Please, O Please I don't want to play that word game yet again today, but I am going to because there is no free will on this side of the game table. I am the 'contestant' and she is the game runner and 'host' all rolled into one. That is just how it is. I used to talk more than she, but those days are loooong gone. Now, I just try to keep up with whatever she's talking about if I can, which is not always possible as there are chores to do and life to live While she is talking. The normal pauses and breaks in dialog are simply just not there.
My reality would be something akin to hanging out with a friend that didn't know about the invention of periods, paragraphs, or pauses. Well, to be honest they do know about one article of punctuation, the exclamation point and they use it indescriminately. Their volume is also all out of whack: talking LOUD when they should whisper, and whispering when you need them to speak up. Funny. Telling them this wouldn't usually change anything either! Who of us has a friends like that?! Zero to none, I'm sure. I will tell you right now that 'parenting' IS the only place where this will ever happen in which you are held hostage AND you are not being paid for it, and there is no end in sight. There is an end they say, but while you are in this stage of your kiddos development....you are IN IT. Society doesn't really support this kind of relating out in 'the wild'. The fortunate thing is it will change.
Their incessant need to repeat each phrase 6-10 times is kind of hard on the nervous system day in and day out, and God help you if you don't understand something that they are trying to tell you after the fourth or fifth run through. At that point you might as well call in a translator (not mommy. She's already looking at me like, "Pal, I have no idea"!), but since you cannot do that, you half pretend you understand and ad lib from there. Hopefully they work with you on this--are graceful and accept that this is a moment when mommy and/or daddy need a little loving slack--and not decide that they cannot handle your incompetence and therefore have a meltdown in which they must pull in the whole household into the drama of the point they're trying to make. Sound funny? I assure you it's funnier in print. I told this to a friend of mine who has two daughters, and he lovingly said in point of fact dryness, "You did have a girl".
"Right", I said. "Yes, we did".
"No", he said. "YOU did".
"Ahh. I see", I said. "The Chromosome Issue", I asked?
"It's no 'issue', just true", he said.
"Got it". "Thank you", I said.
"No prob", he says.
"This guy's not pulling any punches. A true friend", I think to myself. Gee. School of hard knocks from more than one angle. Hehe.
Anyway, back to the story...
Once I'm awake and seen 'out in the open' (on any given Saturday or Sunday) in my house I'm involved and engaged full tilt boogie, and it's that way until she's (my 3 yr. old daughter Shayla) in her bed and I close her door 13 hrs. later that night. A three year old doesn't know about union sanctioned breaks and lunches. :-) I'm a stay at home dad, so I look forward to the extra help from Momma that the weekends usually afford. But I sometimes feel like a spy in my own house, listening at my door before I open it and enter the game arena. "Can I make it to the bathroom incognito", I think to myself? For all the noise that happens in our house, my daughter still has supersonic hearing. She'll be in the living room with her mother watching one of her shows and having a conversation simultaneously, and STILL hear me slink out of my room. How, I have no idea, but she does!
"Daddy's Awake", she shrills!! Ahhh, and just when I thought that I might get to go to the bathroom by myself. Negative ghostrider. I remember that the bathroom used to be a kind of private place..., right? Hmm. Maybe I'm thinking of something else. I can't quite remember.
I love being a dad, even for all the challenges it presents. It's a wondrous job full of intensity, vibrancy, and change. One of the greatest things that changes is you. It's a real life stretching exercise that births in you the ability to do things that you never thought possible. You love and take care of your children and they change your life enabling you to do things that you never knew you could do and all without your Constant awareness of it. It's quite clever really on the part of creation: keeping you busy with one task while also accomplishing other things at the same time.
Fathering is most certainly a universe of God unto itself. Childless adults take heed: the womb is an interdimensional doorway. Respect and Revere.
Posted via email from daddyville's posterous
