There's a funny scene in the new Billy Crystal movie Parental Guidance. Billy plays Artie "Fartie" Decker, minor league baseball announcer and reluctant, usually-distant grandpa, watching his grandson Turner play Little League for the first time. Turner pitches three in a row, strikes out the school bully, and Billy's character is overjoyed.
"He's outa there!" he shouts gleefully, buttons bursting off his chest.
"No," says the somewhat apologetic umpire. "In this league, we let the kids keep hitting until they get on base."
"But that's dumb," Billy's character says incredulously. "That's not baseball. Listen to the song. It's 'one, two, three strikes you're out,' not 'one, two, three strikes, keep going."
"Sorry," the umpire says, himself embarassed by the silliness of it. "We don't want any of the kids to feel like losers."
"But baseball has losers," Billy says. "Otherwise, how would the game ever end?"
"In this league, every game ends in a tie," shrugs the embarassed ump.
The collective "oy veys" of the on-screen characters and the movie theater audience were palpable. It's all too true, after all. We live in this touchy-feely, psycho-babble world where kids no longer play games to win or (God forbid) lose, but where they're all perfectly equal in spite of variations in skill, athleticism or luck, everyone cooperates, and coming in second is so damaging to tender young psyches, it's downright abusive to put your six-year-old in a contest where, horror of horrors, he might actually lose.
So, in the true spirit of defensive parenthood, which means I'll mock you for doing it while Adam and I do it all the time, I have to admit, I'm a hopeless hands-up hypocrite. Adam and I are guilty of this crazy, ridiculous, insane "nobody loses" goal for our children, every day, in spades.
J1 and J2 have lost an awful lot in their lives. They've lost parents, they've lost the parents that came after those parents, and then the parents that came after them.
They've lost homes, they've lost foster siblings, they've lost schools and classmates and churches and the very clothes that used to hang in their closets. At not one, but several times in their life through no fault of their own, they lost total control of their lives and their future, and along with that, a lot of their self-assuredness and dignity.
And I think when you've lost all that and couple it with the natural childhood adreniline rush of coming in first, you have a monster problem on your hands. Our kids have lost so many real things in their life, when they sit down to play Candyland, trivial as it seems, if one of them gets almost to the end of the board, then gets bumped back to the peanut or the gingerbread man, we've got one mother of a meltdown on our hands. After all, that must be a whole lot what their life keeps feeling like.
Justice and Justin don't like to lose. Especially not to each other.
That's not to say we don't try. It would be a ridiculous life, and we would be ridiculous parents, if we never taught the two of them that the world, like it or not, comes with winners and losers. We faithfully play all sorts of board games and card games in our house, and both of them win and both of them lose, and sometimes we have fun, but more often than not, it's a repeated disaster. But that's okay. Practice rarely makes perfect in any trite sense of the cliche, but my hope is, after losing to each other a hundred more times, the sting may be lessened. Or at least the tantrums that come with it. They might get used to losing a game once in a while and learn, after experiencing it enough, their world really won't end and life can still be good. Please God, may it be so.
Currently, our two favorite non-competitive games are a Dr. Seuss game Aunt Heidi gave us when the kids moved in. It's called "I Can Do That," and it's wonderful. Nobody wins, nobody loses, we just take turns drawing cards, putting them together and doing silly challenges like "Crab walk to the refrigerator with the plate on your stomach before the timer runs out."
Side note. Even on my best day, you do not want to see me crab walk. And certainly not with a plate on my stomach.
The other game is "Max," a game introduced to us last week by the childrens' therapist, Miss Hannah.
Our kids have a lot of "Misses" in their life. There's Miss Mary, their case worker, Miss Staci, her boss, Miss Tabitha, their old therapist, Miss Hannah, their new therapist. Swing a dead cat around the Department of Family Services and I guarantee you'll whack a miss.
Miss Hannah, comes to our house once a week on Monday nights and God bless her for trying, she often brings a game along. Usually these are met with their mild cooperation or their utter boredom. Depends on the game.
I'll be the first to admit, I totally don't get our children's therapy. I'm like Billy Crystal at the ballgame, scratching my head and looking like a befuddled grandpa. I have no illusion I was born in a much different era, because honestly, two hours a week where we play goofy games and draw goofy pictures makes no useful sense to me at all. We do our routine at the kitchen table, the kids go to bed and the therapist goes home. And what have we accomplished?
None of it ever seems to address the problems of the week, or even remotely tie into the issues in our lives, but since I'm not an expert and I'm the first to admit my own general cluelessness, I drink the Kool-Aid and hope for the best. When therapy night rolls around, I suck up my second guessing, throw common sense to the wind and go completely on faith that whatever "M.S., L.M.F.T." means after Miss Hannah's name, she has a clue what she's doing, and in the long run, might help us learn to love and trust each other more.
Anyhoo, last Monday she brought us "Max," a game so fun, after she left, I hopped on Amazon and ordered us our own family copy. It was marvelous! It's a simple little, homemade-looking game from a toymaker in Ontario, in which a black cat named Max chases a bird, a chipmunk and a mouse around the game board. Players don't compete against each other, but cooperate in turns, helping the animals make it safely to the tree and occasionally calling Max back to the porch with a snack...cheese, milk or catnip.
We had so much fun, all of us, laughing and rolling the dice and sitting on the edge of our chairs, for a minute, we forgot were were in therapy. We were just a family having fun. Miss Hannah, picking up on the rare, new naturalness she was seeing in our living room, put the game away and got out the crayons.
"I want you to draw me a picture," she said, first to Justin, then later in her second session with Justice.
"Draw me a boat."
Justin's looked like pirate ship. Justice's looked like a cruise ship to the Bahamas. Smart girl.
"Now draw me a storm," she said. They both drew clouds. They both drew rain. They both drew lightning. Justin drew a shark swimming menacingly through the crashing waves.
"Now draw your family on board the ship," she said. And she waited while they did.
"Now I want you to think about this for a little while," Miss Hannah said. "I want you each to answer three questions for me. What are you doing on the boat? What is the storm about? And how do you get out of the storm?"
They both went away and considered this for a few moments. We met back momentarily to compare answers.
Justice answered first.
"We're on vacation. The storm is about thunder. And if we want to be safe, we go down below the deck where we're out of the rain."
Justin was even more direct.
What are we doing on the boat?
"We're trying to stay dry."
What is the storm about?
"The shark bit our ship, and we almost sank."
How did we get out of the storm?
"We swam the other way, so the shark couldn't get us."
Now I'm not one to grasp at Freudian straws. I'm sure that Justin didn't mean the storm was his life. And I'm sure he didn't mean Adam and I were his saviors from its sharks, though Lord knows he's certainly had some. Things like that are too easily made symbolic, especially when kids are involved. They make our adult light bulbs go off, we want to cheer inside for the honorable mention their new life seems to be bringing them, but they're really not accurate. They're just pictures. And rescue like that is not yet within the realm of the abstract articulation of a six and seven-year-old child.
What I did notice, however - and here's what made Adam and I feel really good - was not what they said, but the fact that the kids drew us as a family, and we were finally the only ones in the picture. One, two, three, four. It was the first time in seven months both kids drew us - just the four of us - as a self-contained family unit of our own. Usually their drawings have imaginary moms, or foster sisters from their previous lifetime. Pets, aunts, fantasies, anyone but us.
This time, they drew just the four of us. Dad, Daddy, Justice and Justin, on deck, weathering the storm.
And you can bet I'll keep those drawings in the memory box, date on the back, until the end of time.
"In this league," says the somewhat apologetic umpire, "we let the kids keep hitting until they get on base."
"But that's dumb," Billy's character says incredulously. "That's not baseball. Listen to the song. It's 'one, two, three strikes you're out,' not 'one, two, three strikes, keep going."
Only, sometimes it isn't dumb, I guess. Sometimes it makes infinitely more sense to say "one, two, three strikes, keep going." Sometimes when you do, you eventually hit that unexpected home run.
Oh well. That's how it happened in therapy anyway.
Safe from Max and safe from the storms.
Crazy and sweet, but last Monday night, everybody won.
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