Like any normal kid, my 9-year-old played the Bill Clinton/Mark McGwire denial card for a while, but eventually caved when there was no more room to skate. Tanya explained very clearly, calmly and compassionately that lying will not be tolerated in our house. As one would expect, Sophia was embarrassed. There were some tears shed, some frowning, some running away, and some time taken to get over it all. Eventually hugs were exchanged to wash the incident away. We felt good.
While I was cuddling in bed with her afterward, she was still clearly shaken by the fallout. "It seems like you and Mom never do anything wrong," she said. "It seems like you guys always do everything perfect."
In nearly 12 years of parenting, including writing a regular newspaper column in the Fort Collins Coloradoan for four years chronicling the things my kids have said, nothing had punched a hole in my heart more than that line. Truly, I felt like an absolute failure.
I paused for a few seconds to gather my thoughts, and got started mending this fence. I explained to Sophia that she, like me and Tanya and Ella, is like every human being on the planet: she has made mistakes and will make plenty more, and the only negative would be not learning from them. I told her it's better to admit the mistake early and be done with it, rather than try to perpetuate it. We talked about how Tanya and I love her no matter what she does or says to us or anyone else, no matter how she behaves. There is nothing she could do to make us not love her.
I dug deep into the archives to tell her about forging my mother's signature on a detention slip in third grade (she found out and I got in some serious shit); throwing a baseball through a window at school in 5th grade; spending every penny in my piggy bank on hockey cards in the 6th grade without telling my mom; dating a girl my parents hated for a year and a half (I hated her too...not sure what I was thinking) and being significantly less than polite on many occasions when they called me on it; making mistakes at work, having to rewrite articles I submitted because they were terrible; saying thoughtless things to my friends over the years...the list goes on and on.
I found myself hugging Sophia tighter and tighter as I told her how I felt a true kinship with her. We both set our personal expectations too high, then tend to worry and internalize our feelings and get stressed out when things don't turn out as perfectly as we want them to. I've intuitively felt this way for quite some time, I told her, but only started realizing it in my thirties, and she was lucky to begin to understand it now. We are both sensitive to how others see us and depend too much on positive feedback. We're both a bit silly and don't shy from the center of attention, and we both need to be physically active to keep our minds sane. She doubted my sincerity initially, but I think she got the picture.
The whole experience—stroking her head and holding her tightly and listing all the ways we are connected—was mind-blowing. We do quite a bit of expressing our feelings in our house, and we're not shy to get emotional. But this was different. This was a soul-binding moment that I had never felt before with anyone but Tanya, the moment I realized I was mind-meltingly in love with her.
It's the rare moments like these that make me realize that no feeling on Earth could ever compare to being a parent.
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