Weapons in the Form of Words

Got a lot of those things all percolating in my brain stuffs and when I try to express it via words it all comes out like, "HATE HATE HATE BITTER BITTER MASCULINITY APPEAL TO AUTHORITY MISANTHROPY ETC ETC ETC"

Let me just start by telling you guys a story. True. Last night, I'm sitting in my shambling house (which insurance adjustors have inspected and taken pictures of and shaken our hands and told us their stories and promised us they would get back to us) and I'm feeling pretty shitty about the onerous burden of fatherhood. 

Check it, it goes like this (and I'm talking specifically to all my seed bearing bros, especially to those of the male variety): You have to be hard, right? I can't be the only one who extrapolates that future where you're in a restaurant with your boy and he's being a total shit to you (he's, like, older than adolescent but not yet a man) and you sit there and take the abuse (or lack of engagement) and at the end when your boy gets up and you pay the tab and he leaves and you notice some stranger sitting some tables thence and the stranger shakes his head. Is that not the most stark indictment of your lack of hardness?

 I had to discipline the shit out of the kids. Yeah, they fear me. I'm not proud of this. In fact it's something that causes me grief to the max because it's not the socially acceptable thing of our times to be the hard ass motherfucker who, with a look, can impart all the hells he is going to impose on the frail physical forms of his progeny. The progeny then shrink from their wrongdoing. Such is the dream.

The issue (incident) in question was that last night as I was slung between the armrests of our secondhand suede loveseat/sofa contraption reading Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, I hear from the back, "The goddamn fucking gum!" as Gavin was running into the living room. Both the boys had been playing in Gavin's room and both had been chewing gum. Their voices are pretty indistinguishable (outside the high pitched ranges brought on by pain) and it was inconclusive which voice uttered the saying.

I rose. I held my finger in the place I had been reading. Gavin saw me and fled to the supposed safety of his room (where Kiernan was). The children cowered. Once in the room I commenced to slap skulls with said book. They cried. 

I seethed (much in the vein of my departed mother), "You will not take the name of Our Lord in vain". 

They cried more. They rubbed heads and pointed fingers at the other. They stood sheepishly and cast accusing eyes at me as if I was the monster and the outsider and the one to be vilified (although their minds couldn't form the vocabulary necessary their glances said the words). I cast threatening looks about the room and brandished the book. They were fearful and I left.

Later, after they went to bed I felt guilty. After a bit (when it was quite likely that Gavin would be asleep) I asked Felicia, "Do you think Gavin's asleep?"

"Probably."

I went back instead to find my boy half in sleep. I knew he needed to get up early and it was late (for him). I felt selfish and stood in the doorway with the illumination of my phone. He groaned and I went to his bedside and sat. I put my hand through the coarse hair of his head. He turned and I talked to him about it (the incident). I tried to explain to him the rationale behind the exhortations and gesticulations of his father (a wild man, to be sure). I did so to assuage my guilt. I did so to explain the terrors of fatherhood. I did so to try to illuminate the nuances of being a man. I did so in an attempt to distill the wisdom, thus bequeathed to me, from my father. 

I tried all those things and I failed. 

At the end of it my boy rolled toward my position on the corner of his bed, my hand on his coarse hair, and he said, "You're the best Daddy ever."

I said, "It feels like I'm the worst. You'll see. One day."

I kissed his cheek and all sins were forgiven.