The Raging Elitist

Sitting at the dinner table listening to Scotty erupt into screams, I’m way beyond my last nerve. It should’ve been a good day – 70-degree weather in January, a stroll down to the old Pitt Street bridge stretching out into Charleston harbor, sitting on a park bench while the kids played amid centuries-old live oaks, meticulously prepared local shrimp bought from Wando Seafood on the creek; all these things can’t fit into a bad day, yet I’m sitting at the table waiting for the screaming to end, wanting to enjoy my perfect lowcountry shrimp, and I’m pissed.

I have lots of reasons to be angry. None of them are very good, though. Most of them revolve around perceived (and actual) slights from board members and employees I work with. Suffice it to say that I tend to get overinvested in things that are less important than I make them out to be in my head. Yes, the people bothering me are actual dickheads. This is true, but I should expect it by now. Instead, I’m angry about it, which makes me disappointed in myself, which makes me even angrier. What’s worse, I’ve been watching myself take it out on the boys all day, this frazzled man with little tolerance whose kids are afraid of him.

I noticed it in the morning, the quick fuse, the snappy tone. Damn, that was mean. Where’d that come from? The boys avoiding me around the house. The two of them slinking out of my peripheral vision and into the background on our walk, pretending to understand when I snapped again, shrinking their little world and its operations down to a size that wouldn’t butt up against my rage. Turning to Danyelle, a pause in my venting: “I feel like I’ve been yelling at them all day.” Danyelle eyeing me: Yeah, you have. I’ve been trying to help them stay away from you.

So I’m a moody bitch and kind of a miserable father. Great. Guess how that makes me feel? It’s a bad time for Scotty to be screaming. It’s a worse time for it to be because Cartter gave him a nosebleed. Soon, Cartter is hiding under a blanket on the couch pretending he isn’t struggling not to cry. I can’t believe I’m thinking of my dad’s old line, “You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose . . .” I can’t believe I’m explaining that Cartter can’t fish out his brother’s boogers, that he can’t stick his fingers in people’s holes, not their eyes, ears, noses, mouths, or buttholes. I can’t believe it, because Cartter is smarter than this.

Possessed by my foul mood, I think I’ve finally succeeded. Fast flowing after a booboo, but reluctant to signal emotional distress, Cartter’s stifled tears mean I’ve gotten through to him, that he’ll remember not to pick his brother’s nose in the future. Unfortunately, I’m not a prophet, and after Scotty bleeds through several tissues, the future comes early.

No, Cartter doesn’t breech Scotty’s nostril again, but he does sprint into his room at bedtime and start yelling about how he won, which causes his brother to cry and makes me very angry since Cartter promised me a mere 24 hours earlier never to do this very thing ever again. So here I am standing in Cartter’s room, Legos strewn all about the floor, in the future of a correction unlearned. In this moment I’m the recipient of my son’s lie and his disobedience, yet I still don’t feel justified throwing my hands in the air and letting go the words, “Why can’t you just be good?”

In his bed he’s three-years-old again, the voice that escapes him two octaves higher than normal, a sound that starts like a high-pitched train whistle before it collapses into sobs that rack my sternum and turn the floor into quicksand, “I’m trying to be good!” I’m sinking into the floor looking at his bed where he’s hiding under the covers, unable to stop himself from what he’s doing – crying pitifully in front of his father. My head drops, and I look around half expecting that someone is watching me. All my anger is gone, shame and sadness left in its place.

If he were three, crying in his bed, afraid, I would climb into the bed and hold him, tell him it’s ok until he calmed down. So that’s what I do now. Because it’s all I know how to do. I tell him I’m sorry. He is good. I get mad about other things, and it makes me act badly. It’s not his fault. I’m not mad at him. I tell him these things, and it lasts all of a minute, lying awkwardly on his stuffed animals, holding him above the blanket unable to see him. His room where he’s slept his entire life, where he’s been afraid of the dark and cried for help in the middle of the night; where he gnawed the finish off the side of his crib and then climbed out, Houdini-like to appear in the living room; his room where he smeared thick, white butt paste all over his face like some kind of deranged mime. Lying there with my boy, my baby in his room. One minute is all it lasts. His crying is less hysterical. Then it’s gone. Can he understand me? Cartter, my seven-year-old son, do you understand that I am an adult mishandling his emotions, laying them on you unfairly even now as I ask to be forgiven and tell you I love you? This is what I ask him, but I say just, “Do you understand?” It all flashes, the night terrors, the crib, the butt paste, holding him, comforting him. He’s composed again. I feel his mind processing. “Yeah,” he says, and he’s a seven-year-old, not a little baby, my dependent and my equal all at once, and all I can be is relieved and grateful.