The Raging Elitist

Danyelle and I have reached the point where our boys’ allegiance is more to each other than it is to either of us. They’ve realized that if they form a united front, enforcement of the rules is more difficult. When it’s time to go into the back for bedtime, they both become inert. When it’s time to locate shoes and go out, they both become blind. When it’s time to stop yelling or rolling on top of each other, they both become deaf. Moving them against their will is like pulling a leashed dog who refuses to follow, except there’s two of them.

There are moments when playing the enemy is fun, like when the boys choose each other as teammates for game night and we go kids vs. parents (Losers go to kid jail!), but the vast majority of the time, I’d prefer to be on the same team, and my new role can be a bit of a letdown. Being antagonized by a five-year-old who relies on you to keep him alive is tiresome. Scotty practices his eye-rolling and scowling on me after school these days, and my previously funny antics are met with his patented blue-in-the-face demand that I “STOOOOOOOOP!” My fatigue with this behavior finally led me to pitifully ask my wife the other night, “Why is Scotty so mean? It’s like he hates me,” to which she calmly replied, “You just need to spend some special time with him.”

Well, it just so happened that this suggestion came on the brink of a de facto boys’ weekend with Danyelle out of the house Friday and Saturday evening. What better time for me to show what a valuable teammate I can be? Turns out that, as sometimes happens, Danyelle was right. Having the boys fully in my charge for a while was just the thing to cure my pouting. I came out the other side of the weekend feeling reassured about my position as male role model for my kids, and now, in the spirit of sharing that reassurance with others, and in the spirit of list-making, something that is apparently highly in demand judging from all the product-review-laden online parenting publications I’ve researched, I’ve made a list to help others turn regular time into “special time.” I’m calling it: Do As I Say – The 8 Keys To Quality Time with Your Two Young Boys.

1. Expect Horseplay

Let’s face it – with brothers aged five and seven, “keep your hands to yourself” is an untenable position. Maintaining it would require making it my number one priority in life, and I really don’t want to do that. As a result, my boys operate under the assumption that their bodies are to be shared with one another. I’ve grown somewhat comfortable with the living room becoming a sort of martial arts dojo where combatants use all kinds of take downs and leg holds to assert their dominance over one another, but the physical displays of affection between the little wrestlers disturb my manly sensibilities. Danyelle and I have been fighting for years to put an end to a practice the kids call “nibbling,” which is something like an extended nuzzle that never quite makes it all the way to a kiss. Perhaps most unsettling, though, is when the rough and the affectionate come together.

Standing on the pier at the south end of Waterfront Park downtown, clouds covering up the sun, and a cool wind coming in off the harbor, the boys are, naturally, exchanging body heat. It’s Friday after school, and they’re giddy at the start of the weekend, eyes glazed over with abundant joy that adults can only achieve through the use of drugs. They’re taking turns hoisting one another and jumping on each other’s backs, babbling loudly and giggling. It’s about the fourth time asking them to stop that I finally achieve the necessary volume to penetrate their noisy romp and get them to pay me heed. Horseplay is going to happen, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and it needs to be before they start buttfucking in public.

2. Be Your Own Judge

Generally, stopping the boys’ displays before they reach actual eroticism seems to be beneficial to the people around me. Women passersby in particular shine approving looks at Cartter and Scotty entangled with one another, apparently thinking of their behavior as “cute.” I have to admit that I enjoy these moments. My sense of parental importance puffs up in the presence of strangers who deem my offspring satisfactory. Sadly, this needy deference to the judgment of others cuts both ways.

Buttfucking debacle successfully averted, the boys gallivant on the playground equipment a short walk across the old ballfield while Danyelle and I sit and watch from a park bench (Danyelle is still with us at this point), about to be disturbed by two couples approaching from the opposite direction. One of their party is a man wearing a Baby Bjorn and toting an infant. He’s yelling to a wandering one-year-old, “Jace! Wanna go over here, Jace? Jace! Hey Jace!”

The “adult” members of Team Jace engage in a loud and effortful pretend doubles match with no rackets or balls, featuring a pretend forehand by Baby Bjorn man that whips his infant’s head from side to side and back again. They stroll into the middle of the small playground and yell to one another as if they were separated by a great distance. They climb onto the equipment, spin each other on the spinny thing, and, of course, shout Jace’s name a lot. Obviously, I think they’re super impressive.

After Scotty falls off the monkey bar platform, and Danyelle and I exhibit minimal response, the Jace Squad finally moves on. “You should have seen the looks I was getting,” Danyelle says. Apparently, our attention to potential booboos did not meet the lofty standards of the baby tossing Jace crew.

Removing my sunglasses and staring towards where Jace is sticking his face into an excited dog’s snout as if trying to give it a dental exam, I say, “I hope they come back over here, so I can mean mug them. Fucking assholes.”

3. Emphasize Cooperation Over Competition

Having grown up in the hypercompetitive world of year-round swimming, I’m very sensitive to the damage that can be wrought from placing too much importance on your kids’ athletic endeavors. I pride myself in not being one of those parents who seem to derive their sense of self-worth from their kid’s performance on the field of play. In short, I think I’m going to be a much better sports parent than my parents were, so, with the offensiveness of sharing public space with Jace behind me, on my own with the boys, I’m mildly confident that I can avoid emotional catastrophe at the noisy, cramped gym at Town Hall where Cartter has a Friday night basketball game. Everyone’s bellies are full of Melvin’s barbecue, and I’ve brilliantly supplied Scotty with a pen and sketch book to keep him occupied. I even remembered the water bottles.

Cartter plays in the rec department’s “fun-damental” league. There were a few practices to start the season, but now there are just weekly games. Volunteer dads coach the teams; there are no officials; travelling is rampant; and they don’t keep score, and by “they” I mean league officials, of which there are none. How sweet!

The surprise of the evening turns out to be Scotty’s complete attention to the game. Midway through the first half, he’s sprawled out on the hardwood in front of me with his sketch pad, turning urgently to face me after each made basket. My eyes dart nervously towards the group of parents from the opposing team before I say quietly to him, talking with my hands, “18!”

Running down the court towards us, Cartter is grinning and holding up two fingers to remind his brother that baskets are worth not just one, but two points. He and his friend Cam periodically run over to check in and make sure Scotty is adding right, letting the game proceed five on three without them. When the two of them sub out and move to the sideline, I tell Scotty, “Why don’t you go over there with them? Cartter and Cam will help you.” In fact, all Cartter’s teammates are ready to help Scotty with his task, which I believe is better handled away from the parent bleachers.

I’d see Cartter’s coach a couple days later. Walking past his house with Danyelle, I’d holler to him as he put his trash in the bin, my arms raised overhead in exaggerated exuberance, “Coach! Still undefeated, baby!”

Hustling out to the end of the driveway to stop us, hollering to his son to come say hello, he’d ask with the slightest tinge of hope, “So, is Scotty gonna keep score at all the rest of the games?”

4. Stay off the Screens

In my newfound adulthood, I worry that my mind and my children’s minds will be rotted by screens, that one day we’ll look up from our devices, bleary-eyed and confused, and realize that our entire lives have passed and that we haven’t learned anything that matters. I give myself a pass for writing on my laptop, emails, and certain news reading, and I do engage from time to time in the guilty pleasure of Clemson sports message boards, so yes, much of my life is spent looking at a screen, but I no longer watch TV. Ok, Clemson sports don’t count, and every once in a while, you have to watch a movie to take a break, but veg time in front of the food channel or HGTV or sports talk and binge watching shows on Netflix are out. Really, our TV is off pretty much all the time.

The boys spend far less time in front of screens than I do. At ages 5 and 7, their screen time is very easy to control, and our approach has been to basically not allow any. I believe the result is twofold: increased hyperactive insane time, and increased literacy. Both have got to be more beneficial to their emotional and cognitive development than turning into a vegetable in front of a screen, but I particularly enjoy the latter.

The house will often slip into an hour or more of peace and quiet with each boy’s face stuck in a book. Sometimes it comes on the heels of a timeout, but other times it happens completely on its own, and as the boys have gotten older, it is happening more and more.

They like comic books, Dog Man and Captain Underpants and Investigators, but recently, my mother sent me a book called Hyperbole and a Half, which is basically a graphic blog that a publisher inexplicably agreed to print and that very many people amazingly decided is worth their time. Although it’s marketed for adults, I prefer to read authors who are more talented than I am, so after a chapter, I deposited it on the counter assuming it would eventually disappear from my sight forever. Cartter felt differently. He saw the comic tome lying in purgatory and immediately squirreled it away to his room to discover what treasures lay inside.

At first, he just read the sections in the picture frames, but he quickly realized there were all sorts of interesting things happening in the chunky text. He babbled on and on about the stories over dinner. How could I not feel validated? My second grader is basically reading at a high school level.

Of course, the book does have some adult language, and when I catch Cartter practicing it in the living room with his brother, I have to explain to him that it’s ok he’s reading the book, but that doesn’t mean he can go around cursing. Still floating in a glossy-eyed, giggly state on the couch, staring in front of him towards nothing in particular following my gentle reproach, it’s with uncontrollable delight that the next word spills past his lips. It’s apparent to me that Cartter simply cannot believe his good fortune at living in a world where people say such hilarious things as “motherfuckin.”

5. Let Loose

Look, sometimes a little screen time is ok, especially when Mommy is having a girls’ night, and Clemson basketball is bringing its best team of the last 15 years into Cameron Indoor Stadium, home to the abhorrent “Cameron Crazies” and their beloved Duke Blue Devils. On such an occasion, you crack a couple light beers, postpone dinner with halftime chips and dip, and you flip on the TV and settle in with the kids for what promises to be a frustrating and painful experience.

Normally disinterested in Daddy’s sports-watching, there’s something about the Duke game that pulls the kids in. Last year when we went to see the Dukies fall to Clemson on the Tigers’ home court, Cartter lived and breathed every possession. This year, both he and Scotty are fully invested as we watch from our living room. As the tension mounts in the second half and the Coors Lights provide the slightest of buzzes, I enjoy joining in the kids’ chants of “D is for Dumb!” and “Duke is poop!” We quickly find evidence that certain combinations of chants produce the desired effect. Scotty discovers that if we all do different derogatory chants at the same time, they become even more powerful. I am easily persuaded.

Sure enough, Clemson takes the lead late in the game. With seven seconds left on the clock, the Tigers have just gone up by one, and Duke has to inbound and go the length of the court. I take my next to last sip of beer, saving the last for good luck. Duke’s guard gets the inbound pass, races down the court, flailing towards the lane, travelling, crashing into a defender and shoving him, and throws up a pathetic air ball as the clock ticks under a second. The Tigers have done it!

No, this is Cameron Indoor, where no Clemson team has won in 29 years. The whistle blows. A foul is called. I stand up from my spot on the couch and press my eyelids together hard, clenching my fists to better explode a single F bomb into the room. Two free throws. Game over. Duke wins. The kids look at me wide-eyed, mouths slightly agape, as if to ask what happens next.

“Sorry guys. I shouldn’t have cursed like that.”

“We don’t care.”

 6. Get Creative

It’s taken me half a lifetime to understand that creative output really is more satisfying to me than number crunching or trying to fit in with my doctor/lawyer/banker/real estate professional peers. I’ve been busy running away from my creative side since I got out of college, trying to craft an identity that would make sense to people, searching for my societal niche in teaching jobs, coaching jobs, and, in my most misguided attempt, business school. Turns out that no matter what I do, people’s respect remains elusive, and my existence remains unjustifiable. At 20, however much I enjoyed the tedium of reading books and writing papers, I thought I’d find an easier form of validation when I was an actual adult. At 39, as I watch my children spend the weekend devouring comics and writing their own stories, I think 20-year-old me was an idiot.

I really don’t have to do anything to entertain the boys on Saturday afternoon after Danyelle leaves. They’re busy for hours working on their “books.” They fold printer paper in half widthwise and staple the side to make a spine. Then they fill the pages with tales of unfair adults, terrorizing monsters, and, most importantly, heroic little boys.

Periodically, they bring me titles such as A Child’s Life; All About Me 1, 2, 3, and 4; and my personal favorites, Notebook of Doom: Hippo Horror; and Notebook of Doom Number Two: Mega Monster. The covers feature full color pictures and the kids’ bylines (Written by: Cartter. Illistrated by: Scotty). Inside, the stories unfold over the course of several hundred words with drawings at the top of each page that summarize the action. There are jarring plot twists: “He jumped off the plane and swung to a near by bridge and he also turned into a snake so he could hold on;” unspeakable acts of destruction: “Scotty was frightened and he told poilece that the monster must be found! Then they saw that billions of people lay ded on the ground;” and the narrators are acutely sensitive to their readers’ potential boredom: “but you don’t need to worry about that because we’re getting to the good part;” “Hey we’re getting to the good part so listen! That means you too!”

The kids emerge from their rooms every 30 minutes or so to update me on their progress, inviting me to check out their latest picture and read the accompanying text. They run into the den where I sit at my computer devoid of all silliness, their emotional state perched on the precipice between pride and trepidation: “Daddy! We finished Hippo Horror! Do you want to read it?” Yes, I do. A brief examination of a drawing, a compliment, a minute of reading aloud with a sincerity and enthusiasm befitting the author’s tone; this is all that’s required. Victorious, the boys run from the den back to their rooms to continue their work, monk-like in their quiet commitment.

“They were really on a roll the other day while I was gone,” Danyelle would later say after having discovered the additions to our home library. “What did you do?”

“Nothing. Really, almost nothing.”

7. Give Them Their Freedom

Clearly, our boys are capable of more than we often realize. If that weren’t the case, raising children would be a painstaking process of predictability and failure instead of a painstaking process of predictability and failure punctuated by frequent surprises. Oh look, Scotty can read! Wait, Cartter made breakfast? While we suffer from tunnel vision and worry about teaching them ABC, they’re busy learning everything else, and we’re largely unaware of it until boom, there it is right in our faces, like the kid who doesn’t say a word until he’s three and then is suddenly giving TED talks in the living room. Eventually, these sorts of things happen enough times that the kids start to earn a little more trust, and building trust seems like a pretty solid goal for a parent. I want my boys to enjoy as much of my trust as possible. Still, as Danyelle and I walk away from the playground in the woods where they’re busy working on an elaborate bamboo fort, we both stop after about 50 paces and think, “What are we doing?”

There’s another boy over there with his dad, and the two of them helped to drag bamboo shoots over to the build site and to massively upgrade the preexisting structure. After our moment of doubt, Danyelle doubles back to check in with the dad, a neighborhood acquaintance, and let him know the boys are good to come home on their own. Then, we proceed without them.

The park is a communally owned 20-acre space in the middle of the neighborhood. Completely wooded before Hugo, pine forest and cul-de-sacs now separate three big lawns cleared out by the storm. Groups of little kids roam free throughout all the time. They go to the playground and build forts. They climb trees. Girl and boy groups encounter one another and dispense with shyness in favor of boisterous turf wars. Our boys have enjoyed free rein in the section behind our house for years, but we’ve always accompanied them to the playground, which is a five-minute walk and not visible from our property.

Back at the house after abandoning them there for the first time ever, the conversation turns to a device we’ve recently been made aware of called a gizmo. It’s like an apple watch with severely limited capabilities, a wrist band that allows parents to track and call their children and children to ignore the messages they get from their parents. Danyelle is in favor. I worry that it’s like a collar, that the kids aren’t truly free if they’re forced to wear it. Danyelle launches into tales of severe injuries and sexual predators. I reminisce about riding my bike around Sullivan’s Island and swimming in the ocean as a kid without my parents’ supervision. Danyelle says the device will give her peace of mind. I say maybe it will just enable her worrying. “So what, you’re against the gizmo now?” she says.

“So what your pro tech now?” I retort.

90 minutes go by, and I set out to collect the kids and find them still dutifully attending to their fort’s construction. Of course, the neighbor dad wants to talk . . . and talk . . . and talk some more. By the time we get back to the house, Danyelle’s anxiety is flaring: “You didn’t have your phone. I was getting worried. What if they weren’t there or something had happened?”

All signs point to a gizmo in our near future.

8. Share Yourself with Them

As I write this, I can envision my son’s faces eagerly anticipating my reception of their books about hippos and mega monsters. It was just a few days ago, yet somehow it seems like an eternity. The more I write about my time with them, the more I’m aware of it slipping away, and the more I’m compelled to keep going.

I’ve often enjoyed the thought of Cartter and Scotty perusing this blog when they’re older. I imagine presenting it to them when they graduate high school, a gift to remind them how important they are to me and that I’ll always love them. If I were to continue documenting our lives together this way until then, I figure it would be a real achievement, something for them to be proud of. It seems appropriate to give them these stories as they’re crossing over into adulthood, and yet, after a day filled with deranged literary beasts, cursing mishaps, and intense juvenile chanting, the best idea I have for bedtime reading is the blog. “You guys want to read my stories for bedtime?” I say sitting with my laptop on the couch. Do they ever.

I read them a story about Scotty telling me he “got into a battle,” a story about Sammy going to the vet, a story about dropping them off on the first day of school, a story about a crying episode at the dinner table. I read to them the things I watched them do and the ways I felt, and they like it. They want me to keep going all night. Sitting in between them on the couch as their mouths gape and their eyes bulge out of their heads like they were cartoon characters, I gain a new appreciation for the phrase, “died laughing.” They’ll never be these little boy creatures again. Waiting to share this with them would be a mistake.

A Note on Lists

The stupid thing about lists in magazines is that most of them tell you what you should be doing, how you should be acting, as if their authors really knew what’s going on and weren’t just trying to sell you something. Lists belong perhaps least of all in parenting literature, because when it comes to a child’s rapidly developing mind, nobody, absolutely nobody knows what’s really going on, and there’s nothing you can “do” about it.

My weekend with the boys could have been a total disaster. They could’ve fought nonstop and gotten on my last nerve, or any number of much worse things could have happened. I’ve had bad weekends with the boys before. This was not one of them. Why was this weekend so good? I don’t know, but I’m convinced that it’s not because of anything I “did.” Larger happenings outside my awareness were afoot, and I got lucky.

I’m not saying that I’m unimportant. Au contraire, I’m the boys’ father, and that makes me really important, maybe even more important than all the list-makers who aren’t taking care of my kids. I’m saying that my importance is wasted if I’m asking what to do when what Cartter and Scotty really require is for me to just be with them and let them be with me. It’s like Danyelle said in response to my whining about Scotty’s abuse: “You just need to spend some special time with him.” All these words, all these mental gymnastics and list-making, when really it all boils down to the simple advice once offered by Sidney Deane: “Listen to the woman.”