The Importance of Doing Something which is Probably Wrong

Just before the Christmas holiday I started to prepare myself. Namely I started to turn myself into an eating machine/ lazy sloth.  Not to degrade the sloth, it is just a saying.  Sloths are quite good.  I intended to be a lazy pig.  Oh wait a sec.. another good animal.

Here I am sitting in front of a table that is devoid of food because it is in my stomach. There used to be a roast of some sort there in the middle of the table, but.. lo and behold it is not anymore.  I really wanted to sit there for another half an hour in front of the imagined fireplace, so the roast could find its proper place in my internal being and we could, together, achieve an equilibrium of zen and harmony, before I shat it out.

As I said, I was preparing myself for Christmas. 

Not to be.

 I was told by my wife that the girls wanted to go out and ice skate.  As much as I love my daughters, there are two times of the day that I would rather do my own thing than my daughters thing.  That is, in the morning when I still need to sleep and after a meal when I uh,, need to sleep.  But my great love for my daughters and the realization that I would be in the dog house with my wife if I didn't, got me off my ass and into my winter clothes.  Time to turn my slothfulness around and be a Father.

When I was growing up I was a very lucky child.  We had a backyard which froze over in the winter. We had a private ice rink to do whatever or make whatever mistakes in learning or playing that we needed to.  The irony of this is that no one in our family learned to ice skate.  But all the same, the possibility was there.

Now when we go to the public ice rink, which is still a luxury which I am grateful for,  there are all types of skaters of all different levels.  I should say that most of the people are polite there and all types of skaters are accommodated.  But like the general populace, there are usually one or two bad apples.

I think this is the second winter my older girl has been skating.  My older girl is taller and more like myself, she is afraid of falling down.  She is getting to the point where it is kind of far to fall down and she doesn't want to fall on her back.  As a result she is a bit stiff legged and "upright" in her skating.  She needs to loosen up a bit.  She walks skates.  It is pretty good, for a beginner.  But of course the local six year old future starlet who is an ugly little rat, comes up to her,  she doesn't even know her for Pete s sake, and says, "you skate all wrong, you cant skate".  in that mean voice, not in the "here I want to help you" voice. I was standing at the side of the rink watching.  My daughter comes skating up to me and told me what the girl said. My girl was crying her heart out. 

Now here comes the tough part. You have to act.  You have to tell her both that it doesn't mean anything and it shouldn't make her cry and who is that other girl anyway? BUT you have to act, you have to pull off a retaliation.  Say Something. Start a war.  Well, that is how wars are started, aren't they? 

Now any parent would know that its no big deal.  Little kids say these bragging, mean things all the time.  But any parent also knows, or should know, that these things, as silly or small as they seem to parents, mean a lot to our small kids just starting up.  I also remember that sometimes these little mean digs stick in our brains and can keep us from going forward and totally destroy us when we are small.  "You cant sing, you are ugly, hah hah", can have such a terrible impact on our young life.  I was determined not to let that happen to my little girl.  I wanted her to continue skating, no matter if she would be a professional, or just do it once a year for fun. 

Did you know that John Lennon was so profoundly affected when he was labeled "the Fat Beatle" that in the 70s he was on some strange diet of one sort or another for most of the decade that curtailed his full potential and probably didn't help him with his nutrition or mental well being at all? (reference Albert Goldmans book "the many lives of John Lennon" which admittedly is a very negative picture of John Lennon)

The girl of evil nature came skating up to a woman and starting talking to her. they skated together too for a bit.  I gathered that this was the mother.  When the girl skated away, my daughter was still standing crying next to me on the edge of the rink, I started talking to this Mother. I said, "look your daughter said a mean thing to my daughter, that she couldn't skate and it has totally upset her."  You know how hard it was to say this, and it came out rather in a gobbledy gook and not very coherent and I was shaking in my voice because I was scared, but it probably sounded that i was shaking with anger.  My daughter started to cry all over again, but i wasn't sure if it was because I was making a fool of myself and her or that she was still sad that this girl had told her she couldn't skate.  For better or worse, I decided on the second.

The Mother kind of looked at me as if she didn't totally understand my words.  Well understandable as I don't think I had said them correctly. (Looking back, I am not even sure of what I said)  And then she said, "I'm not her Mother, I m her Aunt.  Her Father is over there, he works here".

Oh.

The Aunt seemed to make some contact with the Father and said something, but after that nothing happened.  The only thing I could tell is that the Father seemed to be ready for something bad to happen, he watched his girl and was ready to skate on the ice and ... do something, as far as I could tell.  He seemed to hold his daughter closer to his attention.  But to protect her, not to yell at her.  He looked like a professional skater.

Well, that worked out as well as cooking a lobster in a pail of cold water.

My daughter watched the evil culprit skate around a little more.  Slowly my daughter got back on the ice rink, but made sure she was always on the other side of the rink from the mean one.  And my daughter kept coming up to me and saying, "that s the girl"  and glared at her, or started crying again.  Curses on that mean girls future. 

I wondered if this would dampen my daughter s desire to skate?  I wondered if I had accomplished any thing what so ever by talking to the Mother who turned out to be the Aunt?  I wondered if maybe for all involved it would`nt have been better if I had just sat at the table like a log as I had intended after lunch and let my meal properly digest into my internal being, like the Buddha.

Basically I still wonder if I did the right thing at all.

Ah, the love and labor of being a Father.  Sometimes you just don't know if you are doing it right. In fact many times you are not sure if you are doing it right. 

For a successful outcome of something similar you should read Raymond Carvers story called "Bicycles, Muscles and Cigarets" .  Or you should listen to Louis CK s account of how he got back at a little boy who was being mean to his daughter, "you gotta protect your children".