How NOT to parent

I was trying to recall all the right things I did during the time parenting consumed my life.  I remember never giving a toddler a bottle of milk in the crib to go to sleep. After that there’s a fog.

Okay, so there were glimpses of clarity. Like the afternoon I received a call from a distraught parent. “Do you know what’s in your son’s backpack?” Yeah, wadded up homework and a Ninja Turtle, I thought. “Kyle said they found porn on the way home from school, and Cheezy stuck it in with his books.”  Why do the goody-two-shoes kind of kids always have a “y” in the middle of their name?

Usually, I ranted and raved. Chill — my kids’ favorite comeback rang in my head. I had to take a different approach. So instead of going ballistic, I casually moved to the pile plopped by the door and nonchalantly thumbed through his bag. The chests in the magazine, Photoshopped for sure, were more massive than anything I could imagine. The magazine, Big Boobs —  didn’t do the breasts justice. More like gargantuan, double humongous. ¡Qué chichotas más grandes tienes!  Like Pamela Anderson on steroids. If you’d taken a pin to any one of them, it would have required Fix-a-Flat. 

I sat Cheezy down. “You know why this is bad?” I could barely keep a straight face. “If this is what you think you’re going to see when you grow up, boy, are you in for a big letdown.” The word anticlimatic came to mind. But thought it inappropriate for a ten year old.

It was a good move. No anger, no lies, no rationalizations, no shouting.

That little piece of arbitration might have been the last good job I did at parenting.

There were the times when I felt like running away, maybe to another planet, and didn’t. Do those times count? Those were the moments I learned to love unconditionally.

Related posts:

1. Let me introduce you to my family
2. The secret of coping with bad days