Bad Dad

Well, I finally fell from grace yesterday.  After years of perfection, I blew it with my son.  As I'm sure this is hard to believe, I'll relay some of the details...I think many people might find them oddly familiar.

Yesterday was a hectic one.  We've been getting over illness at our house (literally every one of us...both me and my wife...all four kids...) and simultaneously preparing to go on vacation.  At the same time, my daughter turned 9 on Monday and my wife's birthday is today.  Busy.

One of the things my daughter wanted to do this week to celebrate was have friends over for dinner.  We originally had this planned for Tuesday, but the aforementioned illness(es) forced us to push the date out a bit.  Last night we caught up - a family down the street that pretty well matches up with ours (four kids, each within a year of our four) came up to the house for dinner.  One of the great things about having this family over is that the kids all get along fairly well.  Sure it's chaotic and there is no shortage of conflict, but you could do far worse with eight kids in your house between 7 months and 9 years old, believe me!

After a fun evening of play, their family headed for home and we began preparing for bed.  This is where the "bad dad" in me came to life.  My five year old, Tate, mentioned that we were supposed to play a board game.  The request was new to me and completely out of any context - I casually declined (and directed him to pajamas and teeth-brushing instead).  Tate is an unbelievably amiable kid who has always rolled pretty well with the punches, but when he doesn't he shuts down.  And he did.

Whether or not he is adept at pushing my buttons or whether I have my own private baggage regarding this reaction, shutting down pretty well ticks me off.  He averts his eyes (or stares at the floor).  He is pouting.  He is non-responsive and, particularly, won't talk.  I, on the other hand, am somewhat verbal (in case you didn't know).

My perspective: Tate, five or not, overtired or not, needs to celebrate the fun evening he's had and not sweat it when a board game doesn't figure in because bedtime is upon us. 

My perspective: Not talking about why you are mad makes me mad.

My perspective: Go to bed.

So, I execute on my response and my perspective.  Frustrated but sure in the knowledge that he will soon be asleep and that this is just a small bump in an otherwise pretty good day, I put him in bed and ignore my own anger as he pulls the quilt over his head, completely rejecting me.  Bad Dad?  Just hang on...

Walking down the steps I run into my wife and throw the circumstance at her in passing: after all the fun we've had, you're son is mad that he can't play a boardgame instead of going to bed - you better go talk to him.  That's when I find out that the reason the game came up was my wife.  That's when I find out that the "fun time" I thought they'd been having included the two oldest kids excluding him from some game even to the point of forcing him out of the room and locking the door behind him.  That's when I find out that the boardgame was a lifeline that my wife had offered to comfort him in the midst of rejection.

Bad Dad.

Now, let me be clear: I'm not beating myself up.  My son shutting down does hit a nerve, but its also not something productive insofar as it doesn't promote healing or relationship or risking that the other person (me, friends, wife, kids) wants to change or wants to make things better.  Big idea for a five year old?  Yes - I don't expect him to get it...but I hope to lead him away from shutting down - though, in case you missed it, this is the familiar part for me.  I'm likely frustrated because I have had far more time to master the art of shutting down...and its more pervasive and harder to recognize because I'm better at it.  How 'bout you?

So now I have a choice.  Move on or dig in.  Hurting son has deeper wounds that I wasn't aware of, but now I've contributed to the pain and I would love to take it back but, in some ways, it is what it is.  But I can love him, now that I have perspective I can love him better.  I climb into the top bunk and wrap my arms around him and whisper in his ear that I love him and then play at tickling his leg or punching him in the gut and it gets a little better, though not really better...but I'm in it with him now and I'm happy to hold him for a while and, lets be honest, he'll be asleep soon.

Not so Bad Dad, yeah?

Laying there with my son, quiet and less distracted than I'm usually intent on being, I had this incredible thought that has stayed with me ever since: God is not like this.  I mean He "is" in that He loves me and wants me to be healed and would wrap His arms around me in my time of hurt.  But He "is not" in that he never doesn't know the context, never doesn't know why I'm shutting down, never isn't intimately aware of my circumstance and my failings - of the real battles and the superficial echos of the real battles. Does that make sense at all?

I'm laying with my son trying to redeem my mistake and trying to keep him from accidentally believing that I would hurt him, by mistake or not, and I suddenly realize that the cool thing about God is that he never blows it like that, never has to try and fix it, never doesn't have our best interest...our best hopes...our truest desires perfectly in view - and, far more important, never doesn't have His own best hope for us in His heart.  But, more often than not, whether because my Dad made the same mistakes I do or because of some other reason for my consistent and pervasive doubt, I believe that He 1) doesn't know 2) doesn't love 3) doesn't care...or that if all three of those are true, that I won't like what He has chosen for me.

There's a story in the Bible where Christ is sitting with a group of guys and He says something like, "Seriously.  If your son asked you for a piece of bread would you give him a stone?"  And then He goes on to connect the dots and call these guys out: "Do you think your Father in heaven would do anything less!?"  And the honest answer is both "yes, yes I do think He would do something less" and "no, but I've given my son plenty of stones...and I got a few of my own, too." 

Hard to believe in a loving God in the midst of our own failings...and in the midst of all those times we've been failed.