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Daddy is the kind of man that reads the directions.  Kids don’t come with directions, but they come with parenting books, so Daddy read a few parenting books.  Some have really good ideas … when your kid misbehaves, discover the underlying motivation and find an alternative way to satisfy it.  Those we used.  Some have really harsh ideas … if you are going to spank your kid, make sure it hurts.  Those we didn’t.

Toddler parenting books have ideas about potty training.  Mommy had been saying for a while, “I think it’s time for potty training.”  Daddy thought about that.  Daddy thought about all those independent, asynchronously timed, triplet trips to the toilet and imagined that the only outing they’d be doing is back and forth to the nearest restroom.  How does a parent know when it’s time for potty training?  Daddy heard about a boy who announced one day, “I want potty.  No more diapers.”  That seemed pretty clear.  But Daddy wondered … are there other signs?

Toddler parenting books have ideas about when it’s time to start potty training.  The child must be physically mature enough, psychologically ready, aware of his body and cognitively capable of understanding the process.  Daddy  even saw a Potty Training Readiness Checklist … including “gives a physical or verbal sign when he’s having a bowel movement such as grunting, squatting, or telling you.”  We’re at a slight disadvantage, of course, because Team Vietnam grunts to communicate everything and squats like a Vietnamese to play with anything.  One supposes the signs existed.  A tug at the pants here.  A red faced grunt there.  Daddy may have missed them.  So the boys came up with a sign that was unmistakable, a sign Daddy never read about.  Daddy didn’t see this in the parenting books.

It was 7am.  Daddy’s alarm goes off.  It’s wake-up time.  The boys are up, squealing and banging and waiting for Daddy to open the door.  Daddy dresses.  Daddy’s still half asleep.  He opens the door.  Blankets, animals, socks, toys and pillows are scattered about the room.  All seems normal.  This is the way it is every morning.

Or is it?  Something’s off.  Something’s different.  They boys stand quietly in the middle of the room.  Grunt!  One points.  What’s he pointing at?  Daddy scans.  What’s the matter with that bed sheet?  Why is there a diaper on the floor?  Where are his pants?  Why are there three pajama bottoms on the floor?  What is that?  Another diaper.  Is there a smell in here?  What’s that over there?  And that?  And the bed sheet … what’s up with the bed sheet?  It looks like poop.  Poop.  That looks like poop, too.  It smells like poop.  The boys are pointing at something else.  Grunt!  Grunt!  And more.  Oh my …

At this point reality collides with Daddy’s half-awake expectations of normalcy.  This can’t be happening!  Daddy’s brain refuses to see what he sees.  Only a single word launched itself from Daddy’s mouth … “NO!”.  “No”, as in, no this can not be happening at 7am in the morning.  “No”, as in, this is a no-no-no-no.  “No”, as in, those slow-motion movie scenes where the hero witnesses something horrific while “nooooooooooo” reverberates through the canyon.

Poop.  There is poop everywhere.  There is poop on everything.  Sheets.  Carpet.  Toys.  Walls.  Blankets.  Clothes.  Hands.  Stuffed doggies.

A plan.  Daddy needs a plan.  Neurons fire.  Where to start?  What’s the plan?  The plan … isolate the contagion and protect the boys.  STRIP!  Daddy strips the boys.  Minefields are everywhere.  Step carefully.  Quarantine everything.  Nothing leaves the room but Daddy and naked boys.  Daddy’s socks stay behind.  The stuffed doggies have little tags saying, “Do not wash. Surface clean only”. Fine.  Burn the doggies.  Wash everything else.  In hot water.  Including the carpet.  Daddy thinks … this is what Daddy is doing today.  Great.  Daddy closes the door.  Save the boys.

Naked boys get a shower, a really good shower, all at once.  They love it.

Days later Mommy and Daddy are talking to a friend.  She says, “Oh, yeah, my girl did that.  Poop all over the walls.  It was disgusting.  Happens to a lot of parents”  Really?  Never heard of it.  Daddy checks out the web.  Dr. Heather on Babyshrink.com wrote a whole article on the topic after a number of mothers complained of poop smearing toddlers.  And you know what … it is the all-time, number one, most read article on her web site.  Number one?  Most read?  This must be an important topic.  It sure became important to Daddy in a hurry.  What was Dr. Heather’s take on it?

“… take it as a sign of interest in potty-training.”

A sign of interest in potty training?  No shit!?!  Why wasn’t that in the books?  Daddy’s looking for subtle tugs and grunts and nobody tells him that a room smeared with feces is on the menu of possible communications?  If Daddy ever writes a book on toddler potty training, this is going to be in it.  It’s going to be first.  Right up front.  With photos.  It’ll be like those Drivers Ed films he watched in high school … look for the early signs of interest in potty training, or this could happen to you!

Daddy sure hopes he catches the early signs of interest in driving.

The other day someone asked me, “How is fatherhood?”.  Here’s my reply.

It’s an in-your-face personal development training.  Oddly, people would pay thousands of dollars for a workshop that accomplished the same thing.  In this workshop, you would be handed something unbelievably precious to take care of with the goal of never getting angry or physical or abusive with it.  Then the thing would proceed to detect your weaknesses and torment you with the goal of getting you angry or physical or abusive.  If you don’t kill it, you graduate.  If you don’t maim it too badly, you graduate with honors.  If you never, ever get angry or physical or abusive, you are enlightened and get to start your own religion.  You would have to pay for the entire workshop up front; otherwise nobody would last beyond the first week.  It’s too hard of a workshop.  That’s why people pay thousands of dollars to sit in circles and listen to other people talk about enlightenment, after which they do some chanting and art work.  It’s a lot more fun and you get to sit down for a nice dinner.

We pay to have nanny-help a few days a week.  Nanny-help allows daddy to work with clients and earn money to cover the cost of food and nanny-help.  From the Workshop Fatherhood perspective, this is backwards.  I’m giving away the world’s most potent self development program for free.  People should pay us to hone their character against our three terrible-two’s toddlers.  Nine thousand dollars for a week-long initiation into patience, persistence and discipline.  No boring lectures.  No abstract philosophical nonsense.  No dogma.  Pure, unadulterated, experiential transformative healing.  You have to cook your own food, and it would be still be worth it.

The only problem with this idea is that in order to succeed you can’t kill the kids.  I’m not sure nine thousand dollars is enough motivation for someone to keep them alive. For that, you have to love the boys more than you hate the workshop.  Best if people do it on their own.

Back in BT (before triplets), fathers used to tell me, “You have noooo idea what you’re getting into.  You can’t.  Unless you’ve been there, you just don’t know.”  OK.  Sure.  I knew that was true.  You can never know what a person knows until you walk the proverbial mile in their shoes.  You have no idea what it’s like to spend a month climbing a glaciated mountain if you haven’t done it.  Only nine human beings on the planet are still alive who know what it’s like to walk on the moon.  So, we all agree on the irreplaceability of direct, experiential empathy but, somehow, fathers like to underscore this point.  Why is that?  What is it about fatherhood that inspires such a blood bond of membership?

Extraordinary ordinariness.

Walking on the moon is obviously extraordinary.  There’s nothing ordinary about it.  Its rarity, its unreachability, and until Kennedy choose to go to the moon in 1962, its virtual unimaginability communicates volumes about the experience without uttering a word.  Even if we can’t know what it’s like, we can know of its specialness.

Fatherhood, on the other hand, is ordinary to the point of problematic.  There are too many people on the planet;  thus it stands to reason there are too many fathers.  Common as weeds, we are.  Everywhere you look, there are fathers.  For a trip to the moon a rich man would pay millions.  For fatherhood … free for the asking.  As such, it is easy to underestimate fatherhood’s value and soul sparking capacity to mold and develop.  It’s a club whose inner sanctum is more precious than gold, but whose outer facade is deceivingly common and simple.

Years ago I wanted to rent a sea kayak in Maine just after the ice broke.  Rental shop after rental shop said the same thing:  “Nooooo … the water’s too cold for you to sea kayak.  You’re from California.  This is Maine.  You have noooo idea how cold the water is here.”  At the time I took their cautionary admonitions as a form of regional boasting, as if for a sun belt boater to survive the Maine waters in early spring would cheapen the depth of their winter hardened strength. And when fathers pulled me aside to warn me, “You have noooo idea what you’re getting into”, perhaps shaking their head in casual significance or tightening their voice for emphasis, I took it the same way.  It sounded like boasting.

But I’m in the club now.  I understand now they weren’t boasting, they were congratulating me.  They were telling me in the only way that, before I walked in their shoes, I could possibly appreciate the extraordinary gold inside the hard work of fatherhood.  Fatherhood from this perspective embodies the wisdom teaching ideal of living an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.  Mystics speak of enlightenment not as being beyond the ordinary, but rather a continuously refreshing experience of the ordinary.  So it would seem that fatherhood is the common man’s training into an enlightened life … sort of “enlightenment or else.”

Every now and then Mommy and Daddy break up the kids.  Mommy takes two.  Daddy takes one.  Oh, one is soooo easy.  Two hands, one kid.  Piece of cake.  You got kids?  You thinking about adopting triplet, two-year-old boys? You have noooo idea what you’re getting into.  You can’t.  Unless you’ve been there, you just don’t know.  But I’m probably just boasting.