Fatherhood Follies: Posting my L

Screw up. Own it.

Sometimes we fall on our sword. And when we do it’s important to recognize it, own it, and figure out what happened so that we don’t do it again. So I’m going to own mine right here for y’all to read. If anyone gets any benefit out of this, that would be nice. But what really matters to me is the benefit my children get out of this process.

Let’s dig into what happened and see what lessons can be learned.

Tight timing

We had an event for my family a couple of weeks ago that was a big deal for us. My wife was being honored and our family was going to be in the spotlight. Friends and family came in from out of town. And my job that day was to get everyone and everything to the event on time.

My six year old daughter was probably feeling the stress too that weekend. She happens to hate wearing tights. And wouldn’t you know it, but my wife picked out matching outfits for our three kids and they included a pair of white tights. So my daughter whined. And she stalled. And she whined. And in my mind, tick tock, tick tock…

I know a lot of parents have been in a similar situation. The kid is acting out, but the key is to understand that this is for a reason, an underlying reason. As a parent, what you should not do is respond, react to the act. Of course, what do you think I did? I chose poorly.

I’ve talked about dealing with anger, so it’d be reasonable if you thought I never act out of anger. Unfortunately, such perfection still escapes me. What I am actually really good at is recognizing when I’ve gotten angry and cutting it off so it doesn’t snowball. But on this day, I acted out of anger.

The details of the event are so silly and meaningless in hindsight, but in the moment my frustrations came out. My daughter was sitting on the couch with these tights halfway up, refusing to pull them the rest of the way, so I walked over to help her, got frustrated and angrily finished the job. It was mean. And I think said something too, to the effect of “what the heck is wrong with you?”

Fire, meet gasoline

Depending on your perspective, this may seem like a big deal or a small deal. Each family is different. But for my daughter and I, it was a BIG deal. I caused harm. Not physical harm, but emotional and psychological harm. And for what? Nothing is really worth that, and this was such a dumb, minor thing to get all riled up about. They always seem to be in hindsight, right?

Immediately I recognized what I had done, and I was really, really embarrassed. To make matters worse, my daughter stormed off to her room. So much for being in a hurry to leave! It’s like my rule of senior management, which is if you have a problem and you take it to senior management, now you have two problems. Except in this case, I had acted like senior management, creating a second problem. We’re still not leaving on time and now I have a miserable, crying daughter just ahead of this big family event.

I tried to pull myself together and go talk to her. It’s crazy how the competing voices in your head work in that moment. The ego is still trying to convince me I was right to be mad. Why did SHE have to make a big deal out of it? Why couldn’t she just deal with the tights for an hour?

To really pile on, when I go in to ask her what happened, her reaction was to break down crying and say, “I can’t do anything right!”

Oh holy freaking shite, what have I done here? It’s gone from me being annoyed that she won’t get dressed to a full blown four alarm fire where this child’s confidence has been destroyed. Do you see why it’s important to never lose your cool? It can go sideways really quick.

Picking through the wreckage

Here’s one thing I do know. You can’t repair something like this right away. I created the negative situation, and there’s a rule of thumb that it takes about 4 positives to even out a negative. Always remember that rule. It helps you from carelessly hurting other people’s feelings when you understand the cost of correcting the hurt.

So I realize it’s a long battle to win her confidence back and undo the harm I caused. But even more importantly, in the long term, what caused me to fail and lose my temper? Well, what you don’t want to do after something like this is get caught up in replaying the event with an effort to go back in time and get the right answer. There are a lot of obvious things I could have done in response to her stalling that would have solved the situation very easily. If you don’t have those tools, you just need experience and study. I’m talking about misdirection and distractions and things like that. But I have those tools and many of you do too, and I skipped right over them.

What really caused me to react to her and act with anger is the stress, and in particular not recognizing how stressed out I was. Digging under the surface even deeper, I realize that I get very stressed out over my wife’s career because I am afraid of something. My wife is at a crossroads and her next career path could mean a lot of travel away from home. I don’t want to influence her decision by making her think we can’t manage without her. And so I stress out - and of course this stress makes it harder to manage situations. Stress is so self defeating, isn’t it?

At least one lesson

Well, at the end of the day, if you take anything away from this, I hope you will always keep in mind that arguing and fighting with our kids is a completely unnatural act. We are not designed - the human design - to be combative with our children. We are designed to care for them, guide them, and love them. Our fights are entirely self-inflicted, caused by wanting something in this world that conflicts with having a healthy parent-child relationship. In other words, it’s always something worldly that gets in the way. Almost always, it’s not something the child wants out of the world, it’s something we want. This is what causes the majority of combat between parents and their children. It’s wrapped up in all sorts of justifications and excuses, but that’s the crux of it.

And I get that and I’ll keep at it, trying to do better.