“Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting.”
– Frank Bascombe, Independence Day by Richard Ford
Cartter dropped his first F-bomb, and it really rolled, as they say, right off the tongue. After his initial venture into obscenity, he seized what was clearly a moment of permissiveness and tried out his new linguistic toy two or three more times, each with equal relish and adeptness. He’s a natural. From listening to his father.
My dropping “Calm the fuck down” into the fishbowl hat on game night was what occasioned his corruption. That’s calm the fuck down as in – these kids stomping around the living room making loud proclamations about the Clemson game and doing bad impersonations of the players and coaches need to calm the fuck down. Dominic and his girlfriend Kaelynn were over for dinner, and when Kaelynn drew my offensive entry, her one-word clue for the phrase was “kids.” I knew exactly what she meant when she cut her eyes toward where Cartter and Scotty had been standing when earlier I shooed them away to brush their teeth before urging the adults in the room to “Enjoy the next sixty seconds.”
Cartter badly wanted to draw that slip. Each time the other team pulled it from the hat, and the chance to blurt out the delicious words written on it fell to someone else, he moaned with envy and disappointment. Cursing is the height of titillation. When Scotty asks why I curse, and I suggest maybe I should stop, Cartter pleadingly says no. So driven was he on game night not to miss his chance at joining the ranks of the foul-mouthed that he finally started guessing wrongly about the slips his teammates pulled, brazenly letting the words spill out clear as a bell with his child’s voice. His commitment and excitement were such that the sound of his pronouncement was strangely not jarring. I wonder how long it will be until he looks me in the eye and says with evil intent, “Fuck you.”
Stretched
The weekend prior to Cartter’s first foray into vulgarity, I instructed him on how he might curse at his friends (I later retracted that particular piece of advice). He’d come home from the neighbor’s yard with his shirt collar stretched out so that it hung down to the middle of his chest. He’d been playing tackle football, and his shirt tail had been used to his tacklers’ advantage. It was his Braves shirt, and after a moment back inside with his mommy and daddy, the tears started to flow.
The ensuing discussion revolved around what constitutes a penalty in football, specifically what constitutes a holding penalty, which Cartter apparently called repeatedly, and which his tacklers’ father refused to grant, much to Cartter’s frustration. I explained the rule to Cartter and encouraged him not to be the player who whines and calls penalties but also not to be the player who allows himself to be abused.
A better way to have handled the situation, I told him, would have been to have hopped up off the ground after the offending tackle, dramatically removed the shirt, tossed it aside, and let his disdain be known in a forceful manner devoid of any pleading or whining, such as by hollering, “How you gonna pull me down by my shirt now?” and perhaps also adding, “Bitch!” and perhaps, “Fuck you.” My enactment of this behavior drew a grin and a small laugh, and the tears dried up. An hour later Cartter came home with claw marks on his torso, skin irritated from rolling in the grass, and the happy report that the neighbors had had a much tougher time getting him to the ground.
Scotty, much less preoccupied by the need to compete with Jonah and Judah next door, opted out of the football game and sat at the kitchen table drawing and listening to music with his mother while I prepped dinner. It was very satisfying to watch him and his brother pick their porkchops clean that night, nibbling all the little bits of meat and the good fat off the bone.
Cool Parents
We had our first swim meet of the short course season. Cartter seems to be in a little bit of a plateau, and Scotty is going into a period of big drops, his 50 times now being less than double his 25 times. During the week leading up to the meet, my 12-and-under group continued to practice our brief cheer after every practice. On a day when my prompting was met with muted enthusiasm, I joked in front of the kids with another coach. “Oh no,” I said. “They don’t like me anymore.”
“It’s not them you have to worry about,” my colleague Jessica said. “It’s their parents.”
“Oh no, no, no,” I said. “These kids have cool parents.” I surveyed the group in front of me. There were seventeen swimmers that day. “How many of you guys have cool parents?” I asked. All seventeen raised their hands.
Dislike
Cartter cried when I asked him if he’d still like me when he got older. We were sitting on the green couch in the den having a nice quiet hang, the kind I see him and Scotty having with their mother sometimes – honest talk, calm energy, the sort of moment I pine for when the boys are running around the house making racket. I posed the question to Cartter, and he looked away, tilting his head up and hardening his face, squinting and rocking ever so slightly. I thought he was trying to conjure some kind of joke at my expense, but instead his head fell into the crook of his arm, and the whining sob he’d fought to suppress burst through. “I don’t wanna not like you,” he said through tears, which made me fear that maybe he’d already started. “Then I’d be sad,” he said.
Not long after, I thought about the possibility of one of Cartter’s teammates developing a distaste for me. I’d never considered what that might be like for him, changing in the locker room next to some boy who thought I was an asshole and who let him know about it.
Drifting
Fear that our family time on Fridays is gone forever might have been overblown. Even though I’ve started coaching Friday afternoons again, both boys come to practice, and it ends early enough that we can still all go out to dinner if we want.
After the first Friday practice, on the drive over to Tattooed Moose near the pool, Cartter said that kids at school were celebrating September 11th, because teachers gave out candy. He said it was messed up, because a bunch of people died, but when I asked him and Scotty if they knew what actually happened, they were uncertain.
When I told them, they had a hard time comprehending at first why the hijackers would have killed themselves. Then, they were surprised to learn that there were other passengers on board the doomed flights. “Why?” Cartter wanted to know. Also, where did all the people come from? The hijackers, the innocent passengers, how did they end up there? Maybe the reason the school passes out candy on 9/11 is to appall the children’s parents into explaining that the world is full of unforeseeable tragedy.
After dinner, Google Maps routed me through the Navy Yard alongside the port on the Cooper River, a road that in all my life here, I’d never driven. Amid a heavy downpour, the ramp onto I26 at exit 218 was unsettlingly reminiscent of a recurring dream in which I’m driving up a ramp I’ve never been on in the north part of town, and I start drifting out of my body and into the sky while trying to tap into some other force that’s continuing to drive the car below.
Stung
These first couple months of school, we’ve taken advantage of free weekends while swim season is slow, and Danyelle and I have kept busy in the kitchen – the aforementioned porkchops, salmon and risotto, finely chopped chicken salad – we’ve eaten well. Sometimes, when everyone is feeling particularly sated, safe and cozy as could be, Cartter enjoys asking his mother how she knew she wanted to be a mom, just so he can hear her say that she always knew she wanted to take care of him.
Meanwhile, we’ve also endured a seemingly endless parade of ailments. The boys infected us with a head cold they brought home from school; in Sapphire Danyelle and I were stung by yellow jackets and both of us had allergic reactions; Sammy suffered an ear infection, the treatment of which caused her to go temporarily deaf; and Cartter developed a sinus infection and broke out in hives when he took amoxycillin for it. Just two days ago, Danyelle had a lumpectomy on her left breast. The sight of her lying on a hospital bed was strikingly pitiable, and I was surprised to find myself wanting to cry.
There’s a tendency to get lost amid the tumult of everyday life. A couple weeks ago, when the Braves clinched the NL East on a Sunday afternoon, I decided to call Dad. While I was on the phone in the den, Danyelle walked into the doorway above me, grinning like she had a secret I was supposed to guess. I announced her and her expression to Dad on the other end of the line, eager to move past the interruption. She kept grinning at me and said, “Happy Anniversary.” It was the end of the day. We’d both forgotten.
