Billy Coffey

storyteller

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Difficult losses

January 31, 2011 by Billy Coffey 20 Comments

image courtesy of gamescrafters.berkeley.edu
image courtesy of gamescrafters.berkeley.edu

We Coffeys are a competitive bunch. Life most character traits, that particular one has both its plusses and minuses. But by and large, our competitiveness has served us well. We are not content to be merely good at something. We have to be the best. And of course, in order to be the best, you first have to beat the best.

Which I suppose is why my son kept challenging me to games of Connect Four. You know the game, right? Big yellow rectangle on a pair of blue plastic stilts. One person has black checkers, the other red, and the winner is the first to get four of his or her colors in a row. Santa brought it for Christmas. Mostly because I played it all the time when I was a kid.

My son took to the game just as I did in my once-upon-a-time. We played a game under the tree on Christmas night, then again the night after, and then every night since. Until tonight, anyway. But I’ll get to that.

The thing about playing games with your kids is that you wonder when and if you should let them win. I’ve let my kids beat me at wrestling and boxing and Scrabble and chess. Not often, mind you, but often enough. It’s important they learn graciousness. Both when they win and when they lose. But I never let my son beat me at Connect Four. Some things needs to be a challenge. And to be honest, I like my kids to think I’m a genius at something for now. I know it won’t always be like that.

So we played. He tried, I toyed. He lost, I won.

Until last night.

My son beat me. Snuck in a backdoor diagonal of four red checkers. I never saw it. And what’s worse—what’s maybe worst of all—is that by that point I really was trying to beat him. He had homework to do, and so did I. I’d used my last move to set up my third black piece in a row, hidden from his sight on the opposite side of the board. It was a brilliant move. His was more so.

He dropped in his fourth checker and bulged his eyes.

I bulged mine.

“I win!” he shouted. Then he jumped up and crawled around to my side of the board just to make sure. “I win!”

There had to be some mistake. He’d miscounted. There were three checkers, not four. Or four, but not in a row. Something. Anything.

But. No.

“You win,” I whispered.

He danced. He screamed. He told his mother and sister. He even took a picture of it.

I was happy for him. And not. Like I said, I’m competitive. I don’t like to lose, especially when I’m trying to win and ESPECIALLY when I’m trying to impress my son with my staggering strategic intellect. That’s bad, I guess. But honest. At least I was a gracious loser. I allowed him his celebration. All three hours of it.

He was still awake when I went to bed, though barely. The excitement had worn off by then, leaving behind a sheen of quiet reflection on his face. I tucked his blankets and kissed him on the forehead, then headed for the hallway.

“Dad?” he asked.

“Yeah, bud?”

“I’m sorry I beat you.”

I smiled and told him not to be, that he’d won fair and square and should be proud because I was proud. The next morning, he said he hadn’t slept well. Neither did I.

I waited tonight for him to suggest another game. He didn’t. The box still sits untouched in the basket behind the recliner. I supposed it will be untouched for a while.

I suppose every child must inevitably arrive at that moment when he realizes his father is not the perfect man he’s always believed. That he in fact makes mistakes and misses things. That he loses. That he is a fallible, fallen person. It is a difficult moment, but a necessary one.

Both for the parent and the child.

Filed Under: failure, family, parenting, Uncategorized Tagged With: Connect 4, fatherhood

Ever forward

August 20, 2010 by Billy Coffey 26 Comments

I sat on the edge of my son’s bed and tapped the paintbrush against my hand.

“You know that brush is wet, right?” my wife asks.

I don’t. Not till then. I smear the blue against my jeans, thinking that if I had bought them at the store like that, it would have set me back about a hundred dollars.

“Is he sure he wants to do this?” I ask.

“He said he did,” she answers.

“Do you believe him?”

She pauses then says, “I don’t want to.”

“Me neither,” I say, “but it’s his room, right?”

Another pause. Then: “Right.”

We had painted the Winnie the Pooh mural when our daughter was born, and she had slept beneath it for two years until she had to move out to make room for our son. But at five, he thinks Winnie the Pooh is for kids. And he is no longer a kid. My task today is to erase it. To paint over it and cover it up with pictures of Derek Jeter and Lou Gehrig.

I do not want to do this.

So this morning I painted the trim, the doors, and the other three walls, trying to postpone the inevitable. But with everything else done, the inevitable is here.

It’s just a stupid wall, I tell myself. But it’s not, and I know that. This is a symbol. A memory of the fear and joy of becoming a parent for the first time.

You battle the passage of time with your children. You fight to keep them small and innocent and on your lap. And even if you know they will soon be big and experienced and on their own, you fight anyway.

Painting over this feels like surrender. And I’m not quite ready to wave the white flag.

My eyes gaze around his room, and I catch myself wondering how much longer my son will be in it. He’ll start kindergarten next year. No doubt it’ll seem as if he’ll start high school the year after that, graduate from college the year after that, and the year after that I’ll be holding my grandchildren.

Somewhere in between, my son will realize something. He’ll find the truth about his old man. He’ll discover that I’m really not the superhero cowboy he thinks I am. That I might be tough on the outside, but I’m pretty soft on the inside. That I can’t fix everything, don’t know anything, and fret over a lot more than I let on.

He’ll have his own life with his own family. I’ll have to let him go so he can find his own way.

Such is the constant churning of life, ever forward and never backward. And though we plant our shoulders to the gears of our days and beg them to stop, they roll on anyway.

But just as I am ready to surrender after all, I spot something on my son’s dresser that makes me smile. Sitting there beside his Lightning McQueen lamp is my father’s wallet, left by him just a few hours ago. My normally steady hand seems to disappear whenever I’m painting trim, so I had called him for a little help.

And he answered. Just like he always has.

A lot has changed in my life since I was my son’s age. A lot hasn’t, too.

Still, after all these years, my father is there for me. There to help me fix the truck or cut some wood or tend the garden. There for advice or wisdom or to shoot the breeze.

Just…there.

The fact that I have my own life and my own family, the fact that I’ve found my own way, hasn’t changed everything. Time doesn’t always break our bonds. Sometimes it grows them deeper.

I move from my son’s bed to the tray of paint next to the wall, pick up the roller, and begin. Gone is the leafy tree, pouty Eeyore, Piglet, and Tigger. Gone is Christopher Robin and the unknown book he’s entertained his friends with for over seven years. And then, finally, Pooh is gone, too.

And that’s okay. Because as I paint I have in my mind a far-away picture of another man’s house and another child’s dresser. And I think of that man sitting upon the edge of that child’s bed, staring at my wallet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: change, fatherhood, memories, youth

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