The Inquisition

“It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”  “I just wanted to see what would happen.”

Just a couple snippets of the inner thoughts of a child.  Well, mine anyway.  I’m a living case study concerning all matters “parent-child psychology”, but I can vividly remember mumbling through a few of them myself as a child.  I still have the scars, dents, and fracture-related arthritis to remind me of the associated aftermaths.  However, it’s my charismatic children that now stand to serve a refresher crash course, specifically for my wife and I.

Recently, I went into the garage to grab some nails from my tool bench.  What I found, however, were a couple of nuts.  Sitting on the floor of the garage was my daughter.  Bicycle helmet on, looking down towards the ground, bracing herself.  My son, standing directly in front of her.  Foam-covered wiffleball bat raised completely over his head, ready to swing down.  I must have caught him at “T-minus-two” because I received a surprised, half-hearted smile and customary shoulder shrug after breaking his concentration.

I simply looked at him with my hands motioning to my daughter.  “Really?”

“What?  She has a helmet on.”

The “facepalm” was nearly involuntary.  Involuntary, due to the number of times in a week that I find myself performing it.

Frankly, he had a point.  They had at least taken a helmet into consideration.  If it were my brother and I as kids, we probably wouldn’t have thought that far ahead.  The plan would have been considerably more rudimentary and, let’s be honest, a wiffleball bat simply would not have achieved what he and I would have envisioned as a respectable rate of downward velocity.  I am fairly certain, though, that my son’s experimentation with physics, freak accidents involving bicycles and wiffleball bats, and the biological fundamentals of cranial flexibility would have quickly escalated until true blunt-force-trauma was achieved.  Better to have broken up this party in the research and development stages.

 “Is that really such a great idea?” 

It was your typical, rhetorical question that every parent feels compelled to ask in response to performances such as these.  Personally, I have to.  The cheap amusement that I get out of seeing his wheels spin, in a desperate attempt to formulate an acceptable explanation, is just too good to pass up. 

So starts the Parental Inquisition. A full fatherhood tribunal involving his specific actions and their potential consequences.  I presented my own lengthy dissertation as to why “bat” and “little sister” do not belong in the same sentence together.  However, the more I talked, the more I could see his eyes wandering further out of focus.  The wheels were spinning, but not necessarily on anything that I was spouting.  Most likely, he was mentally flowcharting his next initiative.  I heard accountability and responsibility coming out.  He heard Charlie Brown’s teacher coming in.  “Wa-wonk, wa-wonk, wonk”.

Unfortunately, much like my facepalm ritual, the Inquisition has quickly become an encore performance these days.  A recent example accompanied my son’s gravitational theories concerning the centripetal force required to successfully spin a hammock-full of four year olds, 360 degrees around in a circle.  Unfortunately, only enough force to achieve 180 degrees was reached that evening.  My daughter and friend found themselves with a faceful of mulch.  Back to the drawing board for Sir Isaac Newton... 

Yet another Inquisition was conducted several weeks later, following my son’s aspirations of a winner-take-all game of “chicken” down our driveway.  Son and daughter pedaling their big wheels full-speed towards each other, then veering left or right at the last moment to avoid sure carnage.  My daughter lost that bout too, by the way.  Amidst the mayhem that morning, I firmly believe that James Dean would have been proud of her unwavering moxie.  In hindsight, I think that I can also officially rule out any career for them in statistics, as they both failed miserably in determining their individual success rates in carnage avoidance.  Insurance adjusters perhaps?

Ultimately, it all seems to come back to the old “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” theory.  Improvised bike ramps that would have failed every building code known to man, backfiring potato cannons full of butane, and homemade rocket launchers involving aerial fireworks and my father’s pipe clamps were just a few personal debacles of note.  Most led to friends-turned-M*A*S*H* personnel in frantic episodes of dragging battered comrades back to their respective houses for bandaging and antiseptic.   Shouting wildly at each other along the way in a desperate attempt to get our stories straight for the mom. 

No one ever got seriously injured…not that anyone would admit to anyway.  It was pretty tough to mask the dozen stitches and accompanying skull staples for yours truly though.  From that point forward, heaving coffee cans full of carriage bolts at each other was unspokenly frowned upon amongst friends.

Deep down, you can’t say that it really gets any better with age either.  I’m willing to bet that over 50% of the weekend emergency room visits for 18-50 year old males start out with the phrase “wanna see what I can do” or “hey man, check this out”.  I have personally witnessed at least a dozen of these events.  Probably been a direct party to twice that.  That’s all that I’m willing to admit to on-the-record though, without an attorney present and a gratuitous sound-bite of Jack Palance’s “Believe it…or not”.

Even though it’s inescapable that my son will continue to navigate youth with his father’s genetic idiocy coursing wildly through his veins, I have at least highlighted the need for him to start leaving his sister out of his master plan.  Glass-half-full, I have been the beneficiary of sprint-related cardio workouts after overhearing “go ahead, try it” from the next room.  However, as his ideas grow more elaborate, I also see my odds of success significantly fall in the area of preemptive catastrophe interference.   

I take it back.  The bike helmet was a magnificent idea.