How is it that I came to be relied upon and looked to for explanations of all things mechanical, spiritual, perfunctory and otherwise? Since when should I be a source of knowledge and direction? Parenting is such a great responsibility for the directing, steering, and guiding of another human being! Not that they're willing to accept your direction, but just the fact that you are in the seat of being the supposed dispensary, is enough to sober you up something serious. I sit and ponder this question late at night when all the other sounds of living have retreated into the walls. I do not know what marks me as special for this job, probably nothing. I'm just an ordinary Joe like the next guy. I do know that I am a dad and that it is in my job description to have the answers or at least my version of 'the answers' and I guess that's all that any of us actually have to begin with. I love it and wouldn't trade it for the world, but gone are the days that I didn't have to speak until venturing forth into the outside world from my cave in that neighborhood near you. Now, I have to speak and it's preferable that it be something worthwhile with an answer of some kind contained therein.
Parents are the ones who have to pull answers out of thin air at a moments notice. Sure, there's mobile Google and all that, but it's a tad more complicated as any parent can attest: we are 'on the spot fiction creators' for our little offspring. When I step back and listen to myself, I have to laugh. I spout a kind of daily dribble that wouldn't even be caught in the pages of a popular book of fiction in this day and age. My client simply Has to have her answer and she will not stop until I give her one! Then, she is duty bound to question the veracity of my answer once given. This is where the fiction comes in. A lot of the time my bibliography is a total phantom, but hey, it washes just fine for a four year old.
The tough part of being the Dispenser of Information for your kids is the repetitious part of it. That part is a bit painful to me. Maybe it will ease in time as I get used to repeating myself for hours on end. Haha. Really, it does feel like we do it for hours on end, and it's not actually that much of a stretch of the truth. We get tired of saying phrases like "don't run in the house" and "will you please not interrupt me while I am speaking" and many others of the same ilk. It's funny in a way, but it's the kind of funny that can send you to that small concrete room with the tight fitting clothes before your time. I mean really! It is cuter on some days than on others. Somedays I don't want to come up with an answer for why dogs aren't purple or why it's totally necessary for us to wait at red lights even though no one is coming down the cross street when I've already told that story a dozen times, to the same person no less. I am tired of explaining the scientific proofs behind why we should not run full throttle down slick, wet sidewalks or why running through the house while looking behind you is not the best thing to do twenty times a day as the odds of avoiding a face plant are not particularly in your favor. "Why, why Daddy, why", she earnestly questions with that blended look of innocence and fearlessness that belong only to the highly evolved or the completely clueless!?? These things are both astounding and stupefying and leave me with this tingling sensation in my head which tells me that I really know nothing about life at all. Good, I guess I'm off the hook until tomorrow. It's actually nice to know that it's way more complex than I thought it was.
As parents, we repeat these things over and over because if you do not, nobody will and your little golden angel is still just as surprised and insulted when gravity plummets them to the concrete as they are after you've warned them a hundred times. So, I do like any parent would do, and warn her 150 times. You say these things to your child because you love them, yet you still wonder if your tongue is going to fall out from overwork before they get the point or right at the moment that they get it. You just hope and pray that they do get it, or at least that they will.....at some point. "One day...", I keep thinking to myself, she's going to understand this stuff. One day.... One day, she'll probably think that she has all the answers, and that I'm some nearly extinct koo-koo bird living in my own little tree in my own little Country on my own little planet. So, I should probably savor these days that she comes to me with every little question about every little thing because I know that it won't be forever, and it really is precious no matter how hard it is. I used to be the silent type. (My partner is probably laughing as she's reading this....My mother too.)....Okay, maybe I was never quite the silent type, but at least I could be silent whenever I wanted to withdraw and not talk. Being a dad takes this option out of the equation for probably..Hmm....? I don't know how many years, and then it gets reversed, right? Sure. That's obvious enough. But for now, we her parents are the talkers and the explainers and the answer-givers for any and all things, and so I try, however feebly, to answer the Call.
May God have mercy.