EYES OFF THE BALL

Last year we joined many of our friends in the Empty Nesters cohort. This graduation of sorts is invariably commented upon among parent-alum with some variant of “We got them through to adulthood! Hooray for Us!” It is notable that self-congratulations are warranted for achieving such an obscenely low standard of success – basically a ‘participaction’ prize. We play along, because even in this pass/fail grading scenario, it was never a sure thing. Parents take their eyes off the childcare ball at least daily, if not hourly. And things go sideways all the time. It is a High Five Moment when you get your kids over the societal finish line and “launched”.[1]

Despite the most keen-eyed parental supervision, kids fall through the cracks.[2] Sometimes literally. Once, I left C when she was an infant in the middle of a double a bed as I unpacked the car. She couldn’t roll over yet and was happily, and safely, gurgling away at the ceiling light. Between rounds to the car, I glance into the bedroom and C is gone…!!??!! I look everywhere one can look in a bedroom approximately 1 inch bigger than the bed crammed into it. Not on the bed, not in front of the bed, not under the bed. I am at once frantic, mystified and wondering if she might have developed invisibility as a superpower. I discover her crammed into an infant-sized crack between the bed and the wall, huge smile on her face. The 3-month-old equivalent of “Look what I can do!” Turns out she learned how to scoot on her back in the two-minute interval I had left her alone.

Outside of its perfect symbolism, this event was not exceptional. The girls would routinely learn new tricks right when I made the mistake of relying on their limitations. S never learned to walk. She went straight from stuck wherever you plunked her down on her butt, to RUNNING. I was at the park and concentrating on H (and/or chit chatting) when one of the other parents asked: “Is that your daughter?” I turn to see S, 100 meters away, rounding a corner at supernatural speed, before disappearing from view. I managed to catch her about five feet before she got out onto the street. Shit happens when you take your eyes off the child/ball as a parent.

And yet, take our eyes off the ball we did. Even when we knew better. I blame it in part on consumerism, specifically Toy R Us. We were abetted in our lackadaisical approach by aisles upon aisles of facilitating products. The best example of this was an activity center contraption called “The Excer-Saucer” - a rotating suspension seat surrounded by a hundred different whirligigs, gismos, thingmabobs and doohickies. We called in “The Neglect-a-Saucer”. We were totally addicted to it. We brought it everywhere, even though it filled our entire trunk. We even took it on a cottage vacation that required transporting it to an island by canoe. It was worth the effort for the approximately 30 seconds of child distraction it provided. Throw in some fishy crackers and you might get a whole minute! Pure genius.

As with any addiction, The Neglect-a-Saucer was followed by a progressive search for the next thing that could offer the same high of blissful child occupation. The jiggle chair, the door jumper, the bouncy castle, the trampoline.[3] The best of all was the minivan, which doubled as a mobile playground…until they discovered a black sharpie in the glove compartment. These time-buying devices, along with surveillance tools like the baby monitor with a ~5 km range, encouraged the development of questionable parenting habits. 

Plus, we were easy converts in the early days. We were still sloughing off our twenty-something selves, specifically an ingrained correlation between weekends and partying.[4] We were unwilling to prove all the unsolicited comments about how “Life as you know it is over” correct. We created a complex system of turns on “kid duty” and acquired an expansive collection of Disney DVDs. Still, it didn’t take much to upset this house of cards. Once, M and our friend RP were on late night kid duty at a cottage. RP had a new minivan which came with a built-in video entertainment system (a very exciting technological breakthrough at the time). RP’s kids were sleeping in a nearby cabin – not ten feet from the minivan. I was sleeping in another cabin about 100 feet away. Sometime late that night I hear screaming:

“DADDYYYYYYYYY! DAAAAAADDDY!...”

I get up. No Daddy(ies) in sight. I go check on RP’s kids. They are freaking out because there was a snake in the cabin. A black Rat Snake, some of which grow to be over 6 feet long (we’ve measured). So, yeah: DADDDYYYYY! is about right. I find M and RP in the minivan (again, 10 feet away) watching “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” (fill in that scene as you see fit). After doing the disappointed-spouse head shake, I returned to bed. Because: a) Not my night on duty, b) Not my kids and c) I don’t do snake-related parenting tasks.

Pre-parenting we had higher expectations for ourselves. There is a favourite story about our friend’s younger brother. We’ll call him Junior. Junior had been squirrelled away in the basement to watch the VHS video his parents had rented from Blockbuster (kids…Google those words) while the adults had dinner upstairs. Throughout the night, Junior kept interrupting the party, complaining that he didn’t like the movie.

Jr: “Can I stay up here with you guys?”

Parentals: “No, go watch your movie.”

Jr: “Do I have to?”

Parentals: “Yes. I rented it especially for you.”

Jr: “I don’t like it.”

Parentals: “Keep watching, I am sure it will get better.”

Back and forth it went, Junior dutifully returning to the basement to “try harder”. Later, they discovered that the movie was not in fact “Little Shop of Horrors” starring Steve Martin, but “Little Shop of Whores” starring ‘Blondi’ as “Sex Shop Customer” and “Nikki Knights” as “stripper” (as per IMDb).

We laughed at this story as only clueless teenagers with scornful perspectives on parenting can. We then proceeded to find ourselves doing not much better. Thankfully we didn’t need to contend with social media, but we had YouTube which was coopted by people intent on creating parental pitfalls. Franklin the Turtle was over dubbed as a Stoner. Cartoon videos like “Charlie the Unicorn” and his search for Candy Mountain seem okay…until he gets drugged and has his liver stolen. (To name two examples that were terrible for the kids, but I found highly amusing.) We also had the challenge of deciding just how many Kinder Egg Opener videos one can in good conscience expose your child to. I think it might be none.    

Of course, we had it easy with three girls who, unlike many of their boy counterparts, didn’t live life like an audition for the next “Jack Ass” movie. But, then again, I did have M in the mix. Once, at the Grand Canyon, a mother, clutching her two young sons in a vice grip, approached me, totally irate.

“Make him stop doing that! He’s setting a bad example!”, she screamed.

“Him” being M. And “that” being going a hundred feet beyond the “Do NOT go Beyond this Point” point and hanging off the very edge of a unstable looking outcrop. First of all, as if I could stop him. Second, there’s a reason I didn’t know what she was taking about - I was deliberately averting my eyes.[5] At the time, I wasn’t a parent yet. I looked at this fearful mom, and at her kids who were straining to literally and figuratively explore life on the cliff’s edge.

“Good luck with that”, I said.

If I could go back in time, I would respond instead with a kind nod, or maybe an overly familiar arm squeeze, and say:

“Believe it or not, in fifteen years, you will be doing the Empty Nester High Five.”

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[1] In truth, for the last few years of high school parental oversight is pretty much just performance art - basically reduced to tracking your kids on the Find My Phone App.

[2] Especially if you, like me, count napping in your children’s general vicinity as “supervision”.

[3] Actually this is more of a list of things that require EXTRA supervision. Huh. Also, it occurs to me now that these were the first steps on a clear trajectory to activities like bungee or base jumping. Like most acts of laziness, the hidden cost might hit later down the road.

[4] We arguably continued the TGIF life mantra until our children reached an age where they took it over. We can only admit now that the statute of limitations for poor parenting is past. Though, given events like Dads & Daughters camping (where according to the girls “All the dads were loud and acting weird”), I suspect they were onto us all along.

[5] This was also my go-to course of action if the kids undertook anything remotely risky. When they climbed trees, I couldn’t watch. I hid inside the house after telling them to “Come get me if anyone needs an ambulance”.