Will You Put a Leash on That Fucking Thing?
On Dressing the Child.
By Daniel Ian Taylor
Posted March 25th, 2007
I’ve gotten to the age now where I can ask my father the questions that I was once afraid to ask. I was once too young, not yet ready to hear the answers, afraid to know such things. But now I am ready.
Did you love mom? Was I planned? Is Susan really your favourite or is it secretly me?
Even now, with a hardened heart of accrued disappointment and collected tobacco residue, I am sometimes unprepared for what he says. One Christmas Eve, when I was sentimental for years gone by and just a little drunk, I asked him what one memory, what single moment he would take with him from this life when the time came. Rest assured that it was so romantic, so idyllic, so positively filthy that my fingers shy away from the keys that might spell it out.
Other answers are less troubling, but no less difficult to hear. Perhaps because the answers are just what I expected them to be, and hearing them aloud finalizes it in my mind, makes it so much harder to swath myself in velvety lies and ignorance.
Dad? Why did you let mom dress me like that?
Oh, Son. Why do you think? Because I didn’t care!
That is a hard thing to know: That someone can love you enough to die for you, love you enough to set aside their own plans to raise you and guide you through life, yet not quite enough to make sure you don’t look like a complete fool as you trundle off into the world in a sailor suit your mother bought at Sears. I guess all of our fathers fail us sooner or later.
I often lay blame on mothers in this column, haranguing them for letting their children run amok at the hair salon, for hauling strollers into places they ought not to go, for screaming and crying and wringing their hands when the child inevitably wanders off and disappears into the crowded mall. You should have been watching him, you negligent twit.
But I call on you fathers now, for the sake of the children, for the sake of me having to look at them: Help dress the poor little buggers. Help pick out their clothes. Your wife or common-law partner or regrettably-fertile girlfriend is only going to mess it all up; it’s built into her.
Now I’m no Woman Biologist — and never once have I claimed that I might be — so I won’t offer any kind of theory as to why this happens. Is it instinctual? Is it hormonal? Ovarian? I can’t say for sure. I don’t even want to look it up for fear of there being diagrams.
All I know is that once the miracle of child-birthing has occurred, a perfectly normal woman, one with an otherwise keen sense of fashion and the ability to discern smart decisions for complete idiocy, loses a part of her mind.
Somewhere a gear slips off its axle, a circuit breaker flips, a spring buckles and goes sailing out her ear and into the wastebasket. A tiny man with a tiny clipboard and a tiny crowbar saunters into her head and starts pulling wires out of the walls.
So I’m going over your heads this time, ladies. If you’ve yet to have children, anything I tell you now will cease to make any sense at all once your first child is born. And if you’ve already had kids, it’s too late. You’re probably reading this as you bounce a toddler wearing a “Mommy’s Little Man” sweater on your knee. Your brain is probably systematically filtering my words right now in such a way that you don’t even realize that I’m talking about you. You probably think you’re reading the latest gossip from tinsel town. Enjoy that. I’ve got work to do.
So, Fathers of the World! Hear me! I know that you probably don’t care. I wouldn’t either. But you have to. You just have to. You have to put your foot down about the overalls with the little button-flap bum. You have to make a stand against the iron-on t-shirt transfer of grandma and grandpa. This is your legacy we’re talking about. Do you want a Barney and Friends advertisement slapped across the chest of your legacy? Do you?
And for those of you who leave the house dressed exactly the same as your son in those little matching outfits, right down to the identical ball caps and sunglasses:
I forgive you.
I know that wasn’t your idea. I know you were just sitting in the kitchen, minding your own business, reading the newspaper on a Saturday morning or a Sunday afternoon when you heard the car door slam and your wife appeared in the doorway with Winners bags hanging from each arm. I know how you felt as she crowed brainlessly “Look what I found for you and Joshua!” I know how much you hated her in that moment.
And I know how your heart sank as you turned away in disgust and caught your own reflection in the coffee tin on the counter, saw the thinning hair and the deepening grooves that time was carving across your forehead. I know you realized that you couldn’t go back to the bar scene like that, you couldn’t start doing your own laundry again, you couldn’t keep track of all the expiration dates in even the most modest of bar fridges. As much as you wanted to, I know you couldn’t turn on her like the rabid dog that you might once have been in such a moment, you couldn’t list all the hellish tortures you would prefer to putting that on and taking Josh to the park.
But it’s not too late. You can fix it. You can leave something behind that you aren’t ashamed of, something that isn’t ashamed of itself. Go get the clothes. You know what you have to do.