too. If he did this on occasion, say on Halloween or something, that might make it funny, but he did this to us almost every weekend. When we grew too old to be terrified, he turned the show on my brother. We knew my brother was terrified, because he didn’t know what was going on, and that made it funny somehow, sort of, and in a roundabout way. We knew Ellis better than my brother did, but for reasons endemic to Ellis’ character, we were still a little scared. I don’t know what was going on in his daughter’s mind, but I always wondered how close he was to hurting us all. We would laugh when this was directed at my brother, as I said, but there were moments between the giggles when my mouth would freeze in a worried smile. I would look over at his daughter, with this look on my face, and she would have the same concern on her otherwise laughing face. We would take everything we knew about Ellis Reddick and put those facts and concerns in a hypothetical puzzle, and we would wonder how much truth there was in the in the otherwise comical horror we were witnessing. The pièce de résistance occurred soon after his daughter and I found his hiding place for the wig and the vampire teeth, and we tried to use them to scare my brother. He was so disappointed that he was angry. He chastised both of us, because he knew, kids being kids, we would overdo it and ruin the joy he experienced terrifying  us every weekend. 

The Carnelias were another strange brew. I met low-lifes before the Carnelias, but I never knew anyone who whole-hogged it. The philosophy of most of the low-lifes I knew was equivalent to that of cryptozoologists and conspiracy theorists. They believe some of what they say, but they form most of their ideology around the idea that the other guy is wrong. They define their rightful place in the mainstream by exposing their peers to try to push them outside the fringe. The Carnelias didn’t waste their time with individuals, they were out to get the world. I also met angry, bitter, and resentful people before, but I never met anyone who enjoyed pain so much. Painful mistakes exposed the fraudulent nature, and they delighted in it like no people I’ve met before. The Germans invented the word schadenfreude to describe the act of enjoying another’s pain but the Carnelias personified it. Most of us know about the fuzzy line between comedy and tragedy, but there was never a fuzzy line for the Carnelias. They considered all tragedy comedic. I never saw them happier than when someone else was falling, temporarily confused, stupid, and in pain. It was their reason for living, or as the French would say, their joie de vivre. 

“Your family is just plain weird my friend,” I told Matt after he apologized for an incident I witnessed in his home the day before.

“Oh, and your dad is normal,” Matt said. He was defensive. Why wouldn’t he be? I was insulting his family, and in some ways him, because some part of him knew that the peculiarities of his family would one day become his. The struggle to avoid familial institutions was best captured by the Alice in Chains lyric, “All this time I swore I’d never be like my old man, but what the hey it’s time to face, exactly what I am.”

“At least my dad knows he’s weird,” I said, “and he’s been fighting it his whole life. Your family doesn’t even see it.”

It was a harsh condemnation, and it was true. Matt’s family institutionalized their peculiarities in an inclusive manner that Matt would never be able to see without comparative analysis. Institutionalized peculiarities are as difficult for an insider to see as an accent for a native speaker.

“Everyone has an accent down here,” my very young brother innocently commented when we took a trip to see extended family members in Tennessee.

“Son, down here, you’re the one with the accent,” our cousin said.

Everyone laughed uproariously, until I innocently added, “No, you still have the accent. Don’t you watch TV? Everyone talks like us.” I don’t know what I expected them to say, but I wanted pushback. I didn’t mean it as an insult. I sincerely wanted someone to say, “Oh, and you think you speak without an accent? Just because you were born and raised in a certain locale, where everyone sounds alike, doesn’t mean you don’t an accent?” I wanted one of them to explain to me how they could think we have an accent.

They didn’t say anything.

An internet rambler said, “Middle Americans always try to say they have no accent, but …” After that but, they provided some anecdotal evidence that proved otherwise. It’s a natural inclination of ours to counter a generalized statement with extremes. If I say I don’t have an accent, you naturally point out some words or sounds to suggest I do in some cases. That’s fine and all, but I don’t think the argument is do Middle Americans speak without accents, but do they have the least? Is their language the most neutral, the most homogenous, and perhaps the most boring? An article I found, some years back, stated that actors who strive to appear in American movies and on American TV shows are taught to speak as Middle Americans, from a section of the country that stretches across Eastern Nebraska, Iowa, and Western Illinois. Most producers and directors want as little accent as possible in their productions to try to achieve mass appeal, so this is the most neutral form of speech they’ve found.

“You go around saying that everyone else is weird, but I could probably come up with about 100 people who think you’re weird.” Again, I wouldn’t say I’m not weird, but between the two of us, I would say I’m less weird. If you’re from areas of the country, such as Boston, Fargo, and Nashville, you might think you don’t have an accent, because everyone you know and love speaks the same way. There’s a certain inclusivity that prevents comparative analysis. As the old analogy suggests, they can’t see the forest for the trees. My innocent and naïve question asked our cousins if Tennesseans truly fail to recognize that they’re the ones with the accent? If they do fail in this regard, have they ever watched TV? I had a similar, unspoken query for the weird families I spent so much time around in my youth regarding their peculiarities.

I spent so much time around the Finnegans, the Reddicks, and the Carnelias that I recognized their familial peculiarities. They were some weird people. I can write that now, because I have decades of comparative analysis to back up that statement. At the time, however, I grew so close to them that I absorbed their peculiarities and developed my own lack of objectivity, until that conversation with Matt. When he pushed back with, “Oh, and your dad is normal.” I probably should’ve introduced him to the elusive baseline.

How do we compare one individual to another to derive a relative definition of weird. How do we compare A to B? Who’s the weirder of the two, and who’s closer to normal. We might take our question out to a third party, who establishes themselves as an agreed upon, baseline level of normal or relatively normal, on a day-to-day basis. Every region of the United States has some accent in their speech, indigenous to the area and the most common nationality of the settlers of the area, and everyone has quirks, but what person, or group of people, have the fewest quirks in the group we know, so we can establish an agreed upon baseline? We might say that B is definitely closer to C’s definition of normal than A is, and the best third-party, baseline barometer we have is TV.

I could see how someone might adopt a certain way of thinking, if that’s the way their parents and everyone else they knew thought, but at some point, they should’ve developed their own baseline and said, “Our whole way of thinking just isn’t right. I’ve seen the truth, and this ain’t it.”

These three families were weird, and they often failed to note anything unusual about their thought process, such that it leads to a philosophy, or their way of life. They couldn’t see it for what it is, because they were too close, and because their thought patterns were so institutionalized in their families they were  ancestral. I saw their weird, strange, and just plain different behavior at the time, so often I compartmentalized it and incorporated their reality into who they were. The Finnegans just did things like that, because they were the Finnegans. It’s just what they did, same with Carnelias, Reddicks, and my family. We all did what we did, and our actions and philosophies were reinforced by cousins, uncles, aunts, and our grandparents. I threw our big, old world soup recipes into a pot and arrived at what I thought explained the world.

My broken home was just as dysfunctional as theirs, but we had a big asterisk in our favor: my dad. Though he never said such things, and he abhorred analysis of any form, it was obvious to those of us who knew him intimately that he knew he was something of an oddball. If we sat him down and asked him piercing psychological questions about his mental DNA, we wouldn’t find it, because he would tell us everything we wanted to say and what he wanted us to hear. His oddball philosophies and psychology could only be found when he thought no one else was looking, and in the effort he made to appear normal.  

I went to receive Holy Communion one time, and my dad dressed me down psychologically for appearing in that line without a coat on, “Everyone else had their coats on, why didn’t you put a coat on?” That’s but a snapshot that I found quite humorous.

What difference does that make?

“You stood out like an oddball,” he said.

That’s but a humorous snapshot that provides some insight into the daily travails of my dad trying to fit in and be normal. I laughed about it then, and I laugh about it now, but I find myself examining the apparel of my peers before going out now. “All this time I swore I’d never be like my old man, but what the hey it’s time to face, exactly what I am.”

How many of us are able to objectively examine our way of thinking only to realize that we’re a bit off the track? How many of us can examine the way we’ve thought our whole lives and realize that we have some weird, strange, or just plain different ideas about the world? Due to the fact that just plain different people fascinate me, I’ve known more than my share in an intimate manner, and I can tell you that it’s rare for anyone to have substantive objectivity on these ideas and philosophies, because they’re often familial institutions. It often takes a number of people, a number so overwhelming that it becomes impossible to deny, from people we respect, to realize our thoughts are just plain different. By the time I was old enough to examine my dad with some perspective, it was obvious so many people told him “That ain’t what people think” that he knew he was an oddball. 

I didn’t think my dad had perspective when I was growing up, but I knew that term just crushed him. I don’t know if so many people he loved and respected called him an oddball, but we were raised to believe it was one of the the worst things we could call someone else. Most of us say, “You’re such an oddball” with a cringy smile, but my dad said it with the meanest face he could find. He also said, “That ain’t the way,” whenever I approached him with a relatively original thought. “That ain’t what people think.” He developed an unwavering trust of experts, and he repeated their lines word for word. By doing so, he probably hoped to mirror their baseline normalcy.

Original thoughts were outside his gameplan. He didn’t trust them, and he didn’t want to have them. Again, this reaction might have resulted from the pain he experienced whenever he tried one out and others told him that was oddball thinking. My guess is he lost those battles so often that he feared there was no hope for him, but he didn’t want his sons to have to go through what he did. He never said why it was so important to him that we fit in, and be normal, but he might have thought if his sons could turn out relatively normal, perhaps he could enjoy a legacy of normalcy posthumously. It’s possible, even probable, that his fears of others considering his sons oddballs altered the trajectory of his lineage.

The Finnegans, the Carnelias or the Reddicks obviously never had such fears, for they not only continued their institutionalized, familiar philosophies, they propagated them as the way, the truth, and the light. 

I had so many stories of these families lost to history, because I didn’t consider them noteworthy at the time. “Do you remember the time when the Reddicks did this?” I asked my brother decades later. He was there for much of it, as the Reddicks babysat us on weekends, and he remembered the stories. He spent time around the Carnelias too, and we both forgot more than we remembered about these people, but we both criticized each other for accepting their ways as commonplace.    

I didn’t tell the stories of the Finnegans, the Carnelias or the Reddicks the way I do now, because I didn’t see them the way I do now. Decades helped me remove myself from the limited perspective of seeing it so often that it felt somewhat normal to do them.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” my friends would say the next day, following an eventful evening in which his family exhibited exaggerations of their weird, strange, and strange behavior.

“See what?” I would ask. They would explain what they meant. “Oh yeah, that’s fine. So … what are we going to do tonight?”

Kids accept, adapt, and absorb most realities they’re forced to endure, and as my brother and I learned, they can easily forget most drama and trauma. I don’t know how my friends, the children who were forced to accept these realities on a daily basis, turned out. We’ve only had brief get-togethers since, but my guess is they were unable to correct the weird, strange, and just plain different course their parents put them on. My guess is that they didn’t see the odd thought patterns, strange philosophies, and just plain different ways of viewing the world, because their parents didn’t see it when their parents taught it to them, until it became institutionalized in the family tree. I could see how children born in ancient eras, Biblical eras, or even the William McKinley-era might fall prey to believing they don’t have an accent, or act in institutionalized, familial ways, as most of them didn’t travel more than thirty minutes from their home, but we have easily-accessed modes of transportation now, mass communication, and TV and movies to provide a baseline normalcy and comparative analysis for our family’s ways of thinking. I understand that parents provide the greatest influence on a kid, and how extended family members might reinforce that influence, but how can you still try to maintain that your family is normal? Don’t you watch TV?