The Terrifying, Proud and Hilarious Job of Parenting

Yes, I've been away from this blog for two months.  But if you're reading this then there is an enormously high probability that I've already talked to you about that fact in person.  So why bother with explanations beyond saying that I've been busy.  Enough of that then.

I could easily fill this post with some of the things that I've been up to over the past two months.  After all, I've been busy.  Maybe later.  For now, I wanted to get some small but meaningful things on the record that I don't want to forget, and need to record before I do (I have an absolutely horrendous autobiographical memory.  Facts stick - life events don't)

I wanted to share a few brief anecdotes - one each about my children.  For me, each anecdote represents an aspect of parenting that surfaces regularly in my personal experience.

The first event occurred a couple of weeks ago while I was staying at my sister-in-law's house in Colorado Springs.  It was nothing more than a dream.  Nonetheless, it was a dream that truly rattled me.  Like most of my dreams, it makes no sense whatsoever once analyzed from a wakeful perspective.  But, as most anyone knows, it's the emotional content of dreams that really matters. 

In this dream I was in a hallway inside a jam-packed Mormon church.  I don't know why I was there, but I got the impression that it was a Stake Conference and I was there with my family.  From here, the dream took a completely illogical tangent.  While I was holding Alana,  my 21-month-old daughter, a woman walked up and I passed Alana to her.  Why did I hand her my daughter?  I don't know.  But I did.  At that point it seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do.  Two seconds later it was no longer a perfectly natural thing to do.  In the wonderfully weird awareness of a dream, I realized as the woman walked away with Alana in her arms that she was adopting Alana, and I would never see her again. 

I got one last glimpse of Alana and then she was gone.  Now, I realize that this all makes no sense to an awake mind.  But in dreamland, my daugther was gone and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.  I lost my mind.  I started screaming incoherently, much to the dismay of the other churchgoers.  Of all the nightmares I've had in my life, I can't think of any that was worse.  I gave my daughter away.

The dream was bad enough that my sleep-screaming woke me up.  I realized instantly that it didn't really happen, but I laid there for a few minutes catching my breath nonetheless.  As if she knew, Alana then came running into the room, yelled "Daddy" and climbed up on the bed and gave me a hug. 

Next anecdote . . . My 7-year-old daughter McKenna decided to try out for her school's spelling bee.  She came home with a 50-word list that would constitute the tryout.  I was worried about how she would do.  McKenna frequently mispells larger words in the things I've seen her write, and thus I haven't been all that impressed by her skills.  I'm a very good speller, and I've assumed that I have been that way all my life.  But while visiting my hometown over Christmas my older brother Jason delivered a batch of old grade school materials that had been sitting in a box for a couple of decades.  After going through my own early writing, I discovered that my spelling skills were obviously and substantially inferior to McKenna's skills at the same age.  I was put in my place.  And once we got home and McKenna went back to school, she smoked the tryout.  She did so much better than the other kids in her class that her teacher initially didn't want to bother entering anyone else from her grade.  Now she will be competing against third, fourth and fifth graders in the actual spelling bee - scary stuff when McKenna is the youngest girl in the second grade.  She might not win, but she'll do a whole lot better than I would have.  McKenna is smarter than me, but without the cynicism I was seemingly born with.  Overall she's just a better person than I am, and there's nothing I could want more for her as a parent.

Then there's the anecdote from Evan, the prototypical 5-year-old boy.  This last bit didn't even happen to me.  It happened to my wife.  But the incident was so classically Evan-like, that I have to include it here.  Sarah woke him up for school the other day, and as is frequently the case, he was in a half-awake stupor.  As he sat there, staring blankly, he ripped a massively loud fart.  Evan didn't laugh.  He didn't even look for a reaction.  He just kept staring straight ahead in his early morning funk and informed Sarah in his emotionless and drowsy voice, "That was me."  Was there was any question about who was the culprit?

I love being a parent.