I enjoy posting blurbs and observations on Twitter and Facebook about my children and parenting. Mostly I post about how ill-equipped and overwhelmed I am as a parent and how babies for some reason don’t like the taste of wasabi. The blurbs are meant to be (hopefully) funny, silly, and/or insightful. Some of these observations will lean toward a dark, sarcastic take on the prison sentence that is parenthood. In a family-friendly way, of course.
Occasionally I receive comments that associate my musings with being anti-family, or somehow dissuading people from having kids. Those occasional comments are so absurd they always make me laugh. I wonder if my rant on now wanting to work out is contributing to the obesity epidemic. Maybe I’m also increasing cake sales. I never knew I had so much power.
Anti-family? This could not be further from the truth. I love being a parent and enjoy finding the humor in parenting. If you complain about how you spend your Saturdays taking your kid to birthday parties, that means you are taking your kids to birthday parties. If you complain about how hard it is to get your kid to read, it means you are trying to get your kids to read. If you are complaining about your kid not helping around the house, that means you have a fat, lazy kid. You joke about it. That’s how you deal. If parents don’t like being a parent, they don’t talk about being a parent. They are absent. And probably out having a great time somewhere. I have done extensive research and, almost universally, found that the people who view my blurbs and observations as “anti-family” are dicks. Failing and laughing at your own shortcomings are the hallmarks of a sane parent.
When you are handed your screaming newborn for the first time, you are simultaneously handed a license for gallows humor. The guy who invented the phrase “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” probably had a baby. And, for a moment, probably contemplated throwing the baby out.
-- “Anti-Family”, from Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan, p. 25-26
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Over the last few years, as friends and family members started having kids, I noticed a common trend among these parents: exaggeration. When they would tell stories about the new things their kids were doing, the descriptions almost always seemed unreal. If these stories are to be believed, then kids are walking, talking, and doing palpably adult things at an unbelievably early age.
In reality, most of these milestones are actually referring to not-so-major differences between the limited things their blobby, uncoordinated little guys could do before and after whatever it was that happened happened. These embellishments would drive me crazy. There was no way the stories were true. The kernel of truth buried deep within the narrative flourishes described an apparently small accomplishment and didn’t seem all that special...
Enter parenthood...
Now I’m seeing that there’s indeed a rapturous magnetism to seeing one’s child develop new abilities. And while crawling, walking, and first words are big things to mark and share, the more minute day-to-day stuff that becomes before and in between is pretty striking, precisely because these blobby little guys are so thoroughly uncoordinated. I mean, in the beginning, they suck -- I mean, literally, all they can do is suck. So when they first babble or straighten their legs to "stand" on you or sort of roll over a little bit, it becomes quite noteworthy. And one’s narration of it can get a bit, how should we say, liberal.
As my daughter, Lucy, has grown, you betcha my wife, Katherine, and I have been all over these little changes and improvements, which are so much more pronounced when you have the baseline of seeing your little one every day as a means of seeing these little developments. We decided to lean into the tall tale tendencies and milk it a bit.
Katherine’s favorite tagline, as she concludes spinning a web with a whale of a tale, is, “Our daughter’s pretty advanced,” as we tongue-in-cheek celebrate the elite excellent superiority of our daughter, who is essentially just a really cute lump at this point.
Personally, I’ve taken to adding personifications and metaphors to the stories that furnish Lucy with characteristics and nuance that she won’t be capable of for years. For example, I toted Lucy along on a red-eye flight to Boston. As I journeyed from terminal to baggage claim to shuttle to rental car counter to rental car to highway to lodging in the dark AM hours, I described Lucy’s awake-but-wanting-sleep face as that of “someone who is in a long line who wants to complain but knows that complaining won’t accomplish anything so they just keep their mouth shut.” Here’s what she actually looked like. Pretty humdrum. But the more colorful description is funnier!
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| Hello, my name is Lucy, and I am a professional business traveler with significant travel miles, hotel rewards points, and TSA pre-check status to circumvent long lines, all of which helps me run my Fortune 500 company. |
The long and short of it is that (1) I have a lot of sticks up my butt about a lot of things, and worrying about the factual accuracy of storytelling parents is silly, and (2) the important things about these parents’ stories is that they are there to see this stuff happening.
I’m currently reading Dad is Fat by comedian Jim Gaffigan (check out #DadDanReads on my Twitter for my recent reading!). At the top, I transcribed one of his vignette essays, this one about how parents comment on and narrate their parenthood and their kids’ lives. His slightly acerbic wit and matter-of-fact observations make the most important distinction here: some parents are present to their children and families while other aren’t. We may have different ways of coping; some may laugh and joke while others are more solemn and serious. We may have criticisms of how some parents handle things, the styles they use, the degree of embellishment their stories entail (I’m getting over it); each parent and child has to feel it out. Yet, the primarily important thing is that the parents are present, loving and caring for their kids with their best focus and effort, raising a family in good faith to build God’s Kingdom among us. And if that results in cheeky, sarcastic, or exaggerated stories about their kids, then so be it.
So, parents, tell me a story! Tell me how your child discovered gold in the backyard or developed a new, cutting-edge, game-changing app or newly articulated the finer and yet unknown points of string theory. I’ll listen. And I’ll try harder to simply delight in the fact that you’re there with them, loving them, like I’m trying to love my Katherine and Lucy.
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