parenting

Encouraging a young reader and epic dad fail

October 20, 2010 by Billy Coffey 27 Comments

When my daughter climbed onto my lap a few weeks ago and asked if she could read my novel, I said she absolutely could. There was nothing in those pages that could be considered inappropriate for eight-year-olds—no cussing, no sex, no murder. And as she’d already gone through just about every book on the shelf of her room, she had nothing to read.

For a week I watched her curled up on the sofa with brow furrowed. She was the perfect reader, the epitome of the audience every writer desires. She laughed much. Cried some. She pondered and asked questions and underlined her favorite parts.

And it was during all of that when I began thinking about how I was such a wonderful father, fostering in my child a love for words and books and stories. How I was expanding her mind and giving her proof that any dream could be attained with the right amount of work and faith. Yes, a wonderful father. Perfect but for my fallen nature.

Looking back, it seems appropriate that a few nights ago I would be brought back down to earth in such a sudden way. There is a great amount of danger in thinking too less of yourself, but the greater danger lies in thinking too much. Wonderful fathers do not dash the sense of magic and possibility that is inherent in their children. And yet that is exactly what I believe I’ve done.

It began late at night, in that dimness of mind when wakefulness and sleep melt into one another. I was settled in bed, eyes closed, when a thought that perhaps for days had been boring its way to the front of my thick head finally broke through.

It was the afterword. I had written about Santa Claus in the afterword.

About how he wasn’t real.

I threw the covers back and sat up. How could I be so stupid? How could I have forgotten that? Yes, every child must at some point be confronted with that horrible and inevitable truth. It is often the first baby steps on the road to adulthood. But this way? Having to read it in a book your father’s written? There, in black and white, told by the man who has told you over and over that people who don’t believe in Santa are wrong?

My mind seemed to fold in on itself. Men tend to think of problems in terms of solutions. How something went wrong and why doesn’t matter as long as it’s fixed. And I had to fix this. Now.

And that is why I did what just hours before I would have sworn was unthinkable, an act that was so vile and so contrary to everything I believed in that in the process of its commission I felt part savage and part Nazi:

I took my knife into my daughter’s bedroom, opened the copy of my book that lay on her nightstand, and very carefully cut out the afterword.

I set the book back on the nightstand exactly as I’d found it. My daughter, immersed in a sleep of innocence the likes of which I would never enjoy again, never stirred. The only thing that kept me from taking a shower to try and wash all the failure off was the fact that her belief was intact.

Back to bed. Settled into my pillow, covers over me. I said a prayer of both thanks and forgiveness and waited for God to tell me everything would be okay.

He didn’t tell me.

Because I shot up in bed again when another thought managed to finally puncture my thick brain.

Why do writers include things in an afterword?

Because they’ve mentioned them in the book itself.

I hadn’t just mentioned Santa’s imaginary existence in passing. I’d written an entire chapter about it.

Out of bed. Back to my daughter’s room. I looked at the placement of her bookmark.

She’d read that chapter about two days prior.

And that is where things stand as of now. She hasn’t mentioned Santa. I haven’t either. And she seems fine, has even begun a Christmas list.

But I wonder. I wonder what this Christmas will bring. I wonder if I’ll walk into her room one December night and find her in tears. And I wonder what I’ll say.

Henry Benson and the backseat prophecy

September 15, 2010 by Billy Coffey 12 Comments

The best thing about Megan Benson’s first date was that her father was not in the backseat with a shotgun. That’s what Henry Benson had always told her he would do. “Sweet Megan ain’t gon’ be parkin’ with no boy,” Henry would say, “’cause I’m gon’ be there.” Then he’d turn his right hand into a trigger and his left into a pump, which he would proceed to slide toward him then out and let out a very satisfying “BOOM!”

Everyone would laugh then. The fathers especially, but also many of the mothers (and especially Megan’s, because Terri Benson remembered that Henry wasn’t so wholesome himself back in the day). Megan, however, would not laugh. Ever. She loved her father more than most anything in this world, and she did not like the fact of him having to kill a boy just because he came knocking on the front door one Friday evening.

She spent many of her formative years trying to decide if Henry was being truthful with that promise or if he was just showing off. Her daddy liked to act big and tough, even though she knew for a fact that he cried every July 4 when the Stars and Bars were raised at the VFW. Henry caught her catching him once when she was ten. He told her that sort of crying didn’t count. That, in fact, crying when the Stars and Bars were raised was what good people were supposed to do.

At thirteen, Megan had all but given up on ever having a date at all. It wasn’t worth all the trouble that would likely happen. By then she’d decided that Henry was telling the truth after all. She didn’t like the thought of watching her daddy ride the lightning at the state prison up near Richmond all because of her.

She did prod, though. Megan had seen a war movie about a soldier who’d made it all the way through a mine field by poking his knife in the dirt and then stepping where the blade had gone. To her, that was what she did with her father. Short, innocent remarks about this boy at school or that boy at church. Henry would always give her his undivided attention and listen to every word she said. He was always polite enough to save the “BOOM!” for when she was finished.

Then something happened that neither Megan nor her father quite expected—she grew up. Sixteen came, and with that new year came what she saw as opportunities and what Henry saw as hell itself.

Say what you want about love’s abode being in the heart, it first enters through the eyes. What had drawn Henry to his wife wasn’t her cooking—which was mighty fine, by the way—but her beauty. The former Terri Gordon and current Terri Benson had always been easy on the eyes. I guess that’s what bothered Henry all along. He knew those genes would be passed on to his daughter, and he knew that sooner or later, someone would come calling.

That someone turned out to be Johnnie Chambers. Seventeen, clean cut, and very polite when he showed up at the Benson front door for Megan’s first official date. Henry had been staunchly opposed of course, but Terri had come to her daughter’s rescue. Megan was a good girl, she said, and would know how to act. Henry wasn’t nearly as concerned about his daughter being good as he was the idiot kid with the raging hormones who was currently standing in the living room. Terri told Henry to behave. Henry did, though while his wife’s back was turned he took the opportunity to offer a quite “boom” in Johnnie’s direction.
The Bensons sent their daughter off on her first steps into adulthood that night. Henry waited up. So did Terri, though she’d never confess it to him. Both of them were shocked when Megan walked through the front door a full two hours before she’d been told to be home.

Johnny Chambers was nowhere to be seen. If he could have been seen, though, he would appear to be rubbing his jaw right where Megan had socked him. Seemed Johnny’s hands had a mind of their own and weren’t as polite as the rest of him.

She never told her father that, of course.

The backseat shotgun prophecy would have been forever fulfilled if she had.

The tough lessons of a heart exposed

August 11, 2010 by Billy Coffey 9 Comments

It’s often said around here that my daughter got most of what’s on her outside from her mother. Most of the insides come from me.

For proof, I will point out that I have neither blond hair nor a fair complexion. She does. Her eyes are blue. Mine are brown. And if you look carefully, you will see that her fingers are both long and thin. Mine are shorter.

Yet we share bonds. Like her father, she is quiet and reserved. Quick to laugh, yet given to bouts of melancholy. We both wear our hearts on our sleeves and try to roll up those sleeves so we may appear to be tougher than we are, but we both find they do not stay rolled up for long. Sooner or later, we are both exposed to the world again. And we both profess a love of words, both reading them and writing them.

It is this last point that has proven to tether us to something beyond father and daughter and into new worlds with skies that shine with the brightness of story. I will wake up in the morning to find several torn spiral notebook pages on the kitchen table. On it are the scribblings of an eight-year-old who has found the magic in saying something by saying something else. Her tales are full of mystery and princesses. And she will often find at her bedside scraps of paper upon which I have written my own tales, these of wonder and faith.

Ours is a symbiotic relationship of the most rewarding kind. Our words bounce off one another and back to our own hearts…

The nice folks over at High Calling Blogs have invited me to write this piece for them today, so please head over there to read the rest. Unless, of course, you have yet to read Old Yeller. Trust me.

My daughter’s fingernails

July 13, 2010 by Billy Coffey 36 Comments

Buy all the books you want about how to raise a child into a fully functioning and responsible adult, and you’ll be wasting your money. I know that’s a pretty broad statement, but I stand by it. Because it doesn’t matter what Ph.D. says what or how much Biblical wisdom people can give you, in the end you learn by experience. This I know.

I know this, too—you learn to pick your battles with your children. Which means making them earn an allowance to buy the toy they desperately want rather than simply handing over the money, but treating them to a Slurpee when they pine for one as you drive by the 7-11. Simple enough. At least, it usually has been.

But then came my daughter’s fingernails.

Coffey women tend to have the reputation of being both ladylike and tomboyish, depending upon which the situation warrants. Which means my daughter will strut around all day long giving tea parties in her Sunday finest, only to hit me in the head with a pillow and want me to wrestle. I honor both. It’s good for girls to have tea parties. Good for them to know how to scrap, too.

The problem was the fingernails. Good for pouring tea and wearing dresses. Bad for rolling around on the floor with daddy. So when our impromptu grudge match the other night resulted in me looking as if I’d been attacked by a Komodo dragon, I called time out and grabbed the clippers.

“Time to cut your nails,” I said.

My daughter didn’t protest. Not yet. She simply stood there and stared, wondering how she could explain what she needed to.

“Come on. Sit. It’ll just take a minute.”

More staring.

She sat down with the sort of thump that would one day evolve into something that would seriously frighten her husband. When I took her hand, it was a fist.

“What’s the matter?” I asked her.

“I don’t want you to cut my nails.”

“Well, unless you want me to go upstairs and get the boxing gloves, I’m gonna have to.”

“I don’t want you to cut my nails.”

The thought occurred to me that this was some sort of game, the object of which was for the both of us to see if I could get her fist open. I tried. She didn’t like it.

“Okay,” I said. “Why don’t you want me to cut your nails? Girls cut their nails. It’s popular.”

“That’s not why.”

I stared, waiting.

“If you cut my nails,” she said, “I won’t know if I had a good day or not.”

What?

She said she would explain, but I had to put the clippers down first. I did. Then my daughter raised her hands palm up and fingers wide, and told me the story of her day.

The bits of brown and green on her nails were from her work in the garden that morning. A smidge of white paint was on her thumb from the picture she made after breakfast. She pointed out a spot on her pinky that seemed indented, put there by a stubborn drawer she’d helped her brother open. An orange stain from that afternoon’s popsicle. And though the evidence was scant, she swore there was a spot on the ring finger of her right hand where a firefly had landed and made her smile.

“How am I supposed to remember all that,” she asked, “if you cut my memories off?”

How indeed.

Like I said, you have to pick your battles as a parent. You have to learn when to raise and when to fold. I folded. A little pain on my part would be a good enough trade to keep her memories safe.

I wonder a lot whether I’m living the way I should be. Life can get so complicated when you’re an adult. I try to make sure I do more good than bad, but it’s hard to keep track of it all.

Which is why I’ve been paying attention to my own fingernails lately. It’s something I don’t normally do but maybe should do more of. Because I know if there’s evidence there that I’ve worked and created, helped and smiled, then I’ve had a good day.

Then I’m living right.

This post is part of the blog carnival on Summer, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.

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