Familyhood (2 page)

Roll, Pitch, and Yaw

B
efore I was a father
, I sort of imagined the job as being the captain of a ship; you carefully steer your kids through life's icebergs and storms so that they can sail forth through life's many exciting adventures.

Not sure why my brain took me to the nautical. Never captained a ship in my life. I once tried to take the boys kayaking and pulled something in my shoulder that has never been quite the same since. I think I just liked the
image
of being a ship captain: strong and stoic, meeting every emergency with calm, maintaining order among the crew, who would come to love my quiet, controlled leadership. (And from what I understand from pirate movies, you get better food and a niftier hat.)

All in all, fathering—like captaining—seemed to be an exciting journey. Challenging, but certainly doable. Just keep a steady hand on the wheel, and make sure nobody goes off course.

Turns out, children are not so easy to steer.

My younger son was having a problem with his homework. No subject in particular; he just doesn't like doing homework. He's incredibly bright and, if he so elected, could finish any given night's work in a matter of minutes. But he is so vehemently against the very
idea
of homework that he waits till the very possible last minute, then does it so grudgingly and recklessly that it's really something to behold.

As a father, I felt it was my job to steer him toward approaching homework with a bit more care and concern. Also, I didn't want to have a mutiny—which, as I understand it, is the main thing you want to avoid when you're a sea captain. (Particularly when the mutineer is only forty-eight inches tall.)

My son, however, was not particularly interested in being steered. It wasn't exactly a mutiny, but my little crewmember was not embracing my steering. The homework did not get any better.

Fortunately, I have a co-captain: my wife.
Un
fortunately, she had no idea what to do either. No amount of helpful, gentle encouragement from either of us seemed to do the trick. Homework continued to come in late, ketchup-stained, or illegible. I pointed out that his “5” could easily be read as a “3,” and the odd squiggle he intended to be a “7” is also, ironically, the Chinese character symbol for “impale” or “to have impaled.” My son contended that everyone but me would know what these figures were just fine.

He also had a tendency to illustrate the borders of his homework with a very impressive series of sketches—generally of some military confrontation between giant robots and stick figure gladiators. All very creative—just not necessarily relevant to the work. Or appropriate. To
anything
.

Somehow my precious offspring wasn't quite grasping the concept of what was at stake here.

“This is
homework
,” I declared, as if the paper we were holding were some unearthed, holy document. Some sacred text.

His rebuttal: “So?”

“So, homework is a
very big thing,
” I said.

“No, it's not,” he countered. “It's the same stuff we do in school, and I already did it in school, and I know the answers, so why do we have to go through it again at home?”

Clearly a mutiny was a-brewing. I had to go deeper; push the envelope of my inspirational skills. I explained why homework was so important to his future as a student. And as a man. It wasn't just about getting the answers right, I clarified for him. It was about developing disciplines, setting and achieving goals, meeting expectations—and maybe once in a while even trying to
exceed
expectations. (Though that didn't seem likely. The idea of this guy ever voluntarily doing one ounce more than the barest minimum required was a laughable dream I had all but surrendered years earlier.)

I tried to impress upon him that more than anything, doing his best—at homework or at
anything
—was a matter of self-respect, and respect for others.

No takers. I dug deeper still. I explained how
failing
to do homework properly inevitably leads to a downward school career spiral, diminished earning capacity as an adult, the likelihood of homelessness, and quite possibly a life in crime, which, if pursued without basic math and grammatical skills, could only end in imprisonment or death. I let him know that by failing to do his homework, he wasn't just letting down his mom and dad (and grandmothers, who were kept apprised of the continuing drama), but also his big brother, and—I hated to say it—the nation as a whole; American kids are struggling so badly in school now that it's very likely that elementary school homework may soon be sent to kids in India—who will do it faster, neater, more accurately, and—I'm willing to bet—cheaper. Finally, as the great-grandson of immigrants, he was—as an American—failing to hold up his end of the Social Contract.

Something in there got to him. He apparently hadn't thought of it like that.

Overnight, the homework improved dramatically. He started taking it seriously. He
wanted
to do well, and was firmly committed to never letting his standards drop again.

I was so happy, I didn't notice that in the process, he had also acquired a slight nervous tic and wasn't sleeping very well.

“Why is he so anxious all of a sudden?” my co-captain wife asked.

I shrugged. “No idea. But did you see his math homework? He actually did the extra credit part!” I couldn't help but gloat a little bit. “I think the talk he and I had really helped.”

“Did you actually tell him we'd be thrown out of the country if his homework didn't improve?”

“Huh?”

“He said that you said—”

“No, no. Well . . . not exactly in those words.”

Apparently I had
over
corrected.

The next night, I went into his room and there was the same kid, hard at work, at his desk—whereas before, his customary work mode had him sprawled across his bed in a sea of scattered Lego pieces and corn chips. This time, it was well past his bedtime as he sat fretting over some long division problems and the fact that he hadn't yet studied for a vocabulary test.

“It's okay,” I told him, as calmly and reassuringly as I could. “You can finish in the morning.”

“No, I
can't
! I need to finish it now, because—”

“Listen to me. You did the best you could tonight and—”

“But I didn't finish my—”

“Shh, shhh. C'mon. Let's get some sleep. Tomorrow is a new day.”

“But—”

I cupped his beautiful, agitated little face in my hands and said, “It's just homework.”

A quiet descended. He was a bit relieved, but more than that, confused. As he looked at me through very puzzled, slightly squinted eyes, I could see him recalibrating everything he had come to understand thus far in life, specifically anything he'd ever heard from me.

While he said nothing, it was clear to me he was thinking, “You . . . you really don't know what you're doing, do you?”

In a word: not really.

STEERING, IT TURNS OUT,
is not so easy. Too much in either direction is no good. And if you steer too briskly, people can fall overboard.

I put my son to bed, both of us banking on the hope that the light of day would make the world right.

But that brief exchange caused me to realize just how much of what parents tell their children—if not
all
of what we tell our children—is based on remarkably inexact science. We may have a good sense of what's right and what's wrong, what's beneficial and what's detrimental, but when pressed to act upon those instincts, we are
so
just making it up. And we make it up all day long; a steady bombardment of well-intentioned contradiction.

“Come on, why don't you go out and get some fresh air” is followed by “Come on in—you're getting too much sun.”

“Play with your brother” ends up with “Why don't you give your brother a little time to himself?”

“No more pretzels—have some fruit” leads to “Why would you eat
seven
bananas?”

“When you meet people, look them in the eye and say ‘Hello' ” is hard to do when you've already been instructed “Do not talk to strangers.”

I'm actually amazed that my children aren't perpetually dizzy.

“Read a book” and “Put the book away and go to sleep.”

“If you're not sure, just ask” vs. “Come on—you can figure it out for yourself.”

The suggestions are not only contradictory, but often arbitrary.

“Why don't you give that man on the corner this dollar—he's hungry” is followed with an urgent “No, no, sweetie, not your
whole piggy bank
. Just . . . a little.”

“Oh. How much do I give?”

“Um, I don't know, actually. Okay—that's fine. We'll go get you another piggy bank.”

(When my older guy was about eight, he saw a guy standing on a corner and sweetly handed him five dollars. As we walked away, I gently explained that while I loved his spirit of generosity, this particular fellow wasn't actually homeless—he was waiting for a bus.)

THERE IS NO END
to the pushing and pulling, trying to get the balance just right. And when you have more than one kid, you not only have that many more people to balance individually, but you have to maintain the balance
between
them too.

At its simplest, there's the exhausting attempt to keep things equal.

“Why does he get fifteen minutes more of TV?”

“Because you had more yesterday.”

Or “How come he gets to pick where we're going for supper?”

“Because you picked last time, now
this
time
he
picks. Next time,
neither
of you picks.”

But that's a walk in the park compared to the much trickier judgment calls and interminable calculations we make to push (or pull) each of them in the particular areas we believe they need to be pushed. Or pulled.

I have one kid who needs to take things more seriously; the other could afford to lighten up a tad. I have one who is innately anxious, one absurdly reckless. One child is a “hugger,” the other not so much. My younger son—though loving and affectionate—has to be practically paid off (cash only) to indulge a hug from his grandmothers. By contrast, my older son will hug anyone not currently behind bars. Neither is right, neither is wrong; both just need a little adjusting. But it's the specifics where you get tripped up; it's like cooking from a recipe that's been destroyed at the margins—you know what goes into the cake, but they don't tell you
how much
or
when
it's supposed to be dropped in.

Most frightening of all is that
nobody
has the answers for you. You're the captain. And the crew is looking a little nauseous.

I HAVE A FRIEND
who flies airplanes. Not the little ones with the remote control box that you take to the park and try not to fly into people's dogs. I'm talking about
real
planes. With landing wheels and wings and cup holders; the kind of plane that could take you from one state to another. And also crash upon takeoff.

I had a hard time understanding why this otherwise responsible and conservative guy with a lovely wife and kids would elect to take on an activity that involves potentially falling from the sky and hurtling to a certain death.

“It's relaxing,” he told me.

“Really,” I said, unconvinced. “The crashing part doesn't bother you?”

“You have to understand,” he said, patiently. (I was obviously not the first one in his life to question this particular choice.) “The plane doesn't
want
to crash.”

“Maybe,” I said. “The plane also probably doesn't want to go to Bridgeport for the weekend, but it goes. The plane doesn't always get a say in the matter.”

“But it does. Because”—and here he paused again for dramatic purposes, practically willing me to embrace this—“the plane
wants
to fly.”

He then launched into a complicated dissertation on the laws of physics and momentum. Once the plane gets up in the air, he explained, it
wants
to stay up in the air. In fact, what with energy and thrust and so forth, the plane almost always
will
stay up in the air, flying. So long as the engines don't stop working and the wings stay on, crashing is almost impossible.

“But it happens,” I pointed out, fairly unnecessarily.

“Sure,” he said. “But usually because of things out of our control. So I just focus on what I
can
control: roll, pitch, and yaw.”

I thought that was perhaps the name of the legal firm handling his estate. “Eddie Roll, Markus Pitch, and Simon Yaw—Making Things Right Since 1984.”

Turns out, no. Roll, pitch, and yaw are, in fact, aviation terms. As best I could understand it, if you imagine a plane flying through the air, there are three imaginary axes: front-to-back, side-to-side, and up-and-down. These are the areas you want to concern yourself with when piloting.

“Roll” is the way the wings dip up or down, “pitch” is the way the nose goes up or down, and “yaw” is the way the nose goes left and right. (This, by the way, is one reason I myself will never fly a plane; what I just explained to you there is the upper limit of what my brain can digest.)

But basically, my pilot friend explained, if you manage the pitch and the roll and the yaw—countering sudden changes by rooting yourself as best you can back to center—you're pretty much home free.

“And raising kids,” he told me, “is a lot like flying.”

I was a bit miffed upon hearing this last bit.

“Are you sure it's not like being the captain of a boat?” I asked, irritated that my brilliant analogy had to now be chucked. “Because I had the whole ‘boat thing' worked out pretty solidly.”