Being sure

“Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a rocket,” said Big T,
“Stuck a finger up his butt, and called it Hershey’s chocolate!”

And after he said that, my 9-year-old burst out laughing. He’s just asked me if I wanted to hear a new song that his friend had taught him on the bus today, and I’d said “sure,” because, I felt, “sure.” After he told me, I wasn’t so sure.

I remember hearing similar rhymes at school, and yes, I remember them being around the 4th grade, so maybe it’s age appropriate. That’s not the nerve-racking part, not the thing that I’m up tonight thinking conflicted thoughts about. The part that makes me happy is that he still feels able to tell me stuff like that. And how I’m going to handle it in three, or five, or seven years. Or, more concerning, if I’m going to be given the opportunity.

Right now, we talk. We have talks two or three times a week at bedtime, our private time before his little brother joins us. It’s time that’s typically taken away from his reading time (he just finished Eragon, by Christopher Paolini, before we saw the movie last weekend, and now he’s in the middle of Eldest, the sequel and middle of the Inheritence trilogy.) Sometimes the talks are punctuated by the book sitting open, his eyes flitting over to it from time to time, anxious to get back to the story. But there’s a more important story that I’m trying to work on with him. One about growing up, and staying close, and trying to remain connected. I think about this today, as I talked with a friend about having long, important talks with your kids about what they're experiencing. The best parent, the very best parent, can get told they are the best through these conversations. It's what speaks to the underlying trust, and is a mark of certainty in the familial bond. It's a pretty special thing. It's what I'm aiming for.

When Big T was a toddler, I took in a seminar on child discipline. It wasn’t what I thought, and almost blew off. It was a class which emphasized that the best gift you can give your child is the ability, the certainty and the confidence to make his or her own decisions, within a framework you instill in them at a very early age. The best discipline, and in the end, the only discipline that matters, is self-discipline.

I’m not talking about being a pal to your kids. I mean, that’s its own tender trap, there. I know plenty of parents who tried to play friends to their kids, and forgot the parenting part. The parenting part is about teaching, about leading by example, and acknowledging, explaining, but not excusing when that example falls short of the mark. Explaining that the most we try for is the best we can be, and that perfection isn’t within the realm of possibility. In our house, we aim for what we say we’re going to do. And that often means watching what you say, because you’ll need to live up to it. But a big part of that is acknowledging that parents are human, but they are responsible, and kids are kids, but they are accountable, to their parents, to each other, but ultimately, to themselves most of all.

We talk about love and the importance of family a lot in our house. Our kids go to bed every night saying some variation of “I love my family more than chocolate! I love my family more than buttered noodles! I love my family more than Saturday morning cartoons!” That love is important, because with it comes accountability. We’re responsible to those we love. And as we love ourselves, so are we responsible there. But I’m losing my point.

What I am thinking and talking about is trying to develop and maintain a relationship with my kids that makes them feel like they can tell me things. Today it’s a dirty rhyme that ought to shock me. But one at which I instead laugh and raise a casual eyebrow. We share the laugh, without recrimination. Tomorrow, I hope it might be some issues with how they’re doing in school or with their friends and exposure to alcohol and tobacco, and more serious exposure to drugs. Because that stuff is everywhere, and always has been. The only difference is in kids ability to handle it, or more importantly, much more importantly, their awareness of not being able to handle it and looking to someone they trust for guidance. Today maybe he can tell me a dirty rhyme. Tomorrow, he might trust me enough to call to pick him up from a party where his ride has had too much to drink. And I hope the trust that let him off the hook for the rhyme pays off in his trust that I won’t ride him about that on the ride home. Because the alternative to his telling me the rhyme isn’t that he won’t know it. The alternative is that he doesn’t tell me. And knowing is better. Knowing is always better. Of that I’m sure.

So, as I left the room, the room that he shares with his 6-year-old younger brother, I felt even less sure as Li’l T started to say the rhyme, the parts he could remember, “Yankee Doodle wnet to town…how did it go again?”

It’s going to be an interesting couple of decades.