2009-06

For Mothers’ Day, my husband surprised me with an old fashioned brunch at one of those fancy country club-like places you see in the movies: white linen tablecloths, fresh flowers, silver chafing dishes brimming with food, and plenty of champagne. At the end of the meal —frankly, not wanting it to end— I asked whether we could possibly do it again for Fathers’ Day? My husband thought that was a dandy idea, so we asked the maitre d’ (or whoever the spiffily dressed person at the front desk was) for a Fathers’ Day reservation. He looked at my husband rather confused and announced that they didn’t have anything planned for Fathers’ Day.

Don’t flush your toy train down the toilet
Don’t fill your mouth with rocks
Don’t throw red berries at passing cars
Don’t play in the cat litter box

Don’t lock your mother out of the house

“If you eat fish, you’ve gotta learn to catch fish. And if you catch fish, you’ve gotta learn to clean fish.”

That was my dad’s motto with all three of his little daughters. As soon as we were able to put wax worms on our own hooks, Dad made sure we helped clean the bluegills we caught.

Dad and I have a joke we have shared ever since I first started cleaning fish. Before us is a whole table full of pan fish, fresh from the lake. I scrape the fish scales with a scaler. Dad removes the backbones and skin with surgical precision. I finish by taking out the ribs, rinsing the fillets in cold water from the garden hose, and bagging them up for dinner.

Welcome to the generation of the “over the top” parents. Our generation is doing things for our kids that our parents could not have imagined. I think we are in the midst of a parenting craze that is going to soon be nicknamed, analyzed and made fun of for years to come. I’m going to go ahead and call it “Earl Woods Syndrome”. Who can forget that image of Tiger at age 2 on the Mike Douglas Show putting with Bob Hope? Somehow, that was imbedded in our minds as a role model for good parenting. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. We feel like we have to give our children every opportunity to achieve greatness at an age where most are still filling their diapers involuntarily. The big difference between most of the parents and me is that I’m not accomplished at anything. Because I lack the expertise to teach her any kind of activity, I’m a sucker for the “expert for hire”.

“Daddy, lock your doo-wer.” Cindy says as we pull out of my ex-wife’s driveway.

Cindy and her six-year-old twin, Miranda, are already in pajamas and buckled into second-hand car seats, their arms just long enough to flip the door locks. My nine-year-old son Charlie is locked and loaded into the back seat between his sisters.

I want to do it
she says at each step
of the recipe,
and I try to let her
even if it means eggs
broken on the counter,
too much salt,
too little flour.
 
She splays the dough

“Dad, why does the tooth fairy give money for teeth?” Like all five-year-olds, my son Christopher was nothing if not inquisitive.

I paused.  I’d been through the standard Santa Claus questions and could discuss rocket-powered sleighs and how Santa could ingest a few hundred million cookies without throwing up.  But I’d never given much thought to how the Tooth Fairy got things done.

When a father dies,
and he was loved,
all sighs become deep sobbing.
The earth no longer
bears his weight.
The universe starts throbbing.

Grief ripples through
each moment spent

Clothes make the man, hmm? Well, in our house, the woman makes the clothing donation decisions, even for the man. A few months back, I was wandering through the closet, searching for a few of my husband's most beloved (read: trashed) shirts that I had decided were going to go the way of the goldfish. (You know how you always suspected your Mom flushed little Goldie down the toilet when you were at school? Well, sometimes a particular shirt can drive a wife to similarly desperate measures: not the toilet, but definitely the Goodwill bag.)

After leaving school early to help on the family farm, Dad worked as a laborer for much of his life.