Failing to Find the Humor

The Wife comes up to me the morning at the hockey rink and says “Guess what your daughter did this morning?”

I hate that question. For one, I never guess the right answer. Very annoying. Second, the answer is 100% guaranteed to involve some type of transgression that attains new levels of egregiousness. So after preparing myself, I shook my head and asked what happened.

The lass had pushed dog #1 down the stairs. Most importantly, everyone was basically OK. The dog was traumatized more by the scolding the Wife meted out to the lass than by the ride down the stairs. She (the dog) is unhurt with no limping.

The lass should be so lucky. Actually, she was lucky I wasn’t there to witness the act. While I have improved in controlling my temper tremendously during my parenthood, I regret to say that wanton cruelty to our animals still sets me off.

The Wife explained that she had instructed the lass to tell me what she did. She never did say anything to me. At least, not until the Wife reminded her when we all returned home after skating practice. Even then, I had to give her the old “What are you supposed to tell me?” line.

Since I’d had an hour or so to process the information already, I was able to perform a “controlled burn,” so to speak. Rather than completely fly off the handle, I gave a decent first approximation of being really mad while lecturing her.

And then she started smiling.

The boy went through a similar phase as well. I didn’t take kindly to it then either. In his case, he would fidget and squirm and cover his mouth with an arm or hand or something. But it infuriated me further, because the reason behind the lecture is no laughing matter. There’s nothing funny about what’s going on- not from any perspective.

I eventually came to the conclusion that it’s some kind of nervous reaction. I still didn’t like it, but I tried not to escalate things when I’d see him start to smile during a serious lecture. In fact, I attempted to ignore the behavior entirely.

Seeing the lass do it under the circumstances was a curveball. She hadn’t done it before, and I immediately jumped on her with the “You think this is funny?” line of questions. I realized what was happening and was able to rein in my emotions. Interestingly, her smiling stopped once I stopped focusing on it.

As for the pushing incident, the Wife and I are still trying to determine what exactly to do. I’ve already told the lass she can’t eat the candy Sparky(our shelf elf) had left for her this morning. No smiles when she heard that.