Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood

  It was unbearable. I could feel the lifeguard’s eyes on me. I wanted to get away from all this as fast as possible and settle down with a Dutch Baby at the Original Pancake House. I didn’t want to be trapped in this Victorian pissing drama a second longer. I grabbed my son.

  “We have to leave.”

  “NnnnnnnnnnnnnO!”

  “I’ll let you push every button on the elevator.”

  “Oat-kay!”

  Out of the pool he sprung. I quickly toweled him off, grabbed my daughter, and headed for the exit with my folks, who said nothing. On the way, I put on my best face and said to the lifeguard, “Thank you!”

  He said nothing back.

  Then my son said, “Deddy, I peed in da hoddub!”

  And I nudged him out the door.

  THE CREEK AND THE COFFEE CUP

  I was attempting to go out for a power walk. I couldn’t do any running or sprinting because I had a bad back, but if I listened to enough speed metal while power walking, I could convince myself that I was actually running and that I looked crazy athletic while doing it. The reality was that I looked like an eighty-year-old person doing laps at 6:00 A.M. around an empty shopping mall to help prevent leg clots. Sometimes I even walked in place in front of the TV. I hope no one ever videotaped me doing this.

  My wife was in the office on the computer. The kids were finished with lunch and now watching TV. They hadn’t started getting bored and kicking each other in the face just yet. There was an opening for me to go work out—a bare sliver of time for me to get my shit together and squeeze out the door without any loud objections. When you’re a single person, working out is a horrible thing. The idea of hauling your ass to a gym to labor on a treadmill for forty-five minutes is terrifying when you could be out drinking or trying to hook up with a blond paralegal. But when you’re married and have children, working out is ECSTASY. Running (or power walking) five miles is nothing when you have no children or grocery bags weighing you down. It’s like spending a week at Canyon Ranch. The kids themselves are inherently wonderful and lovely and made of honey rainbows and all that nonsense. But the work involved in feeding them and clothing them and making sure they don’t fingerbang the wall socket is what’s so draining.

  Also, children make you very fat. I always hoped that the time I spent every day installing car seats and carrying unruly little fuckers up to the bath would help burn off all the calories I consumed, but that was never the case. There were too many birthday party sheet cakes, too many bowls of uneaten Kraft Mac that I despised throwing away and had to eat myself, too many pieces of Halloween candy. I couldn’t resist any of it, so parenting had become a six-year stint grazing at a corporate off-site buffet: an endless stretch of mindless eating. I hated myself when I ate that much birthday cake, but it wasn’t my fault that Safeway sprinkled crystal meth into every corner piece. So, so good.

  Taking a power walk would probably burn off a whopping thirty calories, but at least it would make me feel like I was attempting to stem the tide. I got my shirt and shorts and socks and an iPod mini that I kept housed in an unwashed armband, a vile piece of nylon with sweat stains that were old enough to be carbon-dated—a garment that smelled so bad, it could wake smoke inhalation victims. This garment kept people away from me, which suited me just fine. Working out was my time to bask in the sanctuary of aloneness.

  But my daughter saw me in my workout clothes and immediately jumped off the couch in alarm. Kids can tell when you’re about to ditch them.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’m going for a walk.”

  “Can I come?”

  “This is a serious walk. I walk real fast. HARDCORE.”

  “I can walk fast.”

  “We’re gonna walk far. Like, five miles.”

  “So what? Who cares? It’s easy.”

  “You’ve never walked five miles before.”

  “Sure I have. It’s EASY.”

  Everything was easy to the girl. She was six now and eager to let everyone know that she could accomplish any task, even one she had never previously attempted, with minimal effort. Cartwheels? EASY. Jumping off a swing from eight feet in the air? EASY. Cold fusion? EASY-PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY. She had an impenetrable reality distortion field.

  “You sure you don’t wanna watch TV or something?” I asked her.

  “I wanna go with you.”

  “All right. You can come. But just know that I don’t stop. You gotta keep up. And I’m gonna listen to awesome music the whole time. NO TALKIN’ WHILE I’M A-ROCKIN’.”

  “It’s easy.”

  She put on her sneakers and grabbed the little clip-on radio my wife had bought for her at Target. It was programmed to the only station she liked and it allowed her to listen to all the Flo Rida she wanted without me ever, ever having to hear it. She was not allowed to have an iPod, even though she was now old enough to be hired by one of Apple’s Chinese subcontractors to make one herself. I strapped on my noxious armband and we walked outside together. I got into full power-walking-dipshit mode: ass tight, chest out, arms a-pumpin’. I built up a head of steam and now I was in full “pretend Olympic sprinter” mode.

  My daughter remained ten yards behind me, pausing every so often because her earbuds would fall out and she had to put them back in. It’s as if they designed earbuds specifically so that they fall out of your ears every third step. Eventually, she caught up to me.

  “Can you not go so fast?” she asked.

  I was pleased that she thought I was fast. I felt like I was leaving a trail of fire in my wake. “This is what I told you,” I said. “I go fast. You gotta keep up. Let’s go.”

  “Okay.”

  We got onto a park trail and walked at a brisk pace through the woods alongside a large creek. Every thirty seconds, I would turn my head to make sure the girl was still behind me, and that no one had grabbed her and forced her into slave labor. But she never fell too far behind. She kept chugging along, taking strides that were half the length of mine but somehow walking fast enough to not lose any ground. I began to warm to the idea of having her there. I thought, This is the beginning. We’ll do this every day and one day she’ll become an Olympic race walker even though she was gifted with no athletic genes of any sort. Power moseying will become the girl’s passion. She’ll never want to watch TV or play a video game again. She’s just gonna be all about the moseying. And we’ll forge an unbreakable bond and never fight again. We might join forces and become a pair of power walking spies, chasing down rogue agents with our relentless four-mile-per-hour pacing.

  As we walked, a sweaty old guy merged with us from one of the path’s many tributaries and walked at the exact same pace as us, which aggravated me to no end. The girl and I were enjoying a special power walking moment. Did this man know nothing of basic power walking etiquette? I deliberately sped up the pace to leave the geezer behind, and the girl kept up. I assumed that we had lost him for good.

  We passed by campgrounds and playgrounds and kids throwing rocks into the creek and she didn’t get distracted like a little puppy. She was focused and alert and kicking much ass. I saw her tiring down but that only made me want to walk faster, just to test her stamina level. Near the creek, the girl spotted an empty coffee mug sitting on a concrete ledge. She ran up to me and tugged at my shirt. I took out one earphone.

  “There was a coffee cup there!” she said.

  “Yeah, that was weird.”

  “Who do you think it belongs to?”

  “I dunno,” I said.

  “Well, it sure is weird.”

  “Yeah, it is. I like walking with you.”

  “I like walking with you too. Umm, Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think you could stop listening to your music?”

  “Sure.”

  I took out my headphones an
d put them in my pocket and we continued on, across big roads and past houses and churches and strange new intersections that the girl had never seen before, that I had never seen before. It was farther from home than I ever went on my own. I reveled in the joy of happening upon all these new lands as we walked. It was like we were progressing to the next level of a video game with every mile. There’s a broadsword behind that tree! Somehow we ended up walking much farther than I ever thought we would together. I thought we’d go five hundred feet and then the girl would ask to go home and have brownies. But on and on we went, and I was so happy to explore new terrain with the girl that I never made the sensible move of turning us around before she was too tired to make it back.

  “We gotta turn around,” I finally told her. “Can you make it home? Because I don’t have a phone and we can’t get Mom to pick us up.”

  “I can make it.”

  We turned around and started back home. By the time we were halfway back, my daughter was working up a sweat and visibly laboring with each step. And while I was proud of myself for pushing her to walk farther than she ever had, I now felt like an insane sports parent that deprives his kid of water and ends up watching her die of heatstroke. I stopped her.

  “Let’s rest for a second,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  We were still on the path, with a wide swath of grass to one side and the creek to the other. We stopped by the concrete ledge we had seen earlier, and the coffee cup was still resting on top of it.

  “That coffee cup is still there,” I said.

  “Why’s it still there?” the girl asked. “It’s weird. That cup is a stupid cup.”

  I walked up to the cup and grabbed it. It was empty and had old ring stains on the bottom. Whoever left it there wasn’t coming back for it. Beyond the ledge was an outcropping of rocks that gradually submerged down into the creek. I took the cup back to my daughter as she rested on the open park lawn.

  “What should we do with it?” I asked.

  “I dunno.”

  And for reasons still unknown to me, I was gripped with the sudden urge to smash the thing on the rocks below. I had all kinds of rationalizations for doing it pop up in my brain. The girl’s come so far and I don’t have any treat to give her or water to drink. She deserves to do something cool. It would bring us even closer together. And the mug is made of clay. Clay is natural! If we smash it on the rocks, it will become the rocks! We’ll be sending it back into nature. SMASHING SHIT IS FUN.

  “Come with me,” I said to her.

  “What are we doing?”

  “It’s a surprise. You see anyone else around?”

  She looked up and down the path. “No one’s coming.”

  “Good. Here, take this coffee cup and smash it on the rocks.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Really.”

  “But that’s littering. That’s bad for the earth.”

  “It’s not littering. It’s . . . free-range recycling. Give it a shot. It’ll be cool.”

  “Okay.”

  She took the cup and flung it down onto the rocks, where it smashed into a thousand pieces. Oh, what a fantastic sound it made. I felt like I had just hit a baseball five hundred feet. I desperately wished there were another two dozen coffee cups stacked around us so that we could smash them over and over again. There’s something immensely satisfying about destroying things. Children know this all too well. Eventually, you grow old and you learn to not break things. But you never lose the sense of elation that comes from breaking them. That lies dormant inside you until the day you decide to take your kid out for some petty vandalism.

  I was marveling at the shattered pottery scattered about the rocks when I heard footsteps behind us. I turned and saw the same old guy who had kept pace with us earlier run by. He had seen us throwing the coffee cup. He was staring at us and I looked away because I hated having his eyes on me. I grabbed the girl.

  “We gotta go.”

  “That was so cool!” she said.

  “I know, but now we gotta get out of here.”

  We started walking back home, with the old guy forty yards in front of us. I made certain to keep our distance so that we wouldn’t catch up and come face-to-face with him. But then all of us came to an intersection and the DON’T WALK sign was up and blinking. The old man stopped, and now we were in danger of catching up to him before the light turned. I slowed down to a crawl, as if I were walking in place. I thought about stopping forty yards from the light and milling around, but that would have felt even more conspicuous. So my daughter and I strolled to the light and I steadfastly avoided eye contact.

  “You know, I saw you throw that cup,” the old man said to me.

  Guhhhhhhhhh.

  I turned to him. “Oh?”

  “I’m on the Rock Creek Preservation Committee.”

  Are you fucking shitting me? “Oh.”

  “Yeah, we’re trying to keep garbage out of the creek, not put more garbage into it.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  “That’s just my opinion on the matter.”

  “I get it. I totally see where you’re coming from. I’m sorry.” The light still hadn’t changed and now I wanted to leap in front of an oncoming Metrobus.

  We stood there for ten more painful seconds until the WALK sign flashed and we could finally cross. The girl and I scampered over to the other side and turned left to go home. The old man kept on going straight, and I whispered a little thank-you to the heavens when he finally vanished out of sight. I pictured him going home and calling the police on me. It was imperative that my daughter and I get home as quickly as possible and hide in the basement so that law enforcement officials could never track us down.

  “What did that man say?” the girl asked me.

  “He said we shouldn’t litter.”

  “Did we litter?”

  “We, uh . . . Look, we’re not gonna do it again. That was just a one-time deal. Don’t go throwing stuff into rivers or else people will get mad. You understand?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  The next day, I put on all my workout clothes and the gross iPod armband. My daughter was splayed out on the couch watching TV, each of her limbs resting on a different cushion. I walked up to her.

  “I’m going for another walk,” I said. “You wanna come?”

  “Nah,” she said.

  “Really? But we had a great time last time.”

  “Nah. I don’t wanna.”

  “I won’t listen to music.”

  “Nah.”

  “We don’t have to walk as fast. Or as far.”

  “Nah.”

  “We could smash another coffee cup.”

  “Dad! You can’t litter!”

  “No, I suppose we can’t.”

  Sometimes you can’t get a kid out of the house until you walk out the door. So I put on my socks and my sneakers and made it clear to the girl that I was prepared to leave without her.

  “I’m putting on my socks.”

  No reply.

  “I’m putting on my sneakers now.”

  No reply.

  “I am now opening the door.”

  No reply.

  “I am now opening the screen door, which is the last barrier between myself and the outside.”

  No reply.

  The door slammed shut behind me and I found myself out for a walk, alone. I set out down the path toward the creek where the girl had walked for over an hour and engaged with me in petty misdemeanors. I was unencumbered, free to power walk as fast or as slow as I pleased. It didn’t feel anywhere near as liberating as it used to.

  ELECTRIC TOOTHBRUSH

  I bought my son an electric toothbrush because trying to brush his teeth manually had become a nightly exercise in fo
rcible mouth sodomy. Kids don’t understand why they have to put toothpaste on a brush and scrub their teeth for twenty agonizing seconds, and even if you tell them why—Your teeth will fall out! Girls will never kiss you!—they still don’t get it.

  I tried bribing my son. I tried reverse psychology by saying, “Whoa, hey, don’t go brushing those teeth! That would get you in big trouble, amigo.” I tried doing that thing they suggest in parenting books where you say to your kid, “Your teeth aren’t brushed!” This presents them with a problem to solve. My teeth are not brushed; therefore, I must brush them. The idea is that most children like solving problems rather than being told what to do. You can’t ask them to brush their teeth because that gives them a chance to say no. The phrasing must be precise, like the wording of a will.

  But the boy was no sap. He knew that he was three years old and had NO problems of any sort. No life-form on earth has it easier than a three-year-old child. You don’t have to go to school, you don’t have to have a job, and you’re perfectly happy having a train for a best friend. What did he need to solve a problem for? Problems were for bigger, dumber people. He could have given a shit about his unbrushed teeth.

  So every night, I had to grab his big head and jam the brush into his mouthhole and he cried and screamed and acted as if I were a Hanoi prison guard toying with his psyche. Fed up with this process, I bought an electric toothbrush and put all kinds of cool stickers on it, hoping he might come to enjoy brushing his teeth.

  “Look, it’s got a motor!” I said. “It’s a toy! You can blast all the bad plaque goblins with it!” You have to make everything sound fun to a child. Brushing your teeth is blasting plaque goblins. Broccoli soup is monster soup. A trip to the drugstore is a trip to the witch’s laboratory. It gets tiring.

  I put some toothpaste on the new toothbrush (we bought five different kinds of paste before finding one that suited his palate), turned it on, and handed it to him. He ran into my room with it, threw it on the ground so that the toothpaste could pick up random hairs and bits of lint, then pulled down his underwear and started grabbing his dick. I rinsed the brush off, put on more paste, and handed it back to him.