by Drew Magary
And it’s not just books shitting on us. We hear it from our own parents, who go to pathological lengths to remind us that we hover too much, or that we let the kids watch too much TV, or that we’re letting our kids eat too much processed dogshit. We’re SOFT. That’s the stereotype. We’re soft parents, and our kids will grow up to be free-range terrorists because of it. We see the stereotype in movies and ads and TV shows and on the news, in study after study that says our kids are getting dumber and fatter and angrier. We’ve ruined everything. Collectively, all this empirical evidence of our shittiness is destroying our confidence, our ability to handle our kids with any measure of assuredness.
The funny thing is that I think the evidence is probably wrong. Fifty years ago, spanking and other forms of corporal punishment were far more widespread. Fathers were distant and uncommunicative. Everyone smoked in front of their kids. Seat belts were for pussies. And if parents had any kind of problem with their child, they didn’t have the Internet on hand to help find a solution, or at least a sympathetic ear. We have that now, and it makes us better. No parents I know suffer a kid’s shitty eating habits for long. They’re willing to look for help right away, and they can find it, and that matters. That counts for something. We’re not that bad, I swear. But the stereotype shrouds all of that.
We even hear the stereotype from fellow parents. We’re constantly judging and grading other parents, just to make sure that they aren’t any better than us. I’m as guilty as anyone. I see some lady hand her kid a Nintendo DS at the supermarket and I instantly downgrade that lady to Shitty Parent status. I feel pressure to live up to a parental ideal that no one probably has ever achieved. I feel pressure to raise a group of human beings that will help America kick the shit out of Finland and South Korea in the world math rankings. I feel pressure to shield my kids from the trillion pages of hentai donkey porn out there on the Internet. I feel pressure to make the insane amounts of money needed for a supposedly “middle-class” upbringing for the kids, an upbringing that includes a house and college tuition and health care and so many other expenses that you have to be a multimillionaire to afford it. PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE.
And the worst part is that none of those external forces can begin to match the pressure I bring to bear on myself. The fact that I had resorted to grabbing and spanking and willfully inflicting harm on my own child made me feel like a criminal. I felt like, if someone had videotaped the whole episode, I would have been thrown in jail forever. Maybe I deserved to be there. Maybe everyone else was good at keeping their shit together and I wasn’t. I alone was the Worst Dad on Earth—the kind of dad that gets entire memoirs written about him by his kids, about living with him and his horrible demons. Maybe I was an abuser. Even telling you this story now, I feel like I’m edging off the details because I’m terrified of admitting how hard I grabbed my daughter’s arm. As a matter of fact, I smacked her once. I can’t tell you where or why because it makes me feel ugly and I don’t want you reading it and demanding that my kids be taken from me. I don’t remember my dad ever smacking me. He may have yelled a few times, but nothing that dramatic. Why was I so much worse of a parent? Why didn’t my kid respect and fear me the way I respected and feared my old man? Why did my children always require one more minute of patience than I had? And why was I losing my shit at a five-year-old for acting like a five-year-old?
The girl was still screaming and driving me to the precipice of madness, and I searched around in my mind for some kind of creative solution. I definitely wanted to punish her. I couldn’t even recall what we were fighting about, which happens a lot when you fight with a child. The fight becomes its own reason for being. I wanted to prove my dominance over the household, to regain control. I wanted to WIN, which is foolish because there’s no prize for defeating a fucking five-year-old at something.
Then I thought, a shower. A cold shower. That’s humane, right? It doesn’t hurt the child. It just offers a dose of surprise refreshment. The more I mulled it over, the more I was convinced it was a good idea, which is NOT TRUE.
“Listen to me,” I said to the girl. “I need you to calm down and I need you to promise me you’ll never hit your brother again. Or else, you’re getting a cold shower.” Secretly, I think I wanted her to make me do it. Seemed like a worthy experiment.
“Faka.”
“All right, then.”
I grabbed her and brought her to the bathroom and undressed her. I turned on the shower as she tried to slip out of my grasp.
“No, Daddy! NONONONONO!” she said.
“You will have to learn.”
I put her in and when the cold water smashed against her body, the tone of her screaming changed from anger to sadness. I could hear the shift. I could feel it splitting me open, leaking all the poisonous anger out of me. Her skin went taut with cold and she tried desperately to get away from the water, as if it were attacking her. The fuck am I doing? I pulled her out and she clung to me, crying her eyes out. She was heartbroken.
“Sweetheart, I just wanted you to listen.”
And she looked me dead in the eye and shouted out, “BUT I LOVE YOU!”
That was all she needed to say to leave me utterly defeated. She loved me and I had just done something that made it seem like I didn’t love her back. The regret was instant and total. I loved her. I loved her more than anything in the world and I didn’t even know how we got to this point and now that we were here I felt so dumb, so unbelievably fucking dumb. I took a towel and I wrapped it around her and I wept on her shoulder as I dried her off. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I’m so sorry. I love you too. I just . . . I hate fighting. I don’t wanna fight with you. Am I a bad father? I feel like I’m doing a horrible job.”
I wanted her to say, “No.” I wanted one of those little movie moments where the child turns all precocious and offers words of wisdom to a failing parent. But the girl just ignored me instead. I dried her off and sent her back to her room to get dressed, which she did quietly. I came back downstairs and lay facedown on the floor, crying and pounding the carpet in frustration. My son came out of the playroom and walked up to me, like a dog walking up to sniff a dead body.
“Deddy, are woo oat-kay?”
“I’m okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for asking. I love you guys. I just wish I knew how to figure this out.”
He ran away and I scraped myself off the floor. Every time I have a fight with my kids, I feel like I have to start from scratch. I feel like I’ve tumbled back down the mountain, as if all the good effort I’ve put in before has gone to waste and I’ve fucked everything up permanently. All I want are streaks—little runs of good parenting days. I have a vision in my head of a never-ending streak—a time when I have a perfect relationship with my children that involves mutual respect and lots of outward affection. I don’t know if that’s a real thing or just some pipe dream that only adds to the pressure. Getting up off the floor, I felt like that mythical tipping point was even further away from me now. All I wanted was to get there, and I wasn’t gonna give up. It’s so easy to turn your child into a villain and let yourself hate your life, but you can’t. You can’t let misery win out because it will destroy everything.
I composed myself and swore I would never again throw gas on the fire to escalate the conflict. All I had to do was walk away from the girl and the fight would have been over before all this horrible shit happened, but I didn’t. My wife came through the door and I shuddered to tell her everything that had happened: The Voice, the arm grab, the spanking, the shower. I didn’t want her to know any of it. But I have a big mouth. Nothing stays inside this vault for very long.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“She hit him and I lost my shit,” I said.
“It’s all right.”
“I spanked her. I’m so fucking sorry. I spanked her and I tried giving her a cold shower to get her to stop being horrible and it
was all so stupid.”
“It’s all right. It’s all right. I’ve spanked her too.”
“You have?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “It does nothing.”
“Why doesn’t it do anything? I want it to WORK.”
“I know! I wish it would.”
“Why don’t they listen to us? What’s wrong with them? I did whatever my dad told me to. In fact, I did what he told me to do just now. And I’m thirty-five, for shit’s sake.”
“I dunno. Just don’t spank her again. It makes everything worse.”
“I made it so much worse, you have no idea.”
“It’s all right.”
My daughter came down the stairs and there was no more screaming or evil laughter. She had been replaced with an actual girl, the one I’d kill for. She didn’t seem to have any hard feelings about our power struggle. Kids affect a kind of multiple personality disorder—they become entirely different people for a bit and then have no recollection of that identity once the storm has passed.
“Can I get you something to eat?” I asked her.
“Shells and cheese,” she said.
At last, a sincere answer. That was all I ever wanted. Plain, mature sincerity. I hugged her and told her I loved her and she pushed me away with a laugh. A nice laugh.
“Dad, ew.”
She went to go draw a picture and I began climbing the mountain all over again, hoping to string together enough good days of parenting until I got to the point where there were no more bad days, until the day when I could stand proud in front of stern newscasters and judgmental foreigners and overbearing grandparents and anyone else who thought I sucked at this and tell them that I was a good father and have them believe it.
HODDUB
My parents had come down to visit us and were staying in a nearby hotel. The kids went absolutely batshit insane when my folks were in town because they got to visit the hotel, ride in the glass elevator, order room service (thirty dollars for a burger), and play in the indoor pool. My son, now three years old, thought my parents lived in this hotel, and every time we drove by it he demanded to see them.
“Dat Gammy and Papa’s hodel.”
“Actually, they live in Connecticut,” I said. “They only stay at that hotel when they visit us. Otherwise another person stays in their room.”
That pissed him off. “DAT GAMMY AND PAPA’S WOMB!”
“It’s not their room.”
“It ID they womb!”
Now my parents were finally in town and staying at the precious hotel, and I brought the two kids by because, as always, we needed something to do. I brought everything they needed for the indoor pool: suits, goggles, floaty vests, après-swim sarongs, the whole deal.
It was nine in the morning and the pool had just opened. There was a lifeguard there who couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. The pool had a hot tub attached to it, with a tile partition separating the hot tub from the main pool. You could leap over the partition into the big pool with relative ease.
My kids both wanted to start off in the hot tub, but there was a sign on the wall that said children under five weren’t permitted in the hot tub. I assume the thinking was that if a very small child got into the hot tub, a witch would burst through the door, add chopped carrots and onions to the water, and attempt to make a stew out of your little one. So my son wasn’t supposed to go in. But we had been to this pool before and the lifeguard the last time didn’t seem to give a shit. Some teenage lifeguards let you flagrantly disobey pool policy because they’re teenage lifeguards and they have more important things to do, like stare at their own abs. But others can be shockingly aggressive in enforcing every rule on the list, and the lifeguard on duty this day fell into this category. My son took one step down into the hot tub and he blew his whistle, which hardly seemed necessary because we were two feet away from him.
“He can’t go in there,” he said.
“Really?” I asked. That was the best counterargument I could muster.
“Yeah, no, he’s not allowed in there.”
So I had to calmly explain to my son that he wasn’t allowed in the hot tub. But you can’t just say NO to a kid. That pisses them off. You have to spin it. You have to make it sound like the fact that they’ve been barred from the hot tub is some kind of awesome development.
“Hey, you know what?” I said to him. “The lifeguard said you can go in the big kid pool!”
My son didn’t take the bait. He knew I was bullshitting him. “I WAND TO BO IN DA HODDUB.”
Meanwhile, my daughter wasn’t helping things because she was frolicking in the tub and rubbing his face in it. “I can go in the hot tub!” she yelled. “See? It’s easy! You just jump right in! Come on, jump!”
“He can’t do that,” I said. “Why don’t you help me out and go in the big kid pool?”
“That pool is cold.”
Another family came into the pool area while my son was crying, which was embarrassing because you want to keep the moments when your kids lose their shit private and not have everyone around come check it out. There was a girl who was roughly my daughter’s age, and when she jumped into the big pool, my daughter nearly broke her ankles following suit. Now she was in the big pool, swimming around with her head just above the water, like a Labrador in the ocean, and I thought I had it made. I could have kissed that other little girl, if kissing a little girl that is not your own didn’t result in a jail sentence.
I turned to my son and pointed at his sister. “See? She’s in the big pool now. Let’s go!”
He stood his ground. When my son says no, it’s like he’s winding up to throw a baseball at your head. “NnnnnnnnnnnnnO!”
He walked over to the hot tub and sat down on the first step. By then, I was so eager to end the standoff that I turned to the lifeguard and was like, “That’s okay, right?” After all, it was just one step. Witches don’t come flying in until full submersion, right? The lifeguard was down with it. I breathed easy.
Then the boy took another step down. Now he was up to his knees in the water. I turned to the lifeguard for approval and he shook his head. One step was okay. Two steps? PRISON. I gently told my son that he had to scoot back up one step.
“NnnnnnnnnnnnnO!”
“Just go up one step and we’ll be okay.”
“Nnnnnnn—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—nnnnnO!”
“Why don’t we forget the hot tub and get pancakes?”
“No. I wand hoddub.”
Somehow I always ended up in these kind of situations when parenting. Don’t take two steps into the hot tub. Please only eat half that banana. You can watch TV for twelve more minutes but not thirteen. Children are like very small terrorists: You cannot negotiate with them.
My son got up and began making quick little steps up and down. That was his “I have to pee” dance, and it never ceased to put me into panic mode. I became terrified that piss would come exploding out of all of his orifices if I didn’t get him to a nearby toilet. So I looked at him and asked him, out loud . . .
“Oh, do you have to pee?”
Never say this to a child out loud at a public pool. Ever. You have to be a fucking moron to announce to everyone that your child is about to urinate in the pool, and I apparently was dumb enough to qualify. Everyone heard me. The lifeguard heard me. The other family heard me. For all I know, the lifeguard was already contacting the police.
Then my mom chimed in, “Oh, you need to get him out of the hot tub, Drew.”
“I know, Mom.”
“He can’t just pee in there.”
“I KNOW!”
I begged my son to get out of the hot tub and he stood his ground. I considered picking him up and bringing him to the bathroom by force, but my son did not take kindly to forced bathroom
trips. If you picked him up when he didn’t want to be picked up, he became possessed by Satan and began thrashing about while speaking in ancient Aramaic. So with everyone at the pool staring daggers at me, I begged the boy to exit the hot tub.
“Please, man. You need to get out and go potty.”
“NnnnnnnnnnnnnO!”
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars.”
But it was too late. My son stopped his little quick steps, and I could see the yellow legs of urine streaming down his inner thigh. Everyone watching knew what had happened, so I had no choice. I picked up my son mid-piss and he predictably began trying to claw my face off. I wasn’t gonna be able to carry the demon child all the way to the pisser, so I set him down in a far corner of the pool area, on the tile floor, and let him finish there. As if no one would know what I was doing.
“You can’t just let him pee on the floor.”
“Shut up, Mom.”
Everyone was still staring while my son made a little puddle around himself. There was a stack of complimentary towels nearby and I grabbed three of them to soak up the piss, which surely violated hotel pool towel etiquette. Those things were not meant to be piss sponges. All the while, I avoided the lifeguard’s gaze.
The other family got out of the pool and fled, and that pissed me off. Those hypocrites, I thought. When you go into a public pool, you tacitly agree to the fact that you will be bathing in ten thousand gallons of chlorinated urine. I wouldn’t have sold out another parent like that. But this family left, trying to paint my boy as a common pool-pissing thug, which was bullshit.
I finished cleaning up the piss and my son demanded to go back in the hot tub. I didn’t want to stay there a second longer. We had already been branded with the scarlet P. I didn’t want to bring my son back into the hot tub with that lifeguard still there. But the boy was stubborn, and I was a sap, so back into the tub he went.