World's Okay-est Dad

There is a phrase that comes out of my mouth at least four times a week since the girls have come to live us.  It spills from my brain and out of my mouth before I can stop it, like an escape-artist dog which, if even the slightest lapse in care is taken to hold it back when the front door cracks open, bolts out into the unfenced world, free to do its damage until it is dragged back into the house by its collar.  It’s bound to happen.  It is a phrase born of fatigue. 

Born of irritation.

Born of being a parent.

 “I…don’t…care!”

Man.  I typed these three words, and on their own, out of context, they look so harsh.  In retrospect, probably the harshest thing one could say to a kid.  I mean, if there was ever a duty as a parent, it’s to care, right?  Perhaps someone reading this might say, “Oh, Matt, really, you shouldn’t say that to those girls.”

Well, okay.  The next time we’re running late for school and Mo comes into the kitchen, still half-dressed and sobbing, I’ll take a knee and say, “What’s the problem, sport?” 

“I…can’t…find…my…orange…sock!”

“I see, I see.  Now why do you need the orange sock today?  You have a pink one on the other foot.”

“Be… cause … my friends … we … we were going … to all wear… orange … and … and … pink … socks …tooodaaaaaaay! Eeeeeeeeee!”

Rubbing my chin thoughtfully, I’ll say, “Hmmm.  That is a problem.  Well, let’s take ten minutes to look for an orange sock, okay?  Because I’m sure that’s extremely important, and I’m sure your friends will all remember the sock pact you made on the playground two weeks ago.”

“Oh…kay…”

Sure.  That would be what “World’s Greatest Dad” would do.  But really, it went down like this.

“Why aren’t you dressed yet?!?”

“I…can’t…find…my…orange…sock!”

“Sock?  Orange sock?  You don’t have any orange socks. And you’ve already got a pink one on!  Where’s the other pink one?”

“But…I have to have one!  I promised my friends!  We were all going to wear…”

“Oh, for the love of God!  I don’t care!  Get dressed already!  We gotta go!”

“But…”

“I…don’t…care!  Go!”

And then she cries harder, wailing from every corner of the house as she mopes and moves as slowly as possible.  And when she walks past me, she turns up the water works on command and looks squarely at me so I can see that she is still crying, and that she’s still so very, very angry with me.  In the car, she’s silent the whole way to school because I’m such a huge prick for not letting her find a sock that doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, Shay is just chattering away, happier’n hell.  Because if it isn’t one, it’s the other.

On average, kids’ moods are mellow and easy going.  Now, I said on average.  Over time.  If I were to take a data set and assign a number value from “1” to “10”, with “1” being utterly despondent and “10” being a goddamned screeching maniac jumping out of their skin with joy, the set would look like this:

1,10,1,10,1,10,1,10,10,1,1,10,1,10,1,10,1,1,10,1…5 (the 5 is fifteen seconds prior to falling asleep).

Average that out, you get 5.  Juuuuust right.  So the problem isn’t the average, it’s the variance.  That’s where I go insane.  And to add insult to injury, when one of them is at a “1”, the other is at a “10.”  Or so it seems.

“Why can’t they always be at a 5?” says every parent ever.

I’ve found this leads to stress.  And with stress, comes questionable parenting.  If one were to score my parenting moments over time using fictitious 1950’s dads as the scale, with “1”being Don Draper from Mad Men (basically a sociopath with zero fatherly instincts) and a “10” being Ward Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver, my data set would look something like this:

8,4,7,5,4,3,7,8,6,9,5,4,7,6…and so on.  The variance isn’t as drastic as the kids’ moods…I’d like to think I’ve never dipped below a 3 and that I’m north of 6, but there are times where I’ve thought,

“Prob’ly should’a handled that a little differently.”

Case in point.  Saturday morning, about a month ago.  We had just adopted another Basset hound from some lady up in Kansas.  I was going to leave that morning to drive up to Liberal to pick him up. 

A four hour drive.  One way. 

So as I was facing an all-day affair, I wasn’t in the best mood.  I walk into the living room with my cereal.  Shay is watching some kid’s movie on the big TV.  I tell her that she needs to turn it off for a few minutes so I can watch something while I eat, and that she can go into the bedroom and watch her show in there.

“But I was here first!” she said, pouting. 

Now, we’d had this discussion before.  Multiple times.  When I actually get five minutes to sit down and shove some food in my mouth, I get to do it in front of a show that I want to watch.  I do.  Or Amy does.  Not her or her sister.  They can go into another room and watch, but the big TV in the living room is ours when we want it. 

Much like the “I don’t care,” written out this little argument about the television seems fairly petty.  But it’s just one of the rules we made.  I don’t believe in having kids just run amuck in the house.  Nothing drives me more insane than watching a parent being walked on (or in some cases, out-right bullied by their kids) just to avoid conflict or whining or temper tantrums.  The establishment of boundaries and unrelenting constancy in enforcing them is paramount.  Anyway.       

“Don’t give me that, Shay.  You know the rule.  I’m going up to Kansas to get the new dog today, so how ‘bout you let me watch something I want to watch for a few minutes, then you can come back.  Okay?”

“No.”

Uh oh.  My hackles just went up. 

“You know, Shay, when it sounds like I’m asking for your permission to change the channel, I’m not really asking.  I’m just being polite.  I’m telling you. It’s gonna happen with or without your consent.”

At this, she flips over in the chair and begins to moan.  Ignoring her, I walk over to her chair, take the remote, and switch it to the news or whatever.  She sits bolt upright, looks me dead in the eye, and says, “I can’t wait for you to leave!”

Yup.  That did it.  I turned and said, “Why don’t you quit being such a butthole?”

That’s right.  I called a little seven year old girl a butthole. 

Judges say:  “3.”

Her eyes went wide and she yelled, “Hey!”

“Well…uh…stop being mean to me, and I won’t be mean back!”

Good one, dipshit.  What are you, in third grade? 

She sat there glaring at me, and I took it, because I deserved it.  So I just got up and left.  Ran away.  Amy was in the kitchen.  She’d overheard the amazing parenting I had just done, and quietly asked, “Did you really just call her a butthole?”

Looking at the ground and kicking my feet, I said, “Yes… but she was being one.”

“Jesus, Matt.”

“I know.  Good thing I’m bringing a new dog home today.  Hopefully she’ll forget it.”

“Uh huh.”

For that matter, I hoped Amy would forget it.  Not my best moment.

Fast forward a week.

The girls were having a really rough time.  CPS had taken visitation rights away from their bio mom (won’t get in to it, but it was necessary), and the girls had been told this fact by their therapist a few days prior.  They always seem to take this kind of news in stride, but it shows up later.  Mo will get sad, but she’ll at least talk about it, and then she feels better.  Shay won’t even hear about it.  She’ll literally run from the room if it comes up.  It’s heartbreaking.  She seems fine, but then she starts acting out.

So one afternoon, on a rare occasion when I beat Amy and the kids home, and I’m rummaging around in the fridge like some dumpy bear when Amy comes storming in.

“What’s the matter?” I ask, paws full of snacks.

“Matt, I’m just…ugh!  I’m so annoyed with Shay right now that I can’t even handle it.  Can you deal with her?”

“Sure…what happened though?”
Amy proceeds to tell me a string of behavior very, very uncharacteristic of Shay. She was being obstinate with her after-school daycare provider (it’s at the school, so they’re there with a bunch of their friends).  When Amy went to pick the girls up, Mo ran up to Amy, happy and excited to see her.

Shay, on the other hand was hiding from her.

When Amy found her under a lunchroom table, Shay wouldn’t come out.  When Amy started threatening the loss of privileges, Shay finally crawled out from under the gross table and bolted out of the building without permission or escort. 

Big school no-no.

Once outside, Shay decided to hide behind a tree.  When Amy once again began counting to three, Shay stormed past her and said something about Amy “not being her real mom.”

Uh oh.

This really didn’t bother Amy too much.  We’re prepared for those kinds of outbursts.  One doesn’t become a foster parent without realizing that’s going to happen from time to time.  But from Shay…well, it was unexpected. 

In the car, Shay proceeded to throw fits, hit her sister, kick the seat in front of her, and on and on.

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll go talk to her.  It’s probably because of, you know, the deal with their bio mom.”

“Right,” said Amy.  Again, looking at this in writing, it seems pretty obvious.  But time had passed since that news, and the girls had seemed okay, so it moved to the back of our minds.  Life went on.  But it was becoming obvious that for Shay, it hadn’t.

So I went out to the car to talk to her.  As I rounded the car, she scooted to the opposite side of the back seat, got out on the side away from me, and sprinted inside.  She ran up the stairs, into her room…and slammed the door.  Another big no-no.

Amy about lost her mind.  She’d had it.  She began to march up there.  But I felt a Ward Cleaver coming on, so I stopped her and asked her to let me deal with it.  She agreed.  On the way to the stairs, I passed Mo.  She was twirling around in circles, singing a Justin Bieber song.

Like I said, if it ain’t one, it’s the other.

I knocked on Shay’s door and she responded with a mighty, “Go away!”  (To reiterate, none of this is anything near what she is normally like, so it was weird).

“Shay, I’m coming in.  Are you dressed?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.”  I opened the door, and she was curled up on an arm chair in the corner of her room, crying softly.  I gently sat down on the bed across from her.

“Shay, what’s going on?”

She only shrugged from within her balled-up frame.

“Can you sit up babe?  Talk to me please?”

She sniffed, slowly sat upright, and began to stare at her hands.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“Well, that depends.  Amy told me some stuff that doesn’t sound like you at all.  So what I want is for you to talk to me about it.”  Shay has never been a big communicator, and getting her to talk about anything is always like pulling teeth.  “Can you do that?”

She kept looking at her little hands, folded in her lap upon her striped dress.  “I don’t want to,” she mumbled.

I sighed.  “See, Shay, if you don’t talk about it, we won’t know what’s wrong and why you’re acting a certain way.  That’s why Amy was so mad at you in the car.  We aren’t mind readers, so we can’t know what you’re feeling.  To us, you’re just misbehaving, and we get mad.  But if we know what’s wrong, well, then maybe we won’t get as mad and maybe we’ll all try to work it out.  Do you understand, Shay?”

She looked up from her hands.  “Say my name right.”

“Uhhh…what?”

“Call me Shay-Shay.”

Oh.  Right. 

That was what her bio mom had called her.  Not hard to see how we got “Shay” from that.

“Do you want me to call you that?”

She shrugged.

“Well, if I can’t get you to talk about it, can I guess what’s wrong and then can you tell me if I’m right?”

Shrugged again, then a short nod.

“Okay…I think you’re missing your bio-mom.  Am I right?  Is that why you are so worked up?”

She looked up and water had gathered upon her large unblinking eyes, threatening to coalesce into a torrent of tears.

“You haven’t been too worked up about it so far.  I guess that’s why I kind of forgot about it.”

Her head shot up and she stared defiantly back at me. “But I don’t want to forget her!” 

And then came the sobbing. 

I let her cry for a few seconds, thinking about what to do next.  But I guess I knew.

“You don’t have to forget her, hon, no one’s ever gonna make you, okay?”

Sobs in response.

“Do you want to sit on my lap?” 

And man, she bolted up out of that chair and dove into my lap, pressed her wet face against my chest and I almost lost it myself. 

So I rocked her.  For a long time.  Until she quit crying and was still.  I thought she had gone to sleep, but then she looked up at me with red eyes.

And smiled.

“Do you feel better?”

“Yes.”

“You know we love you, right?”

“I love you too, Daddy.”

“Good. You see?  If you tell us what’s wrong, you might get hugs.  If you don’t, we’re confused and get all mad.  Like badgers.”

She nodded, sniffed, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“Okay.  Let’s go downstairs now.  I’ll bet Mom has dinner ready now.”

“Okay!” she squeaked.

Downstairs, Amy looked at me quizzically, and I just nodded and smiled, letting her know it was okay.

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” said Shay from around her knees.

“It’s okay, honey.  Don’t worry about it. You hungry?”

“Yes!”

“Good. Have a seat now.”

Judges say:  I dunno, pretty good, maybe a 9 or 10 on that one. 

Just then I’m noticing the empty seat where Mo usually sits.

“Where’s Mo?” I ask.

Amy wearily shakes her head.  “In our bedroom.  Crying.  She lost some ‘best friends forever’ necklace her friend gave her or something.”

“Mo!” I yelled.  “Get your butt in here and eat!  I don’t care about that necklace, get in here!”

And now we’re back to a 4.

 

Well, hell.  I can manage only so many “Ward Cleaver”s in a single day.