My little brother ordered a pellet gun from a catalogue, and although he wasn’t parent enough to stop the initial order or even notice for a few days, my dad was parent enough to take the gun away before too long, citing that it was a little on the dangerous side.
Before he decided for sure, he decided to test fire it. I don’t know if this was a test fire to see if it was dangerous or if it was more about shooting the thing himself, sort of the way he insisted on testing fries for poison.
He took it into the garage and stood facing the garage door. I came with him, and before I could say anything he shot it straight into the metal door.
Pow. A sting right in the corner of my eye. He’d shot at the metal door, ricocheted the BB, and the goddamn thing came back and hit me right in the corner of the eye, so close that it couldn’t have been more than a penny’s thickness from punching through the soft part of my eye. As it was, I just got a welt on my face, which was enough for him to decide that this was definitely not safe in the hands of kids, none of whom had shot each other, I should add.
It was these times when he took a shot at parenting that things were the worst. No effort, I could deal with. Success, that was fine too, although no effort was still the preference. What was difficult was a half-assed attempt that made things worse.
If I may use another analogy, we spent a lot of time playing games on the computer. One day I got on, and there the desktop was a letter addressed to his wife (not my mom, thank holy god).
It’s partially my fault for opening it. But what can I say? It was right there, and the title was just Dear [name].
They say curiosity kills the cat, but they don’t mention that sometimes curiosity, though not killing the cat directly, convinces the cat to jump into a freezing river while clawing at its own eyes, praying to disable itself enough that it won’t make it back to shore.
The letter was brief and described, in far greater detail than I could ever recreate without my fingers breaking themselves in protest, the climactic point of a sex act that you did not see on Cinemax after dark.
No parenting would have been printing it out and leaving it on the kitchen table. A good amount of parenting would be to print your erotic letters, give them to the intended audience, and then destroy the file. Put it in the Recycle Bin, say a demonic prayer, and then empty said Recycle Bin. The medium amount of parenting was to leave it right on the desktop, a double-click away, sort of the computer security equivalent of locking up King Kong with twist-ties.
Luckily for me, he’d already half-assed the sex talk, so the mechanics of the half-assed hidden letter were less shocking.
The sex talk is never a great time between a parent and a child. I don’t know how people should go about it, to be honest. Maybe everyone should just never tell their kid about sex. They seem to discover it one way or another.
It seems like you’d have to try and strike a balance between being too scientific and too lovey-dovey. OR you could focus entirely on the prevention of pregnancy, pregnancy being the arch-enemy of carefree sex acts and bad dads alike.
My dad put a drawer of condoms in the basement, available for the taking whenever they were necessary. Kind of like some kids have parents who say, “Just ask me for a ride. I don’t care if you’re drunk, just ask.” So it wasn’t a terrible idea.
The thing that was a little off about it was the timing. I wasn’t the earliest bloomer in the garden, but to be giving the big chat and then providing a supply of condoms to a sixth-grader was a little, well, advanced.
But that can be excused. Better early than late, in that case.
What I can’t excuse is his condom demonstration, which involved him putting a condom to his mouth and blowing it up like a balloon until it burst, slinging the included lube across the room.
Holidays were another place that he was missing some of the follow-through of more successful parents.
We were at the grocery store once when he remembered that it was my sister’s birthday. It’s hard to shop for a little girl’s birthday present last-minute, and even harder when you decide to do it in a store designed to provide meats and produce as opposed to Barbies or weird fairy toys where you pull a ripcord and they gracefully float through the sky, then crash to the ground and scratch their faces on the pavement.
So instead of fighting the tide, he came up with the plan of buying, what else, groceries. Specifically, Twinkies and barbecue sauce. For a grade-school girl.
She wasn’t filled with an everlasting joy, exactly.
The only thing worse than half-assed Birthdays were the half-assed Christmases.
The first bad Christmas was medium-bad. We walked the aisles of Kmart where he said we could pick out a couple things we liked. Today, that would be fine. The surprise of Christmas tends to fade when you grow up and can’t decide if you believe in Santa or Jesus less, and then decide that candy canes are just as good when you quit trying to unwrap the fucking things and just smash them on the ground and eat the shards.
But when you’re looking at the picked-over Christmas Eve toy aisle in a store that wouldn’t survive five more years, you’re a little bit in the shit.
You graduate from being a little in the shit to totally in the shit when you get home, your dad whisks your little sister upstairs and then comes back down and insists that you wrap all the gifts you just picked out for yourself in hopes that his daughter will still believe in Santa for one more year.
We tried to talk him out of this plan arguing that our sister, though a little on the young side, would probably remember picking out these very same gifts one day previous.
That not being a good enough answer, we switched to asking if we could at least wrap only her presents, saving ourselves the time and effort of wrapping things we were CERTAIN we would remember picking out and then wrapping ourselves.
Again, no dice.
So there we were, three boys, trying to figure out how the hell you wrap a Barrel of Monkeys that you don’t even want in the first place.
The second bad Christmas was pretty bad, but it was closer to the complete giving up stage of parenting, so it was preferable.
It was just my older brother and I staying on Christmas Eve. We woke up Christmas morning. I wouldn’t say I sprinted upstairs. It was more like a calm walk of dread, like getting out of the car to see Old Faithful and preparing for what you know is going to be the disappointment of the year.
No tree, nothing wrapped, no nothing.
I went into the kitchen and ate breakfast. It wasn’t until noon, time for us to switch back to our mom’s house, that I said, “So…no Christmas presents?”
My dad looked up. His look was like he’d thought, “Oh fuck. I forgot about the whole present thing.”
He leaned to one side in his chair and pulled out his wallet. He pulled out a couple bills, not a planned amount or anything like that. Just whatever was there. It was thirty some dollars, which he handed over and told me to split with my brother. He DID apologize for not having change, so maybe he did find the Christmas spirit after all.
*
After a week of these dad stories, I’ve had enough, I think. I hope you have too. If I had to say I learned one thing, it was that I am reassured that I made the right decision voting no on personhood for the second time. I can’t honestly say that being never born is awesome, but I can say with certainty that having even a sort of shitty parent kind of blows. But don’t lose hope, kids. Someday you will be strong enough to end your own life.