My six year old is in a swim meet this weekend. She’s swimming in the 7-10 year age group in five different events. She’s in that group because she’s dominant in her own group.
She’s a fish. Her skin accelerates water around her body like a porpoise. Most people propel their body through the water. My daughter does something extraordinary. My daughter slides between the water. Picture a seal moving moving effortlessly, leaving the water undisturbed in its passage, and that’s my daughter.
Her secret name is “Hee-hee,” and that is given to her by her younger sister, who is two. My two year old is into giving everbody secret names. Her secret name for herself is “Meel,” but Hee-hee calls her “Mealy-bug.”
“Hee-hee” is my child of light. Everyone brags on their kids, but Hee-hee really is something special. She is stunningly beautiful, blonde, tall, statuesque with indigo eyes that absorb light. She is unfailingly kind and decent, a beleiver in truth and justice. She’s a true bleeding-heart liberal in a way that most bleeding heart liberals could only envy. She’s got empathy out the wazoo. She doesn’t just care, she feels everything bad that happens as if it happens to her. She’s very smart without the curse of being a genius and the self-torture that entails.
But, she’s got a problem. She can’t stand losing. Usually, this is not a problem. Some people win by hard work and determination or luck (this is the way I do it on those rare occasions when I find myself victorious.) Hee-hee wins as a matter of Right. It is the natural order of things.
So, she doesn’t have much experience losing, and she’s not particularly good at it. I don’t take the blame for this. Like most fathers I tend to let my daughter win when we play games. That’s normal. Hee-hee’s obsession with victory is not.
She gets it from her mother, The Angel of Death. I call her that not because she embodies the archetype, but because she really is the Freaking Angel of Death. When the Angel of Death comes for you there is no escape there is no appeal. Your fate is inevitable. It is predetermined.
You can go gently, or kicking and screaming, but when the Angel of Death comes calling… go you must. We win the club championship every year in tennis, including both years when she delivered our children by csection, and was nursing them. Of course, I have to give myself credit. I stood on the court, thus fulfilling the requirement that she have a partner. She doesn’t play in the women’s singles anymore because if she signs up, nobody else will. During the winter she plays in a men’s group… a men’s group that won’t let me play with them.
But, she’s the same way if it’s Scrabble, or Tic toe, or charades.
I’ll give you an example. For about ten years I’ve been a fitness nut. A real fanatic. I’m really strong and have the cardiovascular system of King Kong. It’s not natural for me. I’m compensating for all my psychological inadequacies, and the fact that inside I’m just a scared little kid. The term you’re looking for is “pussy.” The fact is that I’m also afraid of being a pussy, so I’ve worked really hard to disguise it to such a degree that I’m actually a real badass except for the fact that I’m really just a pussy. Understand?
Anyway, I’ve run all these marathons and a fifty miler and I run everyday. About a month ago my wife announced that she wanted to come along on my long weekend run. I run with this guy who qualified for Boston, a natural. We’ve been doing this for several years.
So, for her first run, we go ten miles at our normal training pace of 8 minutes. My wife refuses to drink anything along the way (an amateur mistake,) and won’t even suck an energy gel. We were planning on going nice and easy but we have this natural pace and we keep falling into it, and my wife kept up an never complained and did the whole thing with us. Afterwards, she smiled and talked. We went out for a drink, and she laughed. We dropped my partner off, got home, sent the babysitter away… and my wife collapsed.
I don’t mean that she collapsed like “boy I’m really tired” collapsed. She collapsed in total body failure, the shivers, the sweats, the whole nine yards. It was alarming. You may think I’m a callous jerk for pushing her, or I should have known better, but you don’t understand. I didn’t push her. To all appearances, she did the run easy. Never, not once did she give any indication of distress.
I’m now convinced that the first sign of distress I would ever see from her would be when she would fall face first into the trail with an exploded heart.
She’s like that.
That’s where Hee-hee gets it, and I’d like to get her out of being that way.
This past Sunday we’re playing foosball for the first time. I explain the rules to her. She nods and pays attention the whole time.
On the very first ball she passes it to her defender, than to her goalie, and then knocks the ball deliberately into her own goal.
“I did it!” She exclaims.
“Yes, you did. That’s my point,” I reply.
“Nuh-uhhh,” she disagrees.
“Yes, really. That’s my point. You’re supposed to hit it into the other goal. That one’s mine. I get the point.” I click my counter over so it says “1.” Hee-hee stares at me in shocked disbelief.
“That’s not fair.”
“Yes,” I say. “It is fair.”
“Nooooooo! I didn’t know. You didn’t tell me. You Cheated.!”
“No Honey, you’re starting to make me mad. I did tell you. I’m your Daddy, I would never cheat you. I told you that if the ball goes in that goal it’s my point, and you said you understood.”
I don’t know how I got myself into this. I’m a real prick. But, I can’t back down now.
“It’s not right!” She cries, in full offended mode.
“There is no right and wrong in foosball, just the rules. That’s a lesson for life, Honey. Remember it.”
She cries and thrashes on the floor violently, and I suggest that she’s not being a good sport and maybe we should just stop playing since she’s taking it all too seriously. As far as my daughter is concerned, abandoning a game in the middle is a mortal sin, so she promises to stop crying.
“It’s only one point, Honey. We’re playing to ten, and this is just for fun. It really doesn’t matter, Ok.”
“Ok,” she says and grabs the rods with the steely-eyed grim determination of a fighter pilot about to make a suicidal strafing run.
I feed the ball, and pass it from my centers to my attackers and nudge it gently just to the left of her goal. She intercepts it with her goalie, accidently spins the wrong way and knocks it into her own goal.
There is pure silence as she stares at me with huge heartbroken eyes, welling with tears.
“That was a good try,” I say.
Silence.
The final score is ten to four, and every point was like that. Sheer torture. I couldn’t even make it any closer. In foosball, the bulk of the men you control are close to your goal. Every time I got the ball, I would pass it gently into her area, and in her efforts to stay in control she would try to move it among her men with the inevitable result that it eventually drop into her goal.
I tried.
Any ball that she hit towards the goal, I let go by making dramatic misses. I even “accidently” knocked a couple into my goal.
Still, she got creamed.
Hee-hee has a full-blown fit. She screams and lays down and thrashes her legs and cries and yells and carries on. I know enough about my daughter to guess that this isn’t all foosball, but rather foosball is probably the tipping point for all the fears and frustration of a prepubescent goal coming out at once, but it’s till awesome to watch.
Finally (and I swear this is true,) she launches unknowingly into racial epithets.
“It’s not fair! You got to have the black guys. I got stuck with the white guys, and they stink. They don’t work right.”
For the record, our foosball table has one team ivory colored and the other team ebony colored. As far as I can tell they are all identically cast from the same mold, the sole difference being the coloration of the plastic they are made from.
There are no racial inequalities on my foosball table.
“Your guys work fine, honey. You just have to practice.”
“You cheated! You took my point! It’s not fair!”
And on and on and on for literally half an hour. It’s really out of hand. I explain that it’s just a game. All in fun. That you have to be a good sport. That it doesn’t matter. That life is full of disapointments, and that foosball is a minor one. I try to console her, but she is, how do you say…
Inconsolable.
I’m getting frustrated and this has gone on long enough. I’m not getting mad, but I have a plan. A long term plan. She really does have to learn.
"Hee-hee, listen to me, " I say (noting the irony that at the same time she is screaming and crying and calling me a dirty cheater, she is also hugging me and crying into my shoulder.) “It really hurts my feelings that you call me a cheater. I love you, and I wouldn’t cheat you. I’ll tell you what. If it will make you happy, I’ll let you have the point. Not because you’re right, but just because it bothers you and I want to be nice” She stops crying and listens now, sensing she’s getting her way. “That will make the score 9 to 5. But you have to promise to be a good sport, ok? It doesn’t matter who wins, ok?”
She agrees, but I know it’s dishonest.
She wipes her eyes, gets a drink and pulls herself together and I reset the score to 9 to 5.
I feel like a total shit because of what I am about to do, but if you knew my daughter, you would know that it was long overdue, and that this was a lesson she had to learn.
Hee-hee positions her men carefully, testing each rod for play and spin with the total focus of an olympic athlete.
She feeds the ball.
I excecute my plan. I play my best. I get control, pass to center and with a wrist snap, fire the ball into her goal at about 100mph.
“GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLL! Yeah! Daddy wins!” I shout.
Hee-hee collapses into a crying heap. I pick her up and let her sob it all out. I tell her again that it’s fun, that she should be a good sport, that she should congratulate me. This however is her first taste of defeat in her short life, and she doesn’t take it all that well.
Hours later, Mom and Mealy-bug take a bath and Hee-hee is curled on my lap still weaping while we watch Armageddon.
“Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. You have to be happy, Hon. You can’t let the little things bother you. Foosball takes practice, but it’s just for fun. It doesn’t matter who wins. I just like to play to be with you. You just have to learn to be with happy with life.”
In between sniffs and sniffles she weeps “But I…” :Sniff: “Don’t…” :Sniffle: “Have a happy life.”
“What’s wrong with your life, honey. Besides foosball of course.”
“Mealy-bug always wants to play with my toys.” she cries tragically.
“So, she likes you. That’s not too bad. You’re always a good share-bear.”
“But she takes the outfits off of my Polly’s and sometimes I can’t find them.”
By “Pollys” she’s referring to Polly pockets. These are little two inch high plastic girl dolls with plastic outfits that you can put on and take off. I hate Pollys. Their like Barbie in all their cliche consumerist values and I’m not crazy about instilling that kind of crap into my kid. But, she loves them and all the kids have them, and the fact is that she’s just a kid and I want her to have the toys that she wants.
More importantly though, I don’t want to force my prejudices upon her. I have a real problem with Pollys. For me, it’s Personal.
You see, Hee-hee was playing with the Pollys in the bath one day and left one behind. They are only about two inches high and easy to miss.
I filled the bath with water and didn’t see it. I got in the bath and sat down… right on Polly Pocket. Polly Pocket went into a place where Polly Pocket should never go. My distress was immediate. The problem though was worse than you might imagine. I didn’t simply have a plastic toy lodged in my fundament. It was stuck. When I sat down on Polly her arms were at her side. When I tried to pull her out, those plastic arms were like barbs on a fish hook.
That’s more information that you wanted from this digression, I’m sure. Let’s just thank God for cream rinse’s lubricant properties, say that I never looked at Polly the same way, and leave it at that, ok?
Anyway.
“Aww, Honey. You have a good life. I love you very much. You have to try hard to be a good sport, ok. Really. Sometimes you lose, and it doesn’t matter. You have to remember how the other person feels. You wouldn’t want somebody to cry and call you names when you beat them, would you. You should make them feel good for winning. It’s only fair.”
At “fair,” my daughter’s eyes look at mine.
“Ok,” she says.
She asked to play yesterday, but I said no.
Today we played and I won 10-4.
She told me “good job,” and went into her room and cried by herself, quietly.
This parenting stuff can be tough. I hope I’m doing good.
