Tag: parents

Ellis Reddick

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{Disclaimer: The name Ellis Reddick is arbitrary. I do not know a person named Ellis Reddick, and any similarities to anyone named Ellis Reddick are purely coincidental. This non-fiction story about Ellis Reddick is based on a man of another name.}

“GET OUT!” Ellis Reddick screamed with unequivocal force. Prior to that outburst, we never knew when Ellis was kidding, and he was almost always kidding. He could yell at us with teeth showing, and it was all a big, weird, and unnerving joke. He was serious some of the times, but we never knew the difference. When he eventually made it clear that he was serious this time, I was absolutely terrified. I was the other kid, the kid he was forced to babysit that day, so we could chalk my fears up to seeing another kid’s parent lose it. Yet, his daughter, who presumably knew him better than most, was just as terrified as I was. 

Why did thoughts of Ellis Reddick horrify me throughout my youth? He didn’t have the barrel chest, the Popeye-sized forearms, or the booming voice my Uncle Frank had. As I would later learn in life, Ellis Reddick was probably 5’5” at most. He needed glasses, based on his girth, he looked about seven months pregnant, and he was cursed with a squeaky, nasally voice that should’ve cast fear in no adult or child. If they put out an open call for voice overs of cartoon characters, casting agents would’ve had my Uncle Frank do voices for lions. Ellis Reddick would’ve only probably only found work for the voices of mice, yet I found Ellis Reddick so horrific that I would plead with my mother to try to find some other babysitter for the weekend. I couldn’t articulate why I feared Ellis so much back then, so my mom didn’t listen, and her options were obviously so limited that she forced me into the Reddick home so often that when I now drive by their house I consider it the other place where I spent so much of my youth. 

What made Ellis Reddick so horrific was obviously not his stature, appearance, or voice. No, what made Ellis so scary to us was his unpredictability, and when you’re seven-years-old, you don’t know it until you meet someone like Ellis, but predictability is your greatest comfort. Most adults are so boring that seven-year-olds inadvertently create a mold for adults. We learn how to act and react around them to keep everyone happy, and everyone knows the rules of individual adults. Ellis was something different. He was foreign to our experience with most adults. We tried to prepare ourselves for his erratic behavior whenever we were around him, but he loved to break whatever mold we created for him, and that he loved engaging in erratic behavior, that shook up our preconceived notions of adults, but nothing he did prior could have prepared us for this.

“GET OUT of my car Julie!” he repeated.

We were idling near a curb on a residential road, about a half mile from their house, with the sound of the rattling little engine of his red Vega echoing Ellis’s ultimatum.

“I don’t want to get out,” Julie said in defiance.

“Then give me the thirty-five cents.”

“Make me,” she said to ward off this challenge.

‘Make me’ was a popular, ritualistic challenge in our seven-year-old world. It suggested that the challenger was willing to take this matter to the next level if necessary. It was a reflexive challenge seven-year-olds made, without knowing what the next level was. The scary element of ‘make me’ for the challenged was that the challenger knew what the next level was, and they weren’t afraid of it. The other import of the challenge was that the challenged does not want to see how the challenger defines the next level.

Whether Ellis was aware of the psychology of such a threat, or if he contemplated the horror of going to the next level with his daughter, is unknown, but he did decide to make her. He went after the thirty-five cents she found in his car. He went to her hands. He tried to pry them open. He began wrestling with her. She was laughing. I was laughing. We believed that these actions were another in a long line of hilarious, erratic reactions from the wacky and always unpredictable Ellis Reddick. He was always doing stuff like this. He was irrational in a non-adult manner. He was obnoxious in a manner we didn’t understand, and he kept us on edge trying to figure out what he would do next, and we loved it.

We didn’t always understand Ellis, or Ellis’ sense of humor, but our relationship was that he was the adult, and we were the kids. In a kid’s world, an adult is next-level funny, and we were always trying to prove that we were sophisticated enough, and smart enough, to “get” adult jokes in a manner our unsophisticated peers could not. Thus, when adults joke or act erratic, we “get it” and then we hold it over those who don’t with our laughter. When other kids looked at us with confused faces, we just laughed harder whether we understood the jokes or not. 

Ellis put a surprising amount of strength into this effort however. We didn’t know why, but it turned the whole dynamic of what we thought we knew about Ellis Reddick on its head. He was still struggling, still fighting, and for a moment, we laughed harder at his progressed, erratic behavior. This wasn’t a part of the usual non-adult, obnoxious Ellis Reddick however, but we thought he might be taking his obnoxious, unpredictability to a new level of hilarity, and Julie and I were always competing with one another with regard to who got it more.

When Julie pulled out of his tussle with the thirty-five cents she had a terrified look on her face. The terrified look affected my reaction, initially, but I decided I would be gaining greater stature if I continued laughing, until Julie could come around to the sophisticated extent of this particular joke. I didn’t want to be viewed as the naïve kid who didn’t “get it” when the joke was revealed.

He went in again. Julie’s attempt to avoid whatever tactics he dreamed up would’ve been admirable had she been able to avoid crying. Her crying, combined with his screaming, caused my smile to falter, as I began to realize that I might be witnessing an altercation between an adult and a child, and if it was, it was my first.

When she popped out of the bent position she had taken to protect the coins, her face was beat red. She was confused and scared.

“Get out of the car Julie!” he screamed.

If there had been a progression from this notion that Ellis always acted erratic to one that any observer could define as a true altercation, I must have missed it. I retraced the steps that led to this point in a hopeless effort to understand, but I missed it. This erratic behavior-turned-altercation began with a conspiratorial, competitive whisper that ticked me off.

“I just found thirty-five cents,” Julie had whispered to me with a sense of superiority about her.

“Where?” I asked.

“In the cushions of the car,” she whispered. 

In a seven-year-old world, as in any faction of our world, money is power. Having money is power, earning money is power, but finding money provides the finder a special degree of power that places them in a seat of superiority in a seven-year-old world. I began searching through the seat cushions around me in vain. I was angry. I thought about how if I would’ve been sitting in the front seat, instead of her, that would be my money now. She lorded this over me for another half a beat, and she added something more to it that I didn’t hear. I didn’t want to hear it. She was mocking me with her new found power.

“That’s mine,” Ellis responded. His voice always had the elements of whine to it. Yet, it had more whine to it here, more urgency, with an ingredient of desperate powerlessness added to it. His voice sounded so powerless that most observers who knew Ellis’s penchant for humor through erratic behavior might have mistaken it for comedy. “That’s my thirty-five cents, and I want it.”

“Finders keepers,” Julie said with a confident smile.

Every seven-year-old knows this truth too. If one loses something, and another finds it, too bad. You’re out baby!

Ellis lost control. What began as pre-pubescent whining from a grown man speaking to a child, evolved to outright screaming as he informed her:

“It’s my car Julie, and what you find in my car is mine!” When that didn’t work, he reminded her: “I paid for your McDonald’s, and if you don’t give me my thirty-five cents, then you can just walk home!”

“Mmm mmm,” she said. Her response didn’t have as much conviction as the previous ones had. As I reflect back on this, I think even the seven-year-old Julie sensed that this might spiral out of control. Julie was his daughter, and she probably knew him better than 99.9% of the population, but the one thing that she probably knew better than the other 99.9% of the population was that no one could know Ellis Reddick well enough to know how he would react. In a world of children versus adults, a child’s existence is dependent on figuring out how the adults in their world will react. Some kids’ parents are on the weaker side, and some were so strict that we repeated their rules to one another so often that we had them down by heart. The one thread running through the rules of other kids’ parents was predictability. There are some parents, and I only met one, who don’t follow any patterns. Some adults are so unpredictable that a kid could spend their whole lives trying to figure them out, and they will fail. Some adults are unknowable. Julie’s reaction told me that she recognized this idea with her dad long ago, but her stubborn refusal to acquiesce suggested that she thought it was probably too late to turn back now.

This was the point when Ellis issued his first “GET OUT!” ultimatum. Then, after approaching the next level of ‘making’ his daughter on two different occasions, he reached a peak of frustration that led him to issue her this final ultimatum. He reached across her. She flinched. He opened the door:

“I want my thirty-five cents,” he said. “Or, I want you out of my car.” 

He screamed various versions of this final ultimatum, with the engine idling and rattling a half mile from her house, until she finally exited.

Julie’s whole body shook with tears, as we pulled away from the curb. I saw Julie cry before. Seven-year-olds cry when they’re hurt, scared, and when something confused us. Crying is just how seven-year-olds deal with some matters, and Julie was no different. She never cried like this before, and I never saw anyone cry like this before. I was so confused that I almost cried.

I couldn’t understand why Ellis had yelled at her with such force over thirty-five cents, but that confusion took a back seat to my fascination with Julie and her tears. The image being laid out here, may lead some to believe that I was mocking her, or that I was enjoying my new ‘seat of superiority’ in lieu of the competitive whisper she gave me when she first found the money, but I wasn’t enjoying it. I was watching realization in her tears. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, as my young mind couldn’t grasp what I was seeing, but reflection on this scene has led me to believe my fascination with watching her cry was borne of seeing a young, idealistic person lose her innocence for the first time. I was seeing a young girl lose her naiveté, as the seeds of cynicism wormed their way into a young brain that didn’t know what cynicism was.

One of the primary roles of a parents is to be a beacon of sanity in a world that is so difficult for young children to understand. Seven-year-old kids don’t see this for what it is, and one of the greatest compliments a seven-year-old can relay to a parent is that they take it for granted they will always be there for them. What happens when a child learns that their parents will not always be there for them? What happens when that parent informs that child, through their actions, that not only will they not be there for them, but they will add to their confusion? I saw the latter standing on the sidewalk, screaming with tears, as we drove away. 

The tears she cast weren’t sad tears, or even bad girl tears that result from an act that requires correction. These were the convulsive tears of a young girl having her heart broken by the one man, in whom, she thought could invest unconditional and unqualified trust. To that point in my life, I never saw devastated, broken-hearted tears before, and I couldn’t stop watching them from the rear window as we drove away.

How does a child deal with a level of betrayal that affects the rest of their life? They forget. ‘How can anyone forget something like that?’ you might ask. I’ve had other friends involved in devastating, heart-breaking events incidents and accidents, and some of them managed to forget them. My first inclination has always been, “How? How could you possibly forget it?” I could see forgetting, or losing some of them minor details of such an event, but they say they don’t remember the situation at all. Are they lying, because they don’t want to talk about it? Some might be, but others sincerely state that they don’t remember the situation you’re describing. 

“Wouldn’t you?” is the obvious question. Of course, but my question is not about should they remember but how can they forget? I would think that such incidents might mark their life in such a profound manner that they’re forever altered. I would think they would be the subject of their nightmares, and daymares, for the rest of their life on earth. The answer is that they choose to forget.  

If the subject of an incident such as Julie’s, which might seem relatively minor in the grand scheme, but in a seven-year-old world was an absolute betrayal of trust in horrific proportions, wants to avoid living a life in which they trust no one, not even their immediate family members, they’ll  manage to forget what happened to them. If they want to live a happy life, they have to learn how to move passed the fact of life that some people die prematurely. Some people just leave the Earth when we need them most. They also have to deal with the fact that some of the survivors are horrible people, and some of those horrible people happen to be parents, their parents. What do seven-year-olds do when they’re having such trouble dealing with the word as-is, only to have death and destruction heaped on top of that? They move on, they adjust, and they forget. 

Sigmund Freud, and the Freudian acolytes who followed, suggested this is the polar opposite of how survivors should deal with such matters. They suggested that the road to quality mental health was paved with memories, both good and bad. They suggested that psychiatrists must pound that road into their patients’ heads, until the patient either finds some mechanism to deal with it, or works their way through it. They suggested that while we might choose to forget, the subconscious never does, and the ramifications of trying to forget would lead to some form of a debilitating breakdown. Modern psychologists find that this is not always true, and some of the times finding a way to forget is almost vital to greater mental health and overall happiness. This still doesn’t answer the question I have of how someone could forget. I know the answer involves something along the lines of “day-by-day”, and “you just do what you can to move on”, but that doesn’t register with me. After some mistakes, with other people, I now know to avoid asking questions do that they might find the merciful power of forgetfulness, but the primary reason I interrogated them was that I wanted to learn how to apply their special sauce to my life.

I didn’t know any of this when I was seven-years-old, of course, and I didn’t have any deep thoughts about what had just happened, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the despair I was witnessing either. I was witnessing the spectacle of seeing someone’s life come crashing down around them, a spectacle that everyone but a child tries to avoid seeing.

I should’ve gone with her, and I was invited to go with her, but I didn’t. I’m still not sure why I didn’t. She was my best friend. My desire to be the child who didn’t do anything wrong may have overrode whatever tenuous loyalties existed in our seven-year-old world. Maybe I just couldn’t deal with the shock and awe of the first true altercation I had witnessed between an adult and child. I witnessed challenges to parental authority before, and verbal altercations between children and their parents were nothing new to me, but the idea of an adult following through on a ‘make me’ next-level challenge with actual physical action was new to me.

I saw Julie cry before, but she wasn’t a crier. I made her cry once, but I was sticking up for myself when I did it. Much like her dad, Julie Reddick was a bully, and she could be relentless. She was the type of bully who wouldn’t stop, until you stopped her by making a bold statement. I decided, one day, that I had had enough. I introduced her to an unfair truth: Boys are stronger, boys are ruthless, and boys won’t allow you to pick on them forever. Boys are going to stand up for themselves, and when you push them to a limit they don’t care how much it hurts when they do.

Ellis was the bully in their home, but Julie was the bully of the block. She was willing to do anything she could think up, to whomever she wanted to do it to, and everyone feared her. Some kids beat you for a reason, and some do it just because they like it, but most of them will stop when a kid starts crying. “All right fine,” is something they say. “You big crybaby.” Crying didn’t stop Julie. She saw it as a sign of weakness. Julie also saw it as a sign of victory, and she didn’t just want a victory. She piled on. She would even laugh while she was doing it, and she encouraged us to laugh with her, but we stopped when she got so out of hand. We felt sorry for the kid she was beating on, and some of the times, we stopped it. The kids in her neighborhood just weren’t used to the level of violence Julie inflicted. They were terrified of her. I became the one kid she wouldn’t pick on, or beat up, because I set the precedent that I would defend myself. As she did with her victims, I laughed at her when I defended myself and she was crying and bloody, but the difference between Julie and me was I stopped when she conceded. When I made her cry, she sobbed with the physical pain I caused her, but that ended quick, and we became friends again soon after. The tears Julie cast the day Ellis Reddick drove away from her, were the tears of pain, confusion, and all-hope-is-lost tears that only a parent can cause a child.

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.

Tennis Shoe Thomas

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“Why do you insist on wearing tennis shoes?” Thomas asked me.

That was how Thomas greeted me at the door of his home. Prior to his greeting, his mother told him what my name was, but that was of secondary concern to this kid who couldn’t believe an eleven-year-old would wear tennis shoes. His mother chastised him quietly for being rude, but she did so in a way that appeared to quietly accepted him for who he was. He asked me that question as if he knew me for years, and he was bothered by my insistence on my foot apparel, but this was the first and only time we met. Thomas said tennis shoes with a level of disgust one might have for another who chooses to have leprosy. His question also laid a depth charge that would detonate throughout the course of this evening in the form of a theme: There was something I missed, some crucial element of being a pre-teen years that could hinder my preparation for the life beyond.

Thomas’ confidence was difficult to mirror, as we were on his home turf, and I was the visitor with all the insecurities of entering another’s home. I don’t think I was four steps in his home when he blindsided me with that scrutiny. I was vulnerable to what other kids thought as any other kid, and Thomas was an older kid to boot, which only increased my feelings of vulnerability thought, and he took full advantage. If I were better prepared for the question, I would’ve mentioned the fact that I didn’t pick my shoes out, but even if I did, I’d never given much consideration to the process of buying shoes. I was a kid, my dad bought my shirts, my shorts, and my shoes. I just wore them. My memory might be faulty, but I don’t remember focusing much of my attention on what I wore, and I don’t think anyone my age did either. There’s always the “cool factor” of course, and I knew my shoes weren’t cool, but the idea that tennis shoes were now considered a “tired” part of the kid ensemble never occurred to me.

It wasn’t the first time that my identity would be challenged, nor would it be the last, but this kid did a masterful job of placing me in a state of vulnerability. As soon as I formulated some kind of half-hearted answer to a question I had never been asked before, Thomas was onto something else. The theme of our conversation was that he had little time for me, because I was a kid, and even though he was only one year older, he obviously preferred to only speak to those he respected.

He was an older kid, and in the kid world older equals cooler, until we find out otherwise. Thus, when Thomas offered not so subtle hints that he had no respect for me I was not shocked. What did shock me was that his preferred audience, and the individual he turned to as a respected peer was my dad. What kid prefers to speak to adults? If my dad gave off vibes that he was cool, hip, or in any way attractive to young people seeking a mentor or a guide, I never saw evidence of it. Even as a kid, I knew my views of him were subjective, but no kid I met said anything along the lines of, “Your dad is actually kind of cool.”

I briefly considered that this might be Thomas’s idea of a devastating insult, “You’re so uncool, I’d rather talk to your father.” As their conversation played out, however, it became clear that Thomas’s goal was to impress the man. What were your dads’ questions, you might ask to get some insight into what prompted Thomas to direct his attention on someone other than me. He asked Thomas typical questions like, “How do you like school?” and “Do you have a girlfriend?” Thomas loved it. That told me more about Thomas than anything else that happened throughout the evening. My dad was just more his speed, and he asked Thomas questions that Thomas enjoyed answering. The typical response from a pre-teen to such questions, responses we learn from our cool contemporaries, is to be polite but dismissive, with a heavy dose of the latter.

Not only was this kid respectful, he appeared to prefer the company of my dad before knowing anything about him. He also appeared to vie for his approval. It was so out of the realm of my experience that I was fascinated, after I determined that this kid was in full control of his facilities. His answer to my dad’s typical question consisted of a verbal flowchart of the path he had planned for his adult life, built on various contingencies and variables that he could not foresee at that point. Thomas built himself to impress adults. The impression I had of Thomas was that his fashioned his life, his personal curriculum vitae, or resume, on getting cheeks pinched by aunts and hair mussed up by proud fathers. His views on eleven-year-olds “insisting,” on tennis shoes became clearer in that light. I realized that by asking that question, he hoped to impress upon the adults in the room that he was one of them in all ways but age, and I continued to think that, until he called me out on my hairdo.

“That bangs thang isn’t working for you anymore,” he said after his mother all but shoved him out of the room. There were no adults around when he said that. He was the first boy I recalled meeting who had a hairdo. As I said, he was one year older than me, and I wondered if this kid was emblematic of what I’d be facing in a year. He also had a girlfriend.

The girlfriend thang damaged the whole profile I had been building on him. I had been planning to tell all my friends about this kid, so we could laugh him, and they could join me in considering this kid a laughable aberration of the pre-teen world. The girlfriend thang would damage that presentation, I knew, for in the pre-teen world, having a girlfriend nullifies all other deficits of character, unless  that person cherishes her.

If a kid our age was lucky enough to have a girlfriend, he was to be dismissive of her. Among the fellas, she was to be a fait accompli. She was the “of course” that follows when we announce that we have a girlfriend. “Of course you do,” we want our friends to say, because you’re so cool that all of the ladies want to spend time talking to you. The average and typical pre-teen didn’t talk about the process, because the process usually involves asking her to be your girlfriend, sometimes pleading with her. The process involves talking about things she wants to talk about and doing whatever you have to do to get her to laugh and want to be around you more often. There’s little-to-nothing to be gained from describing the process, because saying you have a girlfriend was often more important, back then, than actually having one. A guy with a girlfriend also doesn’t talk about how he feels about her. He just carries his badge of honor among boys, knowing that no other fella is going to ask him for details. This Thomas kid not only told me that he had a girlfriend, but he said he was in love with her, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about how much he cherished her. He never actually said the word cherish, but he introduced me to the love letters he kept enshrined in a central location on a dressed, in his impeccably clean bedroom.

“Man, she must really have it bad for you,” I said, looking at the size of that stack of letters.

A dismissive “yeah” may have been called for at this point to keep it cool between the fellas, but this Thomas kid didn’t say anything of the sort. “They’re mostly letters from me expressing my love for her,” he said. “I keep copies. In those letters, I talk about my plans to marry her.” He added the latter with a big, broad smile that my aunt would’ve considered so cute and sweet that she might have pinched his cheek. “We’re in love,” he said. Had Thomas not set a proper foundation for that line, I might have searched for the hidden camera documenting my reactions. He said he thought about her all the time, and he maintained that gooney smile throughout. He talked about the fact that he badly wanted her to be his wife one day. He said that most of his letters detailed those long-term goals, and that some of the letters in that stack were from her, and they contained  positive responses to his plans. “And if that never happens,” he concluded, answering a question I never asked, “I’ll be just as happy with a kiss from her.” This was all said, I must reiterate, without any parents, or aunts, in the room. This was just two fellas sitting in a room talking. Thomas didn’t want to play with his Atari 2600, his Star Wars action figures, or “anything that involved the outdoors.” He didn’t enjoy playing. Thomas just wanted to talk about his girlfriend, and the plans he had of becoming a respectable and responsible adult. 

***

Thomas had a deeper voice that he reserved for conversations with adults, a voice I presumed that was an affectation he had developed to garner more respect from them.

“I prefer Thomas,” he said when I asked him if he went by Tom or Tommy. “My birth certificate says Thomas,” he said when I asked him what the fellas at school called him. “So, I prefer Thomas.”

Thomas was such a violation of everything I held dear that I toyed with the idea that I was missing out on something. I knew responsible kids who talked about getting good grades, eating right, and being respectful and nice, but Thomas’ violations of everything I held dear went deeper than the nerdiest nerd in my class. The theme of my evening with Thomas was that youth is nothing more than a way station to bigger and brighter things, and he was impatient for it to end, because he thought it sucked. 

I met tons of kids who thought being a kid sucked, but they hated it because being a kid meant that they were subjected to authority, going to school, eating vegetables, and the general idea that they didn’t have the freedom that adults enjoy. This kid hated the good stuff about being a kid. Without saying anything of the sort explicitly, he basically stated that he envied those with responsibilities. To illustrate his goal in life, he asked one of those open-ended questions we ask to compliment ourselves, “Why is everyone so surprised that I’m so mature?” In real life, most pre-teens ask why everyone considers them so cool, so attractive, and so athletic. We ask that to drop a depth charge in everyone’s brain to get them to think it’s such a burden in life to be the envy of the world. No one I knew placed the relative nature of their maturity on that mantle. 

If Thomas asked that of me now, I might say, “Maturity is overrated kid, enjoy your immaturity for as long as it lasts, because it doesn’t last long.”

This kid adored his parents so much that he envied them, he loved school and bragged about his grades. I didn’t see anything wrong with the latter, until he told me that he worked hard in school, because he wanted to prepare for his future. You say such things to an aunt, and you say it as if you’re reading from a Teleprompter. You repeat what your dad said when speaking to your grandmother, but you don’t say such things to another kid when there are no adults around. Once we were alone, and away from all parents, I half-expected this kid to let me in on the joke, ‘I just say things like that to keep my mom, the old bag, off my case.’ He didn’t say anything like that. He, in fact, upped the ante on such matters when we were alone, and we were supposed to be playing.

When I later learned that that the whole reason Thomas’ parents invited us over was that they wanted Thomas to be around kids his age, it clarified that whole evening for me. Thomas wasn’t technically an only child, but his siblings were so much older than he that he might as well have been. Though this was never discussed, and I wouldn’t have understood it if it was, Thomas was probably a whoops baby that older couples accidentally have. His parents were older, and my dad was older, but the difference between Thomas and I was that I had a ton of friends who taught me how to be a typical kid. Thomas obviously didn’t, and he liked his parents so much that he probably spent too much time around them. His parents rightly feared that their son didn’t know how to be a kid. Thomas obviously knew their intentions more than I did, because he rejected me, the idea that I was a kid, and his parents objective to teach him how to be more well-rounded. Taken in this backdrop, it would be obvious to anyone who wasn’t there that Thomas’s goal was more about his attempts to reject what his parents were trying to do than me. Except for that one little nugget that we’ve repeated so often throughout this article. Thomas rejected me and all of my typical kid notions in private, one-on-one, with no one else around. If we define character as what a person does when no one else is around, then Thomas’s rejection of me, the traditional norms of childhood, and his parents attempt to teach him how to be a kid was so thorough, complete, and personal that he tried to cajole me into rejecting it with him. 

I never saw Thomas after that evening, so I have no idea if one of the paths on his flowchart panned out, but we spent so much of that evening discussing how much Thomas had going on, and how much I’d missed out on by being such a kid that I can only guess that he spent a portion of his adult life trying to recapture what he missed out on. My guess is that the reason the two of us focused on how much I missed out on was a defense mechanism he developed to prevent those of us who enjoyed being a kid from focusing on how much he had missed out on. My guess, not knowing how Thomas’ life panned out, is that if one of the elements of his flowcharts panned out, and he addressed all of the variables that he couldn’t foresee as a kid, he began playing with his Atari 2600, or whatever system was popular at the time. He probably started watching cartoons, another element of childhood he vociferously rejected when it was just he and I, and he probably spent a majority of his adult years wearing nothing but tennis shoes. My guess is that at some point in his adult life he realized that being a mature, respected, and responsible adult isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If he landed what he deemed a dream job, he realized all the stress and drudgery of being an adult that people could count on. The dirty little secret that Thomas didn’t know at the time is that becoming a mature and responsible adult that people can count on is not a one-stop shopping event. We have to prove ourselves so often every day that I have to imagine it eventually lost the allure Thomas assigned it, and he wished he could go back to those days of youth when he didn’t have to be so accountable for his actions, so he did just that. He probably started out by filling his free time with retro activities, and he indulged in some relatively curious and embarrassing pursuits that ostensibly helped him get in touch with his inner-child. At some point in his life, Thomas pursued the irresponsible and immature activities with as much gusto as he did responsibility and maturity, and he that probably put some divorces on his docket, some noteworthy issues with the substances that permitted him to act inordinately silly and immature without consequences, and he probably had friends and family who couldn’t stand to be around him when he acted like that. For all of the little jabs, cringes and lectures he gave me about wanting to be a kid, my guess is he rejected all of the little jabs, cringes and lectures people gave him about wanting to relive a childhood he felt he missed out on. He likely wouldn’t see it this way of course, but at some point, I think the Thomas I knew learned how let his hair down, live the life he rejected as a kid, just to have a little fun in life, and from what I saw all those decades ago, that would’ve been quite an overhaul.