Fathers, Fumble with the Noose
“I’m digging all the way to China with a silver spoon, while the hangman fumbles with the noose.”
Tom Waits
I was settling one of our little ones into bed last night, which was going better than it usually does, when he asked for his customary ‘lucky lucky lucky last cuddle.’ It’s a request that’s hard to deny, particularly when you know he’s on the edge of sleep and you could circumvent another forty minutes of negotiation, threats and something that resembles a mixed martial arts throwdown. Laying there with him, I figured that if this rambunctious, comical, tempestuous but loving little man didn’t deserve a final reprieve, who of us did?
It’s such a delicate balance to have your kids grasp the inordinate love you have for them, as well as the way that love is expressed through boundaries and expectations. As a child, you can’t see the value or the benefit of emptying the dishwasher or putting your own laundry away. And as much as it’s about communal responsibility and many hands making light work, it’s about each of them internalising an understanding that the work needs to be done, and it can’t be done without them.
The question of parity and equity comes up a lot on a household with seven children in it. There is a particular sensitivity to getting one’s fair share when it comes to turns, or servings, to the point of demanding you also get a third bowl, when you don’t even have an appetite for it. Our kids will argue for what they feel is fair, but they know that at the end of the day, it’s their parents who will determine what that equity will look like. It’s imperative to encourage, ever and always, a disposition to ‘take the lowest place.’ You have to catch them in the moment of putting someone else before themselves and recognise, celebrate, that warm glow in their gut when they know they’ve done some good in the world.
You know you’re doing something right when you see this happening in your household. I’m not going to pretend that it’s the standard practice here, but I know we see it often enough to have planted that seed in the souls we have charge of. Part of that practice, that modelling, is ‘fumbling with the noose,’ or the ‘lucky lucky lucky last cuddle.’ Whenever you can look your kid in the eye and bring grace and warmth to the table, rather than indifference and disinterest, make it happen.
Bedtime is bedtime, and he knows he needs to lie down. When he argues, fights, runs around, the alternative to sleep alone on the floor of the bathroom is always an option (which he vehemently refutes, to my relief). But when he asks for ‘one more minute’ of an embrace that tells him all is well with the world, it’s nothing short of an honour to grant it. A simple embrace that tells him he is loved, he is safe, he is at home, despite just having upset and disturbed a household of settling children.
He knows that he deserves a second chance. Or a seventeenth. Damn, don’t we all?
By Gaetano Carcarello