Daddy Rage and Otter Pops

My friend Brian teaches at BYU, but he used to be a graduate student at Arizona, where I was also a graduate student. We were both Mormon, and . . . well, you know how the rest goes. He is writing a journal about fatherhood, and I read it a couple weeks ago. When it appears in book form, these will be the blurbs from me: "Once in a generation, a writer combines concise observations with an easy prosody that defies gravity. Well, let's stand up and applaud, for Brian Jackson seems to be this generation's H.P. Lovecraft. Congratulations, Mr. Jackson, you have pierced my soul." Brian is really cool, despite his belief that what happens in the classroom should not stay in the classroom. The following is an excerpt from his fatherhood journal. Hopefully, his manuscript will start circulating like John Donne's poems and eventually it will get published by my friends at Random House and Knopf.

As much as I don’t want to admit it, I get pissed at things my parents used to get pissed at. My dad would go ape nuts when he tried to pull into the driveway and our bikes were all over the place. At the time I thought, “What’s the big deal? Does it kill you to get out of your car and move a few bikes?” Now as a dad it infuriates me, and I’m infuriated that I’m infuriated. When I pull into the circle I have to swerve through a tricycle obstacle course, left by every neighbor kid within a mile’s radius, and then slam it into park in front of the driveway and get out of the car in a huff and move a scooter, a football, a tea set, seven other tricycles, a Ziploc bag full of browned apple slices, and a whole ecosystem of plastic animals. It takes me a whole thirty seconds. It would take even longer to go hunt down one of my kids and compel them to move all the bikes in Christendom out of my way.

And then there’s the Otter Pop wrappers. Scattered all over the lawn, sucked dry and left to curl in the sun. In the summers of my youth in Kearns my mom would walk out the door and find a forest of popsicle sticks stuck in the grass—manicured saplings with chewed tips tinted orange and red and blue and green and root beer.

Then she’d shout, “If I find one more popsicle stick on the ground, I’m never going to buy you popsicles ever again!” So now I shout the same thing about Otter Pop wrappers, my hands on my hips, my brow doing the daddy brow thing. But the kids know I’m bluffing. They know that after shouting at the nobody that’s around, I’ll stomp into the garage and grab a rake and rake all those wrappers into a pile and throw them in the trash, swearing and growling all the while. The kids have numbers on their side too. What do they care if I don’t buy more Otter Pops? We have a box of like a trillion in the garage freezer. And we know the kids get in there five times a day because the lid of the freezer is always wide open, letting the hot air in the garage caress the pork chops.

So I’m blustering the same parent bluster my parents did twenty years ago. History repeats itself, even for those who thought they learned it the first time around. Santayana never had to deal with Otter Pop wrappers.

I have other irrational pet peeves I must have inherited from my parents. I don’t like it when the kids leave the table during dinner for any reason unless they’re gushing blood or urine. Cupboard doors left open make me grind my teeth. I’m bothered when Amy moves the kitchen mats to sweep under them and doesn’t put them back; there they are, thrown over the living room chairs like dirty laundry. Stepping on dried grains of cooked rice on the kitchen floor with my bare feet. The empty Ritz box still sitting in the cupboard. The hose running, a mystery turner-oner long gone. The retractable plastic light sabers all over the floor, spinning as I trip over them. I could kill a man over such things.

Most upsetting is my near-obsessive-compulsive need to shut off every light in every unoccupied room. Since I lived with a man who would follow me around the house waiting for me to turn on a superfluous light so he could shut it off, I know how much this must grate on the kids—especially Ben, who switches on every light in the basement every night before he goes to bed to chase away the ghouls in the shadows. I can’t help it. I imagine the power meter outside spinning like a well-greased game spinner, sending the bill skyward. Before we leave the house, even for a short errand, I race around the house, running up and down stairs and from room to room, snapping down light switches with a swift karate chop.

Enacting our own version of Groundhog Day, Ben and I have the same argument about the lights every night when I find he’s gone to bed and left on the hall light, his bedroom light, his lamp, and three bathroom lights—the one over the sink, the one over the toilet, and the one in the cavernous shower stall that only he uses. As much as I respect his need to have complete visibility when the monsters come up from the basement to tear off his arms, I want these lights off. Or at least most of them. You can leave on the shower light, I say, but please, please, please turn off the rest. I may lack ambition, but I see no reason to take a shot at the record for most fluorescent light bulbs used in a month. (Could there be a more annoyingly dad thing to say?)

Maybe if I let Ben leave the bathroom lights on he would use the toilet instead of the laundry basket when he sleepwalks with a full bladder.

Anyway I have no excuse for being the Light Brigade. It’s like I have willful amnesia or something. I was terrified of the dark when I was a kid. And the night light, my little comfort light, my beacon in darkness, made it worse. I shared a bedroom with my brother Kevin, and the nightlight in the hall would play with the shadows of the artwork taped to our door, creating strange long menacing lines like the tendrils of some hellish, child-eating vine. For a while there was a paper Pinocchio hanging on our open door, pinned together at the joints with brass brads, and the nightlight’s glow crafted all kinds of creepy lines on it, giving Pinocchio a sinister snarl, a crooked maleficent brow. I sat in the sheets in the dark so freaked out I could barely move. It took inhuman courage and a bladder as tight and small as a summer grape to get me out of bed, and even then I raced down the hall with my eyes closed until I could duck into my parents’ room for whatever safety it afforded before braving the hall again. A bedpan would have saved me some psychic scarring. I shouldn’t blame Ben for peeing in his laundry basket after I’ve turned out all the lights.

All kids need to grow a little, do hard things, have the hell scared out of them from time to time, just as adults need to feel embarrassed, sick, or depressed in order to realize our limits, stay humble, depend on the divine, and help Big Pharm execs pay off their cabins in Vail. But I feel hypocritical about the way I get after Ben and his thousand points of light. It’s as if I have forgotten my own fear as a child, a fear that stayed with me well into adolescence, when I would have been mortified if my friends knew I dreaded being the last one asleep at sleepovers; in the dark the whole house, always a strange house, breathed down on me in pitch black malice, while all my friends snored peacefully. Perhaps I should lose the tightwad routine, or at least find my inner boy and thereby my humanity and my dad-ity. Let the power meter’s dial spin. Maybe I can learn to put up with a few teeth-grinding pet peeves.