My Secret Shame

It all started out so innocently enough. There we were, about three miles into our trip out to Tarzhay to run some errands in Ulysses. Norah and I had just finished an ill-fated trip to the library to get some more books (we had a “potty incident” that went badly and Norah asked to leave) and were on our way to run one more errand to kill time before returning home for the N-A-P. When suddenly I head this voice from the back seat:

“Hey! You forgot to buckle my seat belt, Papa!”

Gone, dear readers, are the halcyon days where us former kids were free to ride on the bump in between the back seat and front seat of our shit-brown 1976 Plymouth Volaré station wagon (or as my brother and I called it, “the Hump”) without fear of reprisal or suburban scorn. Nay, kids must needs now be strapped into oversized plastic behemoths that resemble small tanks sponsored by Eddie Bauer and that take up the entire back seat of the car. This is, in fact, a good thing, as I doubt I’d be recalling my childhood rides on the Hump so wistfully had I been propelled head-first through the windshield at any point in my youth.

Nevertheless, in today’s cultural climate, a statement like that uttered in the wrong company could not only potentially get me a ticket or a visit from CPS, but results in an instantaneous revocation of your Societal Good Father License, putting you (fairly or not) in the Bad Dad Club along side such glowing examples of contemporary fatherhood as Joe Simpson, the Hoff, and Alec Baldwin.

Needless to say, my stomach dropped to the floor. To be sure, my first instinct was to slam on the brakes. Remembering that small children do in fact adhere to Newton’s first law of motion, I instead merged neatly into the right hand lane and pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned restaraunt.

“That was pretty silly of Papa, wasn’t it?” Self-admonishment is always funny to a three-year old.

“Yeah, Papa! It was veryveryveryveryVERY silly!” (She has a flair for the dramatic. I think it comes with the age.) “You forgot to buckle my seat belt!”

“We’re not supposed to drive without you being buckled in your carseat,” I said, while buckling her in, probably a little tighter than what was required by law (and certainly than what she was used to). “Papa just forgot.”

Child safety violations aside, it’s at this point, however, where I made my most egregious and crucial mistake:

“Let’s not tell your mother about this, shall we?”

—

Dear readers. If there’s one thing that all parents of loquacious toddlers should burn into their skulls now, it’s that NOTHING will get you in more trouble than asking a three-year old to not tell their mother something that you did. It’s like taking them to the toy store and saying to them “Okay, now don’t play with the giant Thomas the Tank Engine wooden railway set.” You know they’re going to do it. They can’t help themselves.

Sure enough, within picoseconds of walking in the front door, she was all, “Mama, MAMA, Papa forgot to BUCKLE MY SEAT BELT!” Sigh. My wife immediately and instinctively raised the Eyebrow of Doom™, and I knew that I wasn’t having any sex that night.

To my wife’s credit, she was very understanding and even admitted that she herself had done something almost as bad (note the emphasis), and to Norah’s credit she has yet to bring up the incident again or make it the central feature of one of her bedtime stories, like she does every other time that I screw up. (I swear, it seems like all her stories either revolve around Papa doing something stupid, or one of us going to the “nose store” to get a new purple nose.)

And instead of letting this example of stellar parenting fade into the collective ether, what do I go and do? I make it into one of the longest blog posts I’ve done in months.

Stupid ain’t the word.

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Tagged as: D'oh, favorite posts, my childhood, Norah