To your kids, you are a giant. Here’s how to be a gentle one.
I hug. Copiously. Extravagantly. Engulfingly. As a father of two boys, I’m an unrepentant kisser and cuddler. Eugene Levy in
American Pie has nothing on me. You know the withholding dads who can never say “I love you”? If they’re the North Pole, I’m the equator. At 4, my eldest son sometimes responds to my expressions of affection with a smile and two words: “I know.”
So it shook me to my core when, after receiving a tongue-lashing for some fleeting transgression, Mason peered up at me from femur level with the saucer eyes he got from his mother and said, “Dad, you’re really big and scary when you yell.”
Me? Intimidating? I ferry ants from kitchen to front door aboard junk mail rather than crush them. MasterCard’s “Priceless” commercials make me tear up. One little ack-ack of nastiness from a coworker can down my plane for days. Shouldn’t my progeny realize this by osmosis?
He doesn’t understand that when I was just a few years older than he is now, I was
that kid—the one you didn’t want to be. My glasses were way too thick for a fifth-grade nose to support. My knee-reinforced Toughskins came from Sears. My tucked-in plaid shirt sported snaps. Did I mention the
Star Trek fetish? I’m certain the 1979 edition of
The Bully’s Field Guide to Menacing listed me as an afternoon snack. At recess, Jimmie Ruttenberg chased me around the playground for one reason: I ran away.
Today, peering over 40’s precipice, I am 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds with close-cropped hair, a goatee, a glare, and a decidedly non-shrinking-violet demeanor that has gotten me into run-ins with military police in China and Kalashnikov-toting sentinels in Afghanistan. My son sees
that guy.
For days after his comment, I didn’t feel big and scary. I felt small and useless. As I processed the notion that I could be not only hero but also monster-in-the-closet to my own child, a pair of questions kept dancing at the edges of my consciousness:
I hug. Copiously. Extravagantly. Engulfingly. As a father of two boys, I’m an unrepentant kisser and cuddler. Eugene Levy in
American Pie has nothing on me. You know the withholding dads who can never say “I love you”? If they’re the North Pole, I’m the equator. At 4, my eldest son sometimes responds to my expressions of affection with a smile and two words: “I know.”
