The following was taken from a chapter in Larry Miller’s book, No Curmudgeon. Just Somewhat Daffy.
By Larry Miller
When I began this book, I knew that somewhere along the way, I would eventually get to this subject, a process-yes, it is a process-that writer Jane Hamilton calls “the rage of parenting.” Okay! So rage is a little bit of a severe term, but it is true, to some degree, for all those hearty people who have undergone the process.
Becoming a parent is not something that all men aspire to. Most often, it just happens. If you put together two human beings of different gender, something is bound to happen if one is not careful. Make that, if two are not careful.
When it happens, the usual reaction by the male is like: “Whoopee, hurray! I’m a father. Here, have a cigar.” That feeling might last all of three or four days. After that period of time, the exclamation becomes more like: “Can’t you get him to sleep, Agnes? It’s three in the morning, for heaven’s sake, and I have to go to work shortly.”
And that is just the beginning of a whole, new world of experiences and sentiments.
I think I put aside the need to address the issue of parenting for an obvious reason: I did not want to offend my kids. Oh, yeah, I know, they are no longer kids. They are grownups, adults with kids and grandkids of their own. But as far as I am concerned, they will always be my kids. With a little help from my wife, I might and ought to add. So, for the sake of this particular chapter in my life, they will be called my kids, especially since it won’t be my wife who will have to endure all the criticisms that will come my way if this book ever gets published.
Overall, I think I was a fair father, certainly not perfect, to which my kids would heartily and perhaps too quickly agree. Please. No applause. And to state a plain truth-well, it is plain to me-reality forces me to look back on my parenting career and come to the conclusion that often my father-duties fell upon my dear wife, who must have felt overburdened, at times, with the unexpected woes that accompany parenting. An apology to my wife, at this point in time, is insufficient, I realize, but still, I offer it, belated as it is.
The one good thing about approaching the subject of parenting is that I can stretch the word out so that it includes the two most precious benefits that come with the ordeal: grandparenting and great-grandparenting. Little did my wife, Carol, and I foresee the enormity of such blessings and what those blessings would mean to us.
I recognize that there are many of you who also have earned those titles and thus do not need an explanation of what they convey. But hopefully, there are some younger readers who could benefit from knowing, ahead of time, the wonders, as well as the responsibilities, of the honorifics that will be bestowed upon them. Most of us old-timers revel in hearing ourselves thus addressed, even if we feel unworthy. And I would not be the first to pull out a cell phone so that I could pull up pictures of my precious ones doing their precious things.
When I first considered writing on the subject of parenting, I felt that it would be easy. After all, I had been a child. I had gone through the process of growing up. And thus I felt that the words would come easily. But then, it dawned on me that not once during those years of growing up had I looked upon the ordeal from my parents’ point of view. Instead, I had taken the expected point of view: that of the beleaguered child. In that process of growing up, I learned early on that it was us against them.
So, when parenting was thrust upon me, I did not look at life in the old, comfortable way of living. And as the days and weeks and months and years passed, I found myself facing: temper tantrums, screams from a daughter who was terrified of spiders crawling up her bedroom wall, braces for misaligned teeth, cuts and bruises and subsequent emergency room visits, diapers being hand-washed (nope, we did not pay exorbitant prices for throwaways), teenage angst, sibling rivalry, and….well, the list goes on and on. So much so that I am hesitant about publicizing the woes, for fear of discouraging anyone from making the decision to get into the parenting business.
Oh, the decisions that have to be made! And the pain of some of those decisions that keep parents awake into the wee hours of the morning. That activity, decision making, most probably is the reason why television invented the Late Show, to be followed by the Late Late Show.
There was the option of taking advice from our parents, who somehow had survived the very battle that we were encountering and thus knew everything we needed to know. I mean, surely they must know everything, having gone through the same woes.
Yeah! Right!
So it was that Carol and I marched forward, learning along the way. But to tell you the truth, even from the point of view of a great-grandparent, I fail to recognize much of what there must have been there for us to learn. We must have learned something. After all, nowadays Carol and I sit and wait for our kids to come to us for the very advice that we were too quick to spurn. Diplomacy cautions me to keep my advice to myself, and not to be too quickly willing to advise them about the things they might be doing wrong. I can assure you that they are not too quick in accepting unasked-for help.
But just in case we were not inclined, in those days, to accept the advice of our progenitors, we did have a backup, for we had good ol’ Doctor Spock to lean on.
“Dr. Spock?” you ask. Well, if you asked, then it is entirely possible that you were not around for what was assumed to be the ultimate guide for good parenting back in the good ol’ days. Or perhaps you were part of the culture of the 60s and 70s, and 80s but refused to be criticized or guided by someone outside the family. And it is also quite possible that you were reluctant to accept advice from anyone, especially from those who attempted to come across as experts in the field of human relationships.
Bookstores have always been overflowing with self-help books. Everyone knows that one can always become an expert at something. There have been books that promise to perfect our skills at, say, painting a shed. Or building that shed. Or driving a golf ball straighter and farther. Or becoming a gourmet chef. Or learning how to listen.
In our time, the savior for would-be perfect parents was Dr. Benjamin Spock.
For the innocent, or unknowing, or uncaring, or the I-am-not-going-to-listen-to-you-anyway people, a bit of information is warranted. I have told at least two of my granddaughters, upon learning of their pregnancies: “That’s what you get for fooling around.” Of course, it is just my way of trying to be humorous. And I don’t believe any of you readers need that term explained to you. If you do, then maybe they have a self-help book for that experience. But let me caution you about that; the trial and error of that activity are much more fun if left to trial and error, much more fun than reading about it in a book. One does not need a graduate degree from Yale or Harvard to understand some of the ramifications of the term. However, although fooling around may be fun, the activity has its consequences, and those consequences are what bring on the need for proper parenting.
Anyway, Dr. Benjamin Spock was a well-educated man (graduate of Yale), who wrote a book titled, “Baby and Child Care.” For many of us poor innocents who chose to raise families with no idea what that was supposed to entail, his book was supposedly the best guide to the process. When choices loomed concerning parental matters, which was almost daily, thousands took Spock’s book off the shelf and arrogantly offered what the proper thing was. The good part about this method of parenting is that one could then chalk off a poor decision to Spock’s fallibility, thus removing the aspersion of guilt that might have been directed to the poor, innocent parent.
How common was the phrase “Well, Dr. Spock said…”? We, men mostly, took refuge on the golf course, or at the bowling alley, or out in the woodshop, whenever a difficult matter arose. Heck, there were times when we found it more comfortable to mow the lawn than to try to figure our way out of another mess. Besides, we figured that anything relating to the job of parenting was a woman’s matter. Let them sort it all out. After all, it wasn’t the man who got pregnant. And Adam was not the one who picked the apple from the tree.
Problems-and every couple has them-must have some acceptable solutions, else God would not have arranged for humankind to be thrust together in what is termed as families. I have to admit that I had no idea, not the foggiest, what was expected of me. Getting married was one thing, but becoming a parent? Now that is a different matter. Little did I think the matter through. I guess I might say that I just figured that I would plod along, as best as I could. And if problems arose, well….
Rules? There must be rules, mustn’t there? After all, the universe came along with its own rules. Schools have rules. Communities have rules. Thus the business of parenting has to have rules. Right?
I vividly recall a wonderful episode of “The Andy Griffith Show,” when Opie asked his father if there were, indeed, any rules that applied to their relationship. Andy thoughtfully reflected for a few seconds, then replied (forgive the paraphrasing): “No, there are no rules. Each parent raises his or her child as he or she thinks necessary.”
That was all there was to it. Said and done. End. Final.
Gulp! No rules? My all-time favorite father on my all-time favorite show, said so. In other words, I was on my own?
Well, I reasoned, then perhaps it would be better for me to think back to how my parents handled the difficult times, especially those times when I had a request from one of my kids.
I can’t count the number of times when I was told by my mother: “Go ask your father,” only to be instructed by my father to take up the matter with my mother. I call the process the ping-pong effect.
I suppose there are some people out there who do not abide by that procedure. Perhaps they have the Harry Truman-philosophy: The buck stops here. But from my point of view, there are very few autocrats raising children, although I will not go so far as to invite total democracy into the practice of parenting. No way! A little autocracy is helpful.
Anyway, eventually, we did break down and accepted a copy of Dr. Spock’s book. It was given to me by a male colleague at the school where we both taught. Apparently, he had grown tired of having a Yale man tell him what he was doing wrong, about how he was handling it. What that great “it” referred to is a matter of conjecture. I, for one, was grateful that there was at least one other male who admitted to suffering from similar unsettling times.
Dr. Spock was far ahead of his time. He had a different approach to parenting, for which he was accused, by many, of being too progressive. While we newly-arrived parents plodded along in total innocence as to what to do in case of skinned knees or hearing horrible swear words from the mouth of a toddler, or learning the difference between whooping cough and a common cold, good ol’ Dr. Spock sat on one of our bookshelves, all too ready to be consulted.
According to a lot of people, Dr. Spock was high on the principle of permissiveness. Apparently, he felt that parents worry too much about intervening and should simply back off unless it wound up being a matter of fist-cuffs between siblings, at which point it was suggested that intervention was necessary after all.
I think the only code of conduct we had in the household in which I grew up was what is called the Mosaic Code; in other words, if a law was in the Bible, then it was in the Miller household, whether we were Jewish or not. Thus we were to honor our father and mother, even when they were wrong. In all things, we were to honor them. I found the book in which the Mosaic Code was ensconced to be quite adaptable until I learned that barbecued ribs and bacon were off their menu.
Anyway, that code was the one I tried to carry over into the house that my wife and I managed, or mismanaged. If the children thought, for a moment, that they were going to prevail, they had another think coming. I had been brought up by conformists, and so it was quite natural that I wound up issuing the same commands that had been issued to me:
Wipe your feet; can’t you see that I just cleaned the floor? Eat everything off your plate before you leave the table, and I don’t want to hear anything about your hating peas. You sass me one more time and you’ll be sorry God gave you a mouth. This is not a democracy; I said it, and that’s it. You hit your sister one more time and you’ll be sitting in your room until judgment day.
Thus it was that Carol and I went into parenting, making up the rules as we plodded along. Carol and I went into parenting by…well, let us say that it was all an accident. Most of you, I assume, understand what that means. And being the neophytes that we were, we just made up the rules, or gave out the edicts, as time and conditions dictated.
It might be beneficial if the process did come along with an acceptable platform of rules. That it did not, had its downfalls, and still does. Instead, it is hit and miss, fortune and misfortune, trial and error. All parents make mistakes. And I am reasonably sure that our children will applaud my having said that. Which is okay. We get the last laugh; they all became parents, too.
Also, it must be acknowledged that Darwin is probably right, about survival of the fittest. Parenting is a matter of survival; it’s us against them, whoever the us and the them are. And if you haven’t figured out if you are the us or the them, you must not be a parent and thus do not need to read all which I am writing. If so, you have my permission to move along to the next chapter.
Anyway, please allow me to repeat myself. All parents make mistakes. In fact, some children are the very mistakes that I refer to. They arrived because of sudden passions and longings. They arrived because of mistakes in the calendar. They arrived because their religion dictates that a man has his prerogatives about that particular activity, which supposedly denies the right of his wife to have a headache.
The point is: they arrived. Let the battle begin.
And please don’t be offended, but it is a battle.
I recall the answer given to a teenage girl when she was trying to understand her place in the home. When given an order by her father, she responded by asking: “Why do I have to do that?” To which the father replied: “Because I said so.”
Not satisfied with the answer given, the daughter pursued the battle with a line that all fathers can expect to hear at some point(s) in their parental career:
“But why do I have to do it?”
“Because I said so. That’s why.”
“I still don’t understand why I have to.”
“Because I’m bigger than you.”
Case closed? Not really. Trust me. It would just take a different course, a different battleground. It would only be a matter of time when the girl would grow into the awful creature that we refer to as a teenager. And that shift in culture is, perhaps, the most exasperating phase of all, when hormones and peers and circumstances determine that the father needs to step back and look at that little girl from a new and different vantage point. It is a period of time that still perplexes me the most, which is why I choose to run away from any felt need to describe its difficulties and anxieties and turmoils.
It is one thing for a boy to have to suffer through the teenage years. It is quite another thing for a girl to have to do it. When girls arrive, healthey are perceived as cuddly. Then, just about the time when they have learned to crawl and then to creep and then to walk and run, their growing independence presents itself as dangerous. And we dads wake up one day and realize that we have lost them, at least to some degree.
School time, away from Dad, means more separation from those who had been, at times, their wardens. No longer is she going to assume the role previously assigned to her. No longer will she be totally passive in her reactions to what life has dictated. No more having to accept “I’m bigger than you.”
And if that phase isn’t disturbing enough to a father (as you can see, all of this philosophy involves a male parent and a female child), it is the next step that he will find most disquieting, for that is the stage when he will notice, at first from a distance, that he has lost his little girl to something far more dangerous and insidious. He will discover that he has lost his little girl to over-stimulated hormones sitting in the body of some young lad whom the now-young lady perceives as being “a gorgeous hunk.” Whether the father understands the process, or not, he has lost her. And if you will forgive me for using an old saying, but truth be told, he lost her the day that he and his wife escorted her into the hallways of education, where the first year was only the beginning of a process of weaning.
Most parents and children grow out of those moments and eventually settle in for the duration. It is all a part of parenting.
Getting back to those old sayings that lend themselves to the process of parenting. As previously noted above, there are lots of rules that present themselves as time goes on, rules that creep in on us. At first we don’t recognize them as rules; in the early stages, they merely seem like I-wish-you-would utterances, but later they become declarations of warfare. The battle heats up.
A person is likely to hear-and would like to reply:
“ If I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times….”
Is that a form of higher math?
Or, “Just you wait until your father gets home. Then you’ll know what’s what.”
Why ruin his day?
Or, once again: “You get yourself upstairs to your room. And you can forget about supper, young man.”
Wow! That was a close one. I hate liver.
“Close the door. Were you born in a barn?”
Did the cows get loose again?
Or, once again, again: “Where have you been all day? I’ve been looking high and low for you.”
I don’t think you’d really like to know.
That last one is a telling blow to the joining at the hips, for there probably has never breathed a child, especially a boy, who did not enjoy the precious hours spent away from his keepers. All it took, in my case, was a small, algae-filled pond with tadpoles in the spring and hordes of frogs in summer.
There, in the acreage nearby, were the saplings and tall grasses that provided us boys with the branches and reeds that we assembled and wove into crude abodes, which we called forts. They were our realms, where rule lay in the minds of those with rich imaginations. What they really gave us was seclusion, the chance to be away from parents, at least until it was time for lunch or supper.
So important is separation needed, at times, by kids, that my heart beats with joy at remembering the Christmas when all seven of my grandkids hurriedly opened the multitude of gifts strewed on the floor of the finished room in the basement, so that they could turn their attention to a huge empty cardboard box that I had stored away in an adjoining room in the basement. The box had only recently held a refrigerator, and I had gotten the huge carton from a friend who owned an appliance store. I knew that the box would get their attention. It would have gotten mine, at that stage in life.
Laughter soon poured out of that room, and with a few basic tools from my workbench, and some left-over wood planks and such, they were busy erecting and discussing and building. Okay, so their finished product would have been scorned by Frank Lloyd Wright, but who knows what his first buildings looked like? All seven of them were letting us parents and grandparents know something that almost all kids recognize, and that is that kids need a place of their own, if only for a few hours.
Their efforts produced what can only be construed as a cardboard hut, a place of refuge. What the scrap-wood amounted to is only a guess; somehow even those various pieces had significance, if only in the mind of, at least, one of them. All the effort, with the accompanying sounds of play, transported them to a wonderland. That last word, wonderland, was carefully chosen, for there truly was a sense of wonder about it all, not just with the final product, but also with the togetherness that was instilled in all of us
And what became of those builders? Those who toiled joyously with cardboard and wood? Where did their ambitions lead them?
Well, one of them is an assistant principal at the very high school where I was lucky enough to have taught. One is a teacher in Colorado. One is a graduate from Western Michigan University, and is now a very efficient and likeable bartender in a major hotel, in Denver. One is a licensed engineer, and works for a global mechanical firm. One is a graduate from a university here in Michigan, and is highly prized for handling finances that are far beyond my scope of understanding. One owns his own restaurant, in Tennessee. And one is a licensed physical therapist.
No. None of them became carpenters. None of them became builders of world structures. But what they did become was intelligent, loveable, caring and responsible human beings. And it is also true that their parents had a lot to do with that.
Maybe that is what parenting is really all about, the process of learning to share the world and its opportunities with our kids, and, finally, letting go.
Signed,
The Warden
