I was eight years old. It was at my birthday party and at the end of it, I talked back to a tired man who had besides donating the X chromosome that made me, had also just spend four hours with a bunch of sugar-addled kids...
"Alan, tell your friends to go home, it's time to go inside..."
"Dad....", I whined, "Just a little longer..."
"Son, it's time to take a bath...." my father said in that voice that was his precursor to violence.
"Son, it's time to take a bath...time to take a --" I never got the second sentence out.
Like a NASA space shuttle, my dad grabbed me by my thick head of hair and carried me to the front door before sending me flying up the stairs.... human flight - no other way to describe it. I stood in that shower - shivering from fear - it was the longest shower of my young life. I walked out pruned like I had been at the beach all day.
My dad never said another word about it and neither did I - and I never back-talked again... till I was nineteen and like an old Silverback taking on a young challenge to the band of gorillas - my dad slammed me so hard against the kitchen wall I saw stars. The challenge was over before it started and everyone in our little band of gorillas all knew who was still king.
I think life was simpler back then.
I just spent forty-five minutes rubbing my son's belly as he fought constipation... He screamed at me more than my wife did when she was giving birth to him. I wanted to yell back, I wanted to slap him upside the head and tell him to just take a crap but I didn't, I let him yell, I rubbed his belly, told him to focus on his breathing and forty-five minutes later, he gave birth to a nine-inch, 9 lb. bouncing bowel movement.
Don't get me wrong. I yell at my kids. Sometimes I scream. I've never hit them - except for a ritualistic slap on the butt that was more out of confusion than anything else but I've never instilled the fear that my dad did to my brothers and I ... And I think my sons are the worse off for it.
There is no rule to our roost - life is a constant series of mediations, shouts, pleas and deliberations - each day is a new challenge to the throne and my wife and I can only try to hold back the rebel forces made up of our three children's whims, wishes and demands....
Each day it goes on and on.... rub their bellies as they yell at us with no end in sight. Some people say it's wrong to hit children and they're probably right but when I look back at my one day of human flight, I think my dad was justified... in teaching me to fly.
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