Boulder-Bots and Sewer Songs

After many parenting failures (such as this one and this one), I’m happy to be able to share a moment of parenting success — although, fair warning, this particular success involved a veritable deluge of potty talk. So if that’s not your thing, in the interest of maintaining good mental hygiene, you may want to just move on with your day.

Still here? Suit yourself.

. . .

Each week, I try to get a few hours of one-on-one time with our older kids. Sometimes it’ll just be running errands together. Other times I’ll plan a surprise or a special outing. And sometimes, on days like this one, we just take a long walk together.

I had decided we needed a walk-day because I could see that lately my son had been struggling, and his old dad had just the thing: invaluable diamonds of fatherly wisdom, plucked from the snarling jaws of life experience. Taking a page from the ambitious-salesman playbook, we hit a drive-thru for a mango smoothie on our way to the walk—sugar being the childhood equivalent of wining and dining.

With the dopamine duly flowing (the straw-in-mouth configuration striking me as vaguely similar to a needle in the arm)—hey, I’m no slouch when it comes to manipulating people for my own good—we set out on our walk. This was the moment I had been waiting for, the moment I had carefully planned out, when I would plant the saving seed in my son’s impressionable mind. (It wasn’t quite that calculated and cunning, but you get the point.)

So I launched into my spiel, noticing (and suppressing) a slightly disturbing recollection of similar memories with my own old man: plying the subject with the Socratic method until only a fool could fail to see the thoroughgoing wisdom of the only choice on the menu. When I had said my piece—something about the poison of seeing others as rivals, and the value of learning how to lose graciously—I realized that I hadn’t really had much to say. My son’s monosyllabic responses painfully accented this thought.

As I was considering how to badger him into appreciating his lack of appreciation, his dopamine-drip ran dry, with that last crackling slurp of flavory goodness. In the sullen tone of people who are mostly satisfied but still notably bored and unstimulated, he said, “Can we go back now?”

I said, “No, let’s keep going a little farther so we can throw our cups in the garbage, then we’ll turn around and walk back.”

So we walked on in relative silence, he, occasionally spurting something about something, or asking me to climb on the rocks with him, and I, declining monosyllabically as I quietly sulked inside, nursing my wounded sense of fatherly pride.

Our walk to the garbage cans had taken us past some large, billowy rock formations, and as we began the walk back to our car, our hands now free of cups, Kai again asked if I wanted to climb with him. Why not, I figured. No harm in indulging the little guy. Scrambling around like this is the kind of thing I used to enjoy anyway.

At first, I just putzed around in Kai’s general vicinity, still somewhat disappointed that our time together had basically been a failure in fathering. But before long I found myself jumping across dicey gaps and working out little bouldering problems. And in fairly short order, someone else started following me around, wanting to do every little thing I was doing.

We went on like this for the better part of an hour. I’d pick out little challenges in the terrain and ask Kai if he thought he could it. Given his love for robots and role-playing, Kai suggested that he be R2D2 and I be C3PO. On and on we went, up one sandstone bluff and down another, until the sun had set and the daylight was dimming. Turns out, even when you’re a dome-headed armless space-droid, you can still shred the proverbial gnar on crumbly mounds of earth rock.

By the time we got back on the path, the growing dark had shifted all the colors to bluish-gray. Other walkers, who had been on the path earlier, were now nowhere to be seen. Our mechanical limbs were warm with robot blood. As we ambled along, the mouth-exhaust of our humanoid breathing was the only sound on the cool evening air.

R2, relaxed, happy, and wanting to keep the good times rolling, decided it was time to sing a little ditty about bowel movements. That’s right, you thought it so I’ll say it: a little shitty-ditty. My more sophisticated 3PO operating system recoiled at the primitive beeps and blurps of my lowercase wingman. Affecting a superior air, I, the stodgy, gold-plated anthro-bot, said nothing. But R2’s intermittent chanting and chuckling rolled on.

My microchip then delivered up a new computation: if R2 is amused by his own pedestrian wordplay, I can easily raise (lower?) the bar. With my polyglottal vocab and rhymophone converter module, I knew I could take his paltry gutter talk to whole new dimensions—or, to be more precise, what we droids would call intergalactic expanses of filth and slime.

For the following twenty minutes, the nearby hills enjoyed (that may not be quite the word) a volley of unprecedented lyrical putrescence, the substance of which was unsuited to print in a thousand ways. It’s truly difficult to justly describe the degree of imaginative perversity and violent coprophagia that can rattle the deepest funny-bones of an 8-year-old soul.

Casting aside every last shred of propriety and self-respect, the normally stuffy box of ambulating circuitry belted out the most obscene lyrical drivel this atmosphere has ever had the displeasure of absorbing. Dogs and rats ran for cover. But Kai? He whooped and chortled until he tripped over his feet and choked on his own guffaws. Then, after spewing out a few lines to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, he asked me to do it again. And again.

We were nearly back to the car by the time the reservoir of verbal sewage had run dry. Once Kai had finally calmed down, I said, “That, my friend, is a metric for the distance between your preferred mode of discourse and mine.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Exactly.”

“Papa, I’d say we had a really good time together!”

. . .

Through experiences like this, I’m learning that sometimes, as a parent, I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m learning that the mythical “Good guys” we try to emulate somehow just know everything they need to know. The “bad guys,” on the other hand, clearly have room to grow. So, I’m learning that I need to get good at being bad.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s never a time for wise words or that heart-to-heart conversation, or that being a good parent is all about being your kid’s best buddy. I’m saying that on this particular occasion, my son needed a friend more than a lecture, and I nearly missed the opportunity to be that for him.

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This post was previously published on A Parent Is Born.

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