I have punching bag man in the basement. I’ve named him Irving, after a childhood enemy.
Irving is made out of pinkish latex or somesuch and forms the realistic head and torso of a brutish looking man. He’s used like a heavy bag. That is, you punch Irving for a workout. He has no arms so he can’t hit back.
It’s very satisfying, and it’s not too hard on the hands, although I have split a knuckle on Irv once or twice. I’ve left the blood on him, so he’s somewhat splattered.
One day my daughter started playing with Irving. She put hats on him, talked to him, wrote on him with a magic marker, and set him up with all these stuffed animals so that he wouldn’t be lonely.
I haven’t used Irving in a while, but this weekend I went down to the basement, cleared the stuffed animals, removed the hat, and pulled Irving out from the rest of the toys. I took off my shirt, and put in “Lunatic Fringe” by Red Rider.
Irving was overdue for a beating, and I laid him into him mercilessly. I love the way his nose flattens and squishes to the side and only slowly recovers after you smack him a good one.
My daughter runs down the stairs, and her eyes widen and her mouth opens into a great big O.
“NO Daddy, stop! You can’t hit him!” She runs over and hugs Irving.
“But I want to hit him,” I reason with my two year old.
“No. You can’t.”
“But he’s mean. I have to hit him.”
“No. He’s my friend. He’s nice.” She hugs Irving and pats him on his back. “It’s ok. It’s ok.”
It seems to me that Irving is looking a little smug at the moment.
So she makes me move Irving back, put the stuffed animals in place and put the hat back on his friends.
She must be reading my mind as we go up the stairs, because she grabs my hand and looks at me sternly. “You can’t hit him.”
“Ok. I won’t.”
My wife and I don’t fight very much, and we try never to do so in front of our child. The truth is that we have once or twice. The other truth is that I’ve maybe used profanity once or twice when I thought my daughter was too young to pick up on it, like before she was a year old.
She wasn’t.
I was yelling because my wife moved the gas cans from the safe location I had stored them to right in front of a garage window. They were swollen and bloated when I found them, and my wife seemed unimpressed with the serioussness of the error.
In order to emphasize my wholly rationale point, I overruled her objections by shouting very loudly about using ones brains so you don’t blow the garage up, and she started shouting back.
My daughter runs into the room, shouting at the top of her lungs!
“Shut up! Daddy Shut Up! Mommy shut Up!”
She stares at us sternly until we quiet down. She’s not upset, she’s either playing peacemaker or more likely the argument seems like it would be fun to join in, so she did.
We start arguing again, but this time more quietly. That doesn’t last long and soon there’s some mild shouting.
“Fucken! Fucken! Fucken! Fucken! You Fucken! Fucken!” My daughter yells.
Neither me nor my wife has cursed in my daughter’s presence since she was an infant, and even then only once or twice.
Somehow she remembered some argument that we didn’t even remember having, way back when, and it stuck.
She parrotted it back to us in the form it must have seemed to an infant’s eyes.
My wife and I look at each other chagrined.
“I’ll remember about the gas.”
“Ok honey. I’m sorry I yelled.”
“You wanna get ice cream? Ok we can get ice cream.” my daughter says.
If you think that’s bad…just wait until she hits the college years.