June 2008 - Posts

• The Do & Don't of Discipline

  We hosted a “seafood send-off” the night before my in-laws winged their way back to California. I like to tease my mother-in-law about the blandness of San Francisco’s crabmeat while I’ll stuff her stomach with Maryland Blue. And since free food was being served, our children somehow appeared on our doorstep. My grandson was also in attendance – bringing with him the kind of foul mood only a two-year-old can muster – wanting absolutely nothing to do with this party. ‘Hi Justin – how about a hug for grandpa?’ “No!” ‘Justin, come sit with grandma.’ “No!” ‘Justin, do you want some crab cake?’ “No!” ‘Justin, how about a nice, swift kick in the ass?’ There. I said it. Rhetorical, yes, because I didn’t actually say that to the grouchy little fart. But man, I was sure thinking it. And then I reflected upon the manner in which my father dispensed discipline. If my elbows were on the dinner table, he wouldn’t request that I remove them; he would simply reach over and knock said elbows from the table.   Temper tantrums and backtalk had a way of making it hurt to sit down for an hour after the infraction. Lack of respect for adults – specifically teachers – meant long weeks of bedroom confinement in addition to the sudden inability to sit comfortably. I once saw a comedian who riffed on being sent to ‘your room’ as punishment, and then reveling in being confined to the area of the house that contained all his best stuff (toys, music, TV, etc). Not in my house. As a result of one infraction (can’t recall which – they were rather numerous, especially when I chose to major in being an idiot in the ninth grade), my father invaded my habitat unannounced, rummaged through my personal belongings, and confiscated my stereo system without uttering a word. Yep, dad was light years ahead of today’s airport security tactics. Out of curiosity, a quick Google of ‘child discipline’ took me to web sites that featured cute terminology like “The Natural Child Project,” “Managing Noncompliant Behavior” and my fave, “The Big List of Consequences.” I recall my mother sharing a story about her mother’s ‘big list of consequences.’ My sweet, loving grandmother not only doled out punishment with a switch from a backyard tree, but also made the offending offspring cut their own whipping stick. American society has become much more civilized (hahahahahaha) in the years since my mother dodged the horseless carriage to fetch the dreaded beating branch. Today, parents discipline with politeness, inconsequential threats and inconsistency. And it’s that last one that we often find at the root of defiant child behavior. Anyway, while we were reveling in our crab and Coronas, Justin strolled through our living room and landed an unprovoked right hook on my mother-in-law. As impressed as I may have been with the strength behind that haymaker, I cringed in anticipation of the boy’s soon-to-be-crimson hindquarters. Instead, I watched my son-in-law repeatedly pick the child up and sit him on the sofa. Jay would hoist him and plop him and explain why he was being subjected to a ‘time out.’ Justin would then slide down so both feet were back on the floor, crying a bit louder with each slither. The scene was repeated at least a dozen times before order was restored. I won’t comment further on how the scenario ended, lest I sound as if I’m passing judgment on their parenting skills. As a grandparent, I view my role in the disciplinarian process along the lines of an English nobleman-type. A lord of the manor who, upon being subjected to repulsive societal behavior by some grubby peasant, simply utters: “Seize him,” “Flog him” or “Bring me his head!” But I will say that my daughter and son-in-law felt a tad mortified that their son had behaved that way toward a respected family elder who was meeting the child for the first time. And I will give my son-in-law kudos for having the patience to repetitively enforce the yo-yo-ing time out that unfolded before us. Parental consistency is indeed the key. If they continue to teach the child to respect the authority of adults and repeatedly demonstrate the consequences of disrespect and bad behavior, then perhaps little Justin will never find himself the recipient of the aforementioned swift kick. I, however, am in line for one serious whuppin’ once mom reads that ‘horseless carriage’ joke. By J. Doug Gill  Posted Jun 26 2008, 05:14 PM by poopaw with no comments Filed under: poopaw [Edit Tags]

• Alpha Dad and Beta Dad

  The mother and stepmother of the bride had been seated. On the other side of the aisle sat the groom’s father, mother and step-mom. Family, friends and co-workers filled the remaining seats of Westminster Hall, the grounds of which provide the final resting place for Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve yet to explore that irony of joyful bliss and infamous death mainly due to the melancholy that accompanies post-wedding emotions (27 tumblers of Glenfiddich may also be responsible for any lack of clear thought). While the bridal party processional joined Adam and his groomsmen at the altar, Vivaldi echoed through the hall. Like countless other dads before me, I stood in the vestibule that led to the bride’s dressing room, nervously ready to escort our Chelsea down the aisle. Unlike numerous fathers who ‘give away’ their little girls, however, I was accompanied in that hallway by one of the most important people in Chelsea’s life: her father, Bruce. Bruce and I have known each other for more than a decade. After he and Diana (my current bride) divorced, the three of us (later made a foursome by Bruce’s new wife, Leslie) made an unheralded commitment to our children. We would buck the dysfunctional family stereotype and make sure our kids would never suffer the ill effects that come with most severed families. In short, there would be no mixed martial arts throw downs in the front yard. Our kids’ psyche being the main reason – but the fact that Bruce had actually learned karate while in the air force was a close second. Our kids knew this would be a divorce unlike any they’d ever seen (or heard of) when we were set to celebrate the first Thanksgiving after Bruce and Diana parted ways. That November we invited Bruce to celebrate in the house his kids (and ex-wife) now called home. He brought the wine, I carved the bird and there was no confrontation to be found. And our extended family relationship has strengthened ever since.  Bruce returned to his left coast roots about eight years ago. With 3,000 miles separating him from his son and daughter, I felt a renewed sense of commitment to his offspring. I could never be their father, but I could certainly strive to be the male voice that helped guide their decisions. And I hoped with all my heart that only good things would happen on ‘my watch.’ Our commitment realized – all of our kids now in the midst of careers, families and accomplishments – Bruce and I (Alpha Dad and Beta Dad) stood in the corridor waiting for the bride to emerge. One father recalled the shy, fair-haired Brownie Scout with the thick glasses; the other remembered the bookish high schooler and the worldly college woman. One saw pajamas and play dates; the other saw ghastly boyfriends and driver’s license. One pictured tooth fairies and tricycles; the other thought of orthodontists and a 12-year-old Chrysler that (barely) carried her to college and back. When Chelsea strolled from the bridal room – blond and veiled and beautiful – we both saw an amazing young woman who took our breath away. And the three of us cried and hugged and cried some more. And two of us were trying to come up with a plan to sneak her out the nearest fire exit. The three of us eventually did make it down that aisle. And when the officiate asked who gives this bride away, Bruce and I answered with a confident – but somewhat hesitant – “we do.” And before we took our seats we hugged and cried again. And those in attendance laughed, awwwwwed, and hopefully observed that divorce can indeed be civil and sane. Before they served the hors d’ouevres, Bruce and I had few laughs blaming each other for being the source of our emotional meltdowns. In keeping with our theme of non-confrontation. we decided to place the blame squarely on Chels. I thanked him for raising one of the sweetest and smartest little girls I had ever known, and he thanked me for helping her become a strong, independent woman. Then we puffed out our manly chests and set forth to intimidate, harass, and generally threaten with bodily harm our brand new son-in-law. Just remember, Adam: There are two sheriffs in Chelseaville, buddy-boy, and us lawmen got us some itchy trigger-fingers (and watery eyes). By J. Doug Gill Posted Jun 20 2008, 01:43 PM by poopaw with no comments [Edit Tags]

• Potty Training Redux

  “Hello, papa,” came the voice from the other end of the phone. It was the oldest of our girls – Jackie - the one who shoulders the blame for me being a grandfather. We get weekly calls from our daughters. Our sons just show up for free food or call when their guilt becomes unbearable. Anyway, Jackie’s call night is Wednesday and - like clockwork - the phone rings about 9 p.m. “So, how’s work?” I asked. “How about this weather?” “How’s Jay?” Jay, if you recall, is the sperm-donor who also shoulders the aforementioned grandfather blame. He’s her husband now – and a great son-in-law – but as you may have guessed I’m still just a teensy-bit bitter. I try to ask three or four pertinent questions about my daughter’s life before I inquire as to the well being of my grandson. Not that I doubt her (their) parenting skills, but I watched my daughter eat worms when we went to the mountains and eat sand when we went to the beach. Let’s call it “qualms.” ‘Well, his new favorite word is pee,’ she shared with me, and I thought about the two-year-old’s expanding vocabulary. Pee will now verbally flow as regularly as ‘no,’ ‘more,’ and ‘NOOOOOO!’ ‘I’m thinking about getting started with the potty training,’ she continued. ‘But I’d rather his father just stand there and show him.’ Now my daughter is no Rhodes Scholar, but it’s not like she went to a Baltimore City public school, either. Surely she is intelligent enough to realize that ‘wee-weeing’ is not a monkey-see, monkey-do proposition. ‘Honey,’ I offered, ‘the boy is not going to saddle up to the bowl, whip down the Huggies and let it fly just because his dad is doing the same thing.’ I was guessing that Jay doesn’t still wear Huggies. ‘Well, he tries to do everything else we do,’ she shot back.   That, I thought, explains why he looks at beer bottles with the same loving stare normally reserved for his binky. ‘You have to hang out in there with him,’ I volunteered. ‘Make sure he knows it isn’t playtime. Try reading to him or offering some other distraction that will help him stay there until he goes.’ It went quiet just long enough for me to puff out my chest in parental satisfaction. Then she blurted: “What do I do with… it?” It?   “You need to tuck ‘it’ down behind that clamshell thing on the potty seat,” I chimed. ‘Why can’t he tuck it?” she asked, getting a bit more animated. “He will tuck it,” I explained, suddenly wishing lightning had hit the phone line. “But you will have to do it for him the first few times. Make a game of it. Give the little weenie a moniker.” ‘Name it?’ “Yes, call it [insert cute wee-wee name here], and after he understands the process you can tell him to ‘point your [insert cute wee-wee name here] behind your seat.’ Soon, he won’t want to leave it alone.” She mumbled something about Jay being on fire, told me she loved me and in a flash it was all-dial tone. I’m glad I didn’t have to tell her that mine was long ago dubbed “Little Dougie.”   I just hope my grandson will one day understand that it takes a big man to have applied the term “little” to his lifelong pal. By J. Doug Gill   Posted Jun 12 2008, 09:07 AM by poopaw with no comments Filed under: poopaw [Edit Tags]

• Can We Get a Little PR Over Here?

  Working from home has its disadvantages. The drawbacks stretch beyond the obvious – telemarketer phone calls, the dog wanting outside, my hot Asian neighbor’s wardrobe choice for the day – and into the realm of 24-hour media overload. I normally work with talk radio providing the backdrop – the droning political discussions never distract in the same way as changing CDs or trying to find an FM station aware that Hendrix, the Who and Led Zeppelin actually recorded more than the same two songs they play in rotation. The TV in my office area is always on, but also always muted. That is, until one recent afternoon when I upped the volume on a ‘news’ segment about Hollywood’s inability to accurately portray certain segments of American society. ‘White men are depicted as fools and foibles’ the Ken doll commentator complained. ‘Women over 35 aren’t offered quality roles’ his Barbie-esque companion intoned. This went on for about five minutes. But for all their mind-numbing droning, these ‘journalists’ never once mentioned the plight of the grandfather. You heard me, you whippersnappers; I’m talking about the difficulty facing seasoned males in today’s society. The men whose mature reasoning, expensive foreign automobiles and financial stability more than make up for their decreasing hairlines, spindly legs and increasingly large man boobage. Gone are the days of the Cosby Show’s Grandpa Huxtable – a man who handed his grandchildren money and told them stories of their father’s horrible behavior during his own teenage years. Vanished are the heroes like Abe “Grandpa” Simpson, shipped off to the Springfield Retirement Castle – his days as a retired soldier/cranberry silo night watchman just a fuzzy, senile memory. These days, an extended session of television will parade before you ancient males who will score with Miss Hottie if they use Just for Men gel. That is – according to the Avodart prostate-shrinking commercial – if they can stop peeing long enough to comb the stuff through their 17 remaining hairs. A Sea Bond ad has blue-hairs singing about denture ooze to the tune of the Everly Brothers “Bye Bye Love,” and there’s an Oreo spot where toothless grandpa shares a milk-sogged cookie with a toothless 5 year-old. And let’s not even discuss the scary old geezer who carves letters of the alphabet into his granddaughter’s peanut butter sandwiches. The movies fare no better. In “Little Miss Sunshine,” a little girl and her grandfather work to perfect a dance routine that will help the child realize her dream of winning a beauty contest. All is well until Poo-paw overdoses on heroin the day before the pageant. Heroin? In what world did these writers live? Everyone knows that Valium is the only recreational drug with the Parenting Association’s seal of approval.  Where are the kinda-young, partially-vibrant, semi-conscious grandpas? The ones who don’t form a band to channel Elvis and sing the praises of Viagra? The ones who can actually get in and out of bed without Rozerem, Nexium, Zoloft, Rogaine, Caduet, Cialis, Restasis, Levitra, Centrum Silver, Icy-Hot patches and Tucks pads. Now I’ll admit that two of my favorite hobbies – drinking scotch and chasing my wife – are no longer a joint exercise. I’m at the stage of my life where I can’t do both. Normally the scotch wins. Not because I love 12-year-old Cragganmore single malt more than my wife (technically it’s a tie), but because she’s two years older than I am and has usually begun the nodding-out process by 9:00 p.m. We’re at a point in our marriage where beeping smoke alarms and armed intruders are the only acceptable reasons for waking a sleeping spouse. Additionally, I can no longer hit a curveball, but I can put a whuppin’ on a golf ball (until my shoulder aches). No more will I be running pass routes, but I can still chase my grandson around the back yard (until I get winded). My performance level for manual labor has decreased considerably, but I can still weed and till a mean garden (until my back aches). And I can no longer go out drinking for an entire weekend, but I can guzzle vast amounts of alcohol over the same time period and never leave my home (until the heartburn kicks in). Now what was I saying? Oh yeah. If this blatant disrespect of geezerdom doesn’t inspire you to act, consider this: one of our original Founding Fathers is the republican nominee for president this year. Our elder hour of respect is nigh. This, my friends, is the dawning of the age of… well… agedness. In the meantime, I’m off to watch Matlock and fall asleep in my chair. If you see Miss Hottie, tell her not to wake me. Unless – of course - the house is on fire. By J. Doug Gill  Posted Jun 08 2008, 11:30 AM by poopaw with no comments Filed under: poopaw [Edit Tags]

• Cow-leee-fourn-yah

  The last time my in-laws came to Maryland, Ah-nuld was running for governor of their beloved Golden State. The wife and I played hometown tourist and drove the left-coasters from the sands of Ocean City to the shores of Deep Creek Lake. At every location – gift shops, restaurants, historical landmarks, and rest area bathrooms – my mother-in-law, Mary Lou, would announce (in a weak, Schwarzenegger-like Austrian dialect) that she was visiting from ‘Cow-leee-fourn-yah.’ It was cute the first 213 times - never more so than when we were in the friendlier environs of our state. However, an old lady with a beach-bag-size purse wandering around B-more’s Inner Harbor chirping ‘Cow-leee-fourn-yah’ is just begging to become a statistic. People often react one of two ways when they hear California. One, blond surfers and surferettes who hail from the sunny, southern cities such as L.A. and San Diego or two, the land of freaks, Pelosis and Berkeley grads we call San Francisco. And they’d be wrong on both counts. My in-laws hail from Yreka (pronounced why-ree-ka), one of the northern most exits off the state’s infamous Interstate 5. They’re close enough to almost throw a baggie of Humbolt County agriculture over the Oregon border. My guess is the miners and Indians who settled the area in the mid-1800s threw back a few tin cups of red-eye and were unable to stagger out of the valley. Viola, Yreka!  If you need a landmark think Mt. Shasta. Many of you may have seen the image of the mountain on older versions of the Shasta soda can. I see the image of the mountain in my bedroom, bathroom, guest room, basement, shed, car, garden, attic, wardrobe, dreams and the wife’s jewelry box. No sir, Mt. Shasta memorabilia never gets old. A-hem. It boomed (well, burped) again when a few flower children escaped the urban sixties-social-experiment and stopped to commune with nature. I kid you not: a town in close proximity to Yreka is called “Weed.” Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait.   Still giggling? Today, the only hippies you see on that stretch of I-5 are the ones hitchhiking to Portland and my sister-in-law, Laurie (who was married in a field full of hippies while Grateful Dead music provided the backdrop). And Californians wonder where these stereotypes come from. Bear with me: I am going somewhere Poo-paw-related with this, but my word of the day is ‘circuitous.’ This year it’s different. When Laurie and Mary Lou careen into BWI next week for our youngest daughter’s wedding, the playing field will be level. No longer am I merely the brother- or son-in-law trying to prove my worthiness of marriage to their sister/daughter, I am a grandpa – just like they are (well, they’re grandmas, but semantics be damned). I’ve long since nestled into their good graces – I put my wife’s name on the deed to the house, upped my insurance benefits to the surviving spouse and always make sure I have two weeks worth of alcohol for their one-week visit. And now, I’m one of them – a devoted family elder proud of the ties to yet another generation of ancestry.   We share the worries that come with having children grown and on their own. We harbor the same hopes for healthy and happy grandchildren. And we fear the kind of world we’re leaving to our youngest generation. Yep, all three of us are now bound by one of the greatest benefits that come with growing old: being grandparents. But there is one hugely glaring difference I’ll be more than willing to point out: I’m the only one still young enough to be shunned by AARP. By J. Doug Gill  Posted Jun 03 2008, 10:55 AM by poopaw with 2 comment(s) Filed under: poopaw [Edit Tags]