A lot of parenting is doing things you have to do. Do you want to clean doo doo off your kid’s entire back when their blown out diaper goes up to their shoulder blades? Absolutely not, but you have to, so you do it. Some of it you want to do. Do you really need to buy matching Christmas pajamas? Not really, but who can pass up so much whimsy? Not me. Every so often, you get to do something that needs to be done and you also want to do it. Like playing catch.
We got our kids baseball gloves last summer, and there was initial interest, but nothing sustained. My son was 5 at the time and liked practicing throwing the ball up in the air to himself, but never really asked to play catch with somebody else. My daughters are a little older and would play for a bit, but only when I brought it up. Nobody was really able to get past the fact that their gloves that were days old were not as well broken in as my more than 25 year-old one is. Frustrated by the number of catchable balls that popped right out of the stiff glove, catch sessions never lasted too long. But that was last year.
An amazing thing happened a few days ago. It was a weekend evening and we were going to settle in to watch a movie and have dessert. The kids picked the movie and I made myself comfortable on the couch with a German chocolate cake in my lap. And before you ask, no, it was not the entire cake. There were a few little pieces taken out for the kids already, so it was like 85% of a cake. A few minutes into the movie my son stands up and says he wants to go play catch. My first reaction was to say no. This was based on two factors.
First, we were watching a movie that he specifically picked to watch. Downright begged to watch. It was Disney’s Dinosuar, which while not terrible, isn’t a favorite. I wasn’t going to give into their requests, knowing that it probably wouldn’t hold their attention that well, and also has some intense parts and my kids are very wimpy when it comes anything too dramatic or scary in a movie. Second, I believe I already mentioned the cake in my lap. My cake time is my cake time.
So I told him no and proceeded to pay full attention to my cake and half attention to the movie. He got up and went outside anyway. My annoyance at him giving up on a movie he said he wanted to watch didn’t last long, and was pretty quickly replaced with a blend of respect and pride. In an age where we are worried about how much screen time kids get (and rightly so), here this kid is making the choice to get up from the TV and go outside and play. Good on him. And not just to get outside and do anything, but to play catch, even if only with himself.
Just as quickly as annoyance turned to respect, that respected turned to guilt. Who the hell am I to not go outside and play catch with my kid? When I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child, playing catch with them was one of the first things I wanted to do. I don’t know what it is, but the act of throwing a ball back and forth is an essential bonding moment. It is baked into our DNA somehow. I’m pretty sure after creating fire, the next thing on primitive man’s to-do list was to toss a rock to his offspring. And look how far we’ve come. Now after firing up the grill, a dad’s next instinct is to throw a ball at a child. It was my job, my pleasure, my responsibility to go throw a baseball to my son.
My cake time is my time, but as much time as my kids possibly want should be theirs. Here my kid is not only asking to go outside and play rather than watch something, but to go outside and play with me. In the alarmingly-not-so-distant future, my kids probably won’t want ever ask me to do anything except give them rides to places, so I put down my fork and picked up my glove. We played catch, he took swings off the tee, I hit him some grounders, we (and by “we” I mean “I”) discussed the importance of a proper stride and loading the hands in the swing. Quintessential dadding. It was like something out of a Kevin Costner movie. Except instead of moving to the western frontier and living with a tribe of Native Americans, I was having a catch with my son.
For my son, I hope the occasion will end up being one of a countless number of times he played outside with his dad. For me it served as a reminder of priorities. We only get so much time, and while I will argue that eating cake and watching a movie is an excellent use of time, it wasn’t how I needed to spend that time on that day.
In a wonderful bit of fate, or cosmic timing, or whatever you want to call it, a day later I came up on this bit of wisdom in “That One Should Disdain Hardships”, a collection of teachings of Musonius Rufus;
There is still another wrong in connection with eating, when we indulge in it at an unseasonable time, and although there is something else we ought to do, we put it aside in order to eat.
Guilty.
I think it is funny how we can justify the time we spend away from our kids. If we work long hours, we can tell ourselves we are doing for them. If we spend time on our hobbies, we tell ourselves that we deserve it because we worked all week. Projects around the house are things that need to get done. While all of those fall apart pretty quickly once you start to examine them, it is much harder to justify crushing baked goods instead of playing your kids. Work-life balance is important for sure, and if I think it is a great thing that there is more focus on it now that in the past. But life-life balance? That one will sneak up on you. It is much easier for me to make sure I am done working in time to get to my kids from school or get to their soccer practices than it is to make sure I’m done with my own personal time to turn our individual personal times in to family time.
That’s the job though. The ball must be thrown, it must be caught, and a dad must be the one to do it. It was carved into the job description on a cave wall somewhere right under cooking meats on a fire, and has held true ever since. All we’ve done for the last couple thousand years is over complicate it.
I Think Therefore I Dad 