Picture Day

I am a single father. I have three kids: 12, 9 and 7 – Girl, Boy, Girl. Their mother, my ex-wife, committed suicide almost 3 months ago. We are on our own now.

My 12 year old daughter has taken to picking up some of the slack that is left from a motherless home – not in that she volunteers to do more of the work around the house nor does she make any kind of concerted effort to feed her siblings or mother them in any way. Rather, my eldest daughter has adopted the obstinate attention to specific details that colored their mothers life. She threw an indescribable shit-fit when I moved the big green hutch from one side of the room to the other, because it “looks stupid over there.” She “[wouldn’t] even look at it there, because it’s stupid and [I’m] stupid for even moving it” and broke down in to tears when I refused to simply move it back, stomping out of the room, smashing things to the ground in furious response to the moving of the big green hutch and to my having the audacity to rearrange the location of a few items on its shelves. She has adopted her mother’s insistence upon a single way being the correct way, the only way.

I am nervous for her.

This morning was picture day. The 12 year old helped by laying out clothes for her brother, by selecting a dress for her little sister and volunteering to do the younger girls hair for her – so that everything will be “just right” for picture day. See, picture day is important, it’s a snapshot of their life today, a commemoration that will go on refrigerator doors and hang behind frames on walls and book shelves, eventually to be stashed away in a drawer or stuffed away in a box somewhere; a permanent reminder of life as it is today. It’s important, especially to her. And it’s important to me, because I want to…I need to provide these children with as much consistency as I can muster, I need to ensure that little things go smoothly, that little moments which will inevitably remind them of their mother pass as smoothly as possible, that they ride thru this ever growing tide of emptiness with as much grace as I can provide for them. It’s a challenge because many of these moments, these important details, are insignificant to me; they are unimportant to me. Meticulous decorations at Halloween or Thanksgiving or Easter or Valentines, they are not important to me; X-mas time I understand, I can participate in overblown decoration, even if I can’t provide the level of detail to which they are accustomed, even if I don’t feel the need to take Polaroids of the house to ensure each year is as precisely identical to the previous years as possible.

But picture day I understand. It is not too much to expect my children to be dressed nice, to be cleaned and their hair done-up, their teeth clean, their eyes happy. And even if the obsessive need to control the moment is appearing dangerously too sincere within her, I appreciate my 12 year olds attempt to make picture day “just right.” It is strangely comforting to watch her step in to provide this semblance of mothering behavior to her siblings, to see her matter-of-fact approach to ensuring they are appropriately prepared. It gives me a few moments of feeling like things are alright in their world, like they are prepared to take care of one another.

The 7year old red-headed spit-fire came down the stairs wearing the white sun dress with pink and green watermelon wedge print all over, the dress she picked out the night before. This was not the dress her 12 year old older sister picked out for her. This is apparently the “ugliest fucking dress” that my 12 year old has ever seen (I’ve taken to letting her swear, as long as she swears correctly) and there is no way she is going to touch her little sister’s hair if she is going to wear that dress. The 7 year old was equally adamant about not changing in to the dress her big sister has picked out for her. My happy family sensation disappeared in a flash as the 12 year old angrily threw the hanger and hairbrush across the room, stomping out of the kitchen.

The normal dad response here is to bring the hammer down, nip the bullshit attitude and the bullshit pouting behavior in the bud – no conciliation, no mercy. The 12 year old is punished, banished to her room and away from her friends for the weekend, a potential long-term loss of ipod and internet access pending if the stomping around in inane fury persists. But this is the first picture day of our new lives and during the fleeting moments before the watermelon wedge sundress arrived on the scene it occurred to me that part of why the mothering 12 year old was so touching was precisely because this picture day is significant to her; to all of them. That in her typical pre-teen way there are volumes of unspoken dramatic significance underlying the focus she is giving to this, the first picture day. As I try to reason with her, as I watch her mascara pour down her tear stained cheeks, as my reasoning digresses into reasonable but curt ultimatums surrounding precisely what she can and cannot control in this world; as I see the familiar unbridled hatred emanate from the smoldering eyes of her mother perched now within the furious, red face of my daughter, peering into me, begging me to give in to her insistence, to understand that things simply must be a certain way, begging me to stop the obstinate insistence that life can potentially function in a way different than her expectations, as I am brought silent by the impasse that is my oldest daughter’s need to run this show I realize that I am stuck.

I will allow the 7year old to wear the pink and green watermelon wedge print sundress on picture day; I will do the little girls hair by myself – to which the 12 year old scoffs, adding “great! One more way you’re RUINING PICTURE DAY!!!” – they will all survive this day. But I will also face a year, probably several years, of continual fighting over the ruined pictures from this day; the 12 year old will make good on her threat to destroy all and every picture of her little sister in that “fucking ugly dress.” It will be a pain in our lives for a very long time, the sadness and emptiness that underlie all of this argument, all of this need to make things “just so” will be conjured up immediately every time we see pictures of the pink and green watermelon wedge print sundress. Even if she is a dramatic 7th grade shit, she is correct – in its current fashion, picture day will indeed be ruined.

But what can I do? I successfully conned the 7year old red-headed spit fire into “trying on” the dress her sister picked out for her, “just to see.” But she has developed some inexplicable connection to the pink and green watermelon wedge sundress that extends beyond the need to defy her sister, to be a thorn in her sisters’ side. She is a porcelain skinned little orange haired doll; once the tears begin to fall from her eyes there is no coming back, they become bright red welts that spreads thru her face until her entire body is a crimson radiation of unhappiness – I try desperately to squelch this rising tide before it grows out of control, allowing her to angrily remove the other dress and return the pink and green watermelon wedge sundress to her body.

As we all return to the kitchen, listening to the 12 year old go into further explicit details of exactly how awful picture day is going to be now, turning her ire more directly upon me, upon what a terrible mean person I am because I “don’t understand” what she is going thru with her little sister not doing what she is supposed to do, because I “don’t understand” how important all of this is to her…to them. I do understand. I tell her this: I do understand – because I do, I see just how dramatic this is for her. Just how significant this need to have things go the way she sees them as needing to go is for her. I do understand, kid, I understand all too clearly – this is the behavior that drove your mother. This is the compulsive need to be in control, the black-and-white view of the world, of everyone in the world being either with you or against you, I do understand this. I understand the world of pain and resentment this will create for you, the frustration that will be forever weighing down on you when you make the slightest effort to peek your head out from inside the little world you have to build around yourself so as to ensure you can be in total and constant control. I watched this eat away at your mother, kid; I saw it turn her into an ugly, angry, broken woman, a woman who eventually became so lost in the complications of real life, of the world that simply has no time for her insistence on details, that she could see no other choice but to give up – to exit, rather than face the fear of being simply another voice in a universe overflowing with voices, hers no more or less important than that of her deepest enemy nor closest friend. I understand kid, I see what this means to you. I see, more than I can possibly explain to a young, frustrated child, I see precisely how important this is.

But explaining to a 12 year old that she can only control her reaction to things, that she cannot expect to be in control of anything else in life – this is not a constructive response and is met with only further accusations of my awful parenting, of my terrible and mean spirited, not-understanding ways, punctuated this time by an insistence that I allow her to remain home from school rather than go to picture day – for it is now all ruined. Her makeup, her hair, her life – all ruined, by me apparently, the slamming door to her room seems to punctuate. I implore the 7 year old to once again reconsider the dress her sister picked out for her but this has grown beyond a simple power control, she has decided this pink and green watermelon wedge sundress, a dress that I purchased for her myself and that I kept with me at my house so that it was only available for her to wear at my house and not at their mother’s house – this dress which was obstinately part of “my house” not “her house” (as in “don’t pack that dress to take with you back to Mommy’s! That dress lives here…I don’t care, go pack a different dress, that dress stays at Daddy’s house” divorced parent ridiculousness) – has for the purpose of this mornings obstinacies and arguments, become the 7year olds attachment to her mother. The idea of removing the dress has now graduated from being something she was simply not interested in doing to now having the heaviness of being a beautiful, if fabricated, reminder of her mother. And thus removing the dress was now untouchable for further discussion.

The time was drawing short, there were perhaps seven minutes remaining before the 12year old’s ride to school arrived, before their Nanna arrived to say hello and see how sweet and darling the kids are on picture day. The boy had remained thankfully marginal throughout the entire episode, taking a brief dabble into the foray by attempting to override his sister’s selection of a nice shirt for him with a plain white t-shirt – so obviously inappropriate for picture day there was no resistance, even from himself, when I told him “no, go put the shirt your sister picked out on and don’t make this worse.” He could sense the tide had welled beyond the humorous aspect of stirring his sisters up worse, that there was something beyond the scope of his little 9year old brain comprehension going down in the arguments around him, and he chose to simply make things as easy for me as he could.

But the fact remained: in the current scenario my 12year old was insisting on returning to bed rather than face picture day with her tear stained cheeks, her red, swollen eyes. The 7year old would have a very cute picture day in her pink and green watermelon wedge print sundress, even if her hair remained wild and unkempt in the way that has come to signify Dad’s attention to detail. But the pictures would be a continual bane on my relationship with my eldest daughter, if not upon the relationship between all of us; even if only representing a small moment in the grand scheme of life – the potential vast repercussions were beginning to take shape. It seemed an impossible situation, I felt on the verge of actual failure, on the verge of the first of small failure; relatively benign on its own but the starting point of small, insignificant seeming failures that will begin to stack up, culminating to form a cascade of failures – an event that I can’t help but suspect many people, many of my deceased ex-wife’s friends and confidants, are simply waiting to have happen, are waiting to see me buckle under the weight of single-parenting. The show down over the 7 year olds dress on picture day was a seemingly simple scenario but it contained an undercurrent of significance that belied the straightforward “you cannot give in” advice that would otherwise take precedence in dealing with a hormonal and bratty pre-teen. Life, my life, is not that simple.

As my attempt to elicit any type of friendly response from the 12year old was rebuked, again, insolently and maliciously, my hand swatted away before it could even come to rest on her shoulder, I turned my attention instead to the 7year old as she sat quietly running her spoon thru her chilling oatmeal. I embraced the sweet, obstinate little angel from behind, hugging her and kissing her forehead as she turned slightly in her chair, saying “I love you daddy,” partly to me and partly to her big sister, stewing dramatically at the kitchen counter. As her head was turned towards me, I slipped my thumb into the little girl’s bowl of oatmeal and slid a two inch slug-trail of oatmeal schmooze down the front of the pink and green watermelon wedge print sundress.

“Oh no, angel!” I said to her in what I hoped was a sufficient display of surprise, “you spilled oatmeal on your dress….” She looked down at the mess and then back up to me.

“It’s okay. Water can get it out…” she began, but she could already sense what this meant, that the dress was now out of commission – that circumstances beyond all of our control were now in play. She started to cry, to get upset, to turn her alabaster body into a bright red kick-ball of sadness, but her sister and I acted swiftly. The dress was removed and stuffed deep into the dirty clothes bin by the time the other dress was being pulled down over her head. Within 2 minutes her hair was a tight and beautiful array of French braids punctuated with a cute little bow and the arrival of Nanna and her big sisters friends interrupted any further displays of dissatisfaction. The 12 year old ran out the door, offering me a brief one-arm hug as she darted away and the 7year old allowed herself to be placated and distracted with the cooing attentions of her Nanna.

I don’t know if I made things better or worse. I don’t know if manipulating the situation (I prefer “ninja parenting”) as I did will ultimately make things worse for my blossoming young control freak. I don’t know where the line between typical, bratty child behavior ends and the genuine depth of childish grief playing out in the only way they know how to behave begins.

But I got all three of my kids out the door, beautiful and on time for picture day. And on picture day, that is really all that matters.

Previous
Previous

ARCHIVE

Next
Next

I’m Here