I am not proud. It wasn’t okay. It hurt everyone, most of all the child I was trying to defend.
It was a record I was rather pleased to have maintained all my life. I’d never sworn at my kids – not really. They knew this. I think they recognized that it set me apart from the other dads they know whose tongues are more colorful than mine.
Swearing was never my thing. My dad didn’t swear. I only ever heard him say the d-word once when he got particularly irate at a defiant sprinkler head. My mom’s anger language was quite tame, too. It was her Tupperware spoons that we had to watch out for.
As a kid, my mouth was so pure that I blushed every time I heard Winnie the P–h’s last name. “Potty” was the worst bathroom term my siblings and I ever used, and it basically covered all the functions. “F-rt” was completely out of the question. My lips were immaculate, raunch-free, pristine.
Imagine how my world blistered when my wife and I adopted 15- and 13-year-old boys back to back. They were good guys, but they’d seen some rough stuff. Foster care happens because parents are in crisis, and that means kids get exposed to scary, brutal, and often really mature situations. Coarse language comes with the program.
Now these young men were part of my family, and I found myself regularly threatening to kick – not the bottoms or heinies or toot-toots – but the factual butts of bros who seemed to think that my whole house was one, big, stinking locker room (which, okay, I get, because whoa, could they stink). My home’s righteous, sparkly-clean, classy-mouthed-Christian atmosphere was turning all funky with crotch talk and grown-up-man swears and the dumbest, fakest-sounding street slang. Is “yeet” even a word? So dumb.
And then there were the seminars I was now offering on things like proper toilet use, including aiming, flushing, and – yes – wiping. Stuff that one might have thought should have come preloaded into teenage guys’ operating systems. I quickly discovered the importance of not shying away from the gritty, gross, seemingly glaringly obvious details. After finding dried pee literally on the bathroom ceiling, I decided that the lesson on first-thing-in-the-morning toilet procedure had to be just shamelessly straightforward. (Yes, pun intended. Doi.)
This meant no more baby talk from Pops.
I’d like you to raise your hands, all you dads who’ve had to give in-person, on-the-toilet, plop-to-flush butt-wiping demonstrations to your 15-year-old sons. Oh sure, he told me he was doing it, but the unflushed toilets and skiddy underpants in the laundry gave much more compelling testimony than the tales he tried to sell. So live reenactment it was. Anyone else shared this sweet bonding experience? Anyone?
Becoming an instant dad to teenage dudes soured my Grade-A language status a bit, but I managed to float above their verbal level for the most part, and to a cool degree, these boys followed my lead – at least within my earshot.
That record has been broken all apart now.
We were returning from a visit to the family cabin, not quite an hour into our two-hour drive home. Cathleen had been more on edge than normal this whole trip. We’d expected that, given that she’s expecting a baby at age thirteen. She’s going through an unimaginable ordeal. Hebert and Agnes had mostly stayed out of her way at the cabin, and the past few days had been pretty nice.
Except for when Cathleen got annoyed. Which was a lot.
The tiniest things or nothing would flick a switch, and she’d flash into vicious mode, slamming Agnes and Hebert out of the blue with cruel little attacks.
“See, this is why you don’t have any friends at school, because you’re so freaking annoying,” if Agnes stepped too close to her on the front porch.
or
“You stupid idiot! I wish you’d never been born!” when Hebert reacted too loudly playing video games upstairs.
Jean and I have pleaded with her; we’ve taken away her phone; we’ve tried appealing to her sometimes-extraordinary empathy; we’ve discussed it directly in therapy with her. These strikes keep coming, never softer, never redirected at something less tender, something with less lifelong connection to her. It seems like it doesn’t matter what temperature the spark is; the retaliation is always full-assault.
It rips at my soul.
The pregnancy has magnified Cathleen’s outbursts, but they didn’t start there. The younger kids have lived with the bruises long enough that I see them withdrawing from her more and more. Where they used to go to her just to hang out and play pretend, now they avoid her. They spend whole days at the neighbors’ house. They never go into Cathleen’s room anymore, ever.
For sure, part of this is that Cathleen is a teenager with older friends and different preferences. But even when Cathleen invites Agnes to have a sisters’ sleepover in the basement, now it takes some coercion by Mom and Dad to get Agnes to agree, and she rarely lasts the night.
I wish I could make Cathleen understand what it does to her relationship with her only sister when she attacks Agnes the way that she does. Agnes is still rather innocent. She’s affectionate and kind, warm and gentle. She’s quirky; she’s openhearted; and she’s easily hurt. Sometimes I worry that the main things Cathleen sees are that Agnes is childish and vulnerable and something to take advantage of. She doesn’t know the harm that she inflicts.
On the ride home, somebody said something about being sick. Agnes tried to make a joke by pretending to vomit. Cathleen hates this. She’s super sensitive to the sound, the image, the smell, even any word connected with vomiting. Agnes knows it.
Cathleen asked her to stop.
– no –
Cathleen fiercely demanded that Agnes stop.
Agnes didn’t stop.
Cathleen demanded again.
Agnes kept joking.
– Pound! –
– Pound! POUND!! –
Cathleen punched Agnes hard in the arm.
Agnes crumpled into the corner of her seat.
I’d had enough. Time for patience was over.
“Cathleen! STOP IT! NOW!” I was driving 70 on a two-lane highway, and she was behind me.
“I told her to stop, and she didn’t!” Cathleen sassed. “She got what she deserved!”
“I don’t care what she was doing or saying. You DON’T GET TO PUNCH HER!”
“Oh, right!” she fought. “Like you ever do anything! She’s been bugging me this whole trip, and you and Mom haven’t said anything to your precious angel child!”
Agnes sobbed silently, arms and legs scrunched around her face.
I tried reasoning – angrily, “When all you do is yell and then hit, Mom and I have no chance to step in at all!”
It didn’t work.
“I HATE her!” Cathleen shouted. “She’s a STUPID MORON!“
Okay, fine. There went logic and persuasion out the window.
“SHUT UP!!” I bellowed. “SHUT UP!! SHUT!! UP!!”
silence
Oncoming traffic raced through the lane next to me. It was going 70 miles per hour the other direction. It was time for everyone in the car to stop.
I didn’t stop.
I was overflowing.
“Violence is NEVER okay! I don’t care if you thought she was doing it on purpose! You DON’T GET TO HIT HER!” My anger was snowballing.
“Everybody needs to just be quiet. Just stop talking for one minute – including Cathleen and Dad,” Jean urged. “Agnes hates the yelling more than anything else.”
“We need to talk about this sometime!” I thought I could justify the spewing rage.
I knew I couldn’t. I heard Agnes sniffling. Cathleen couldn’t let it go any more than I did.
“You think you’re such perfect parents! All you do is let Agnes and Hebert get away with whatever they want! That’s why they’re—”
Then everything fused – the weekend of insults, the backtalk, the brutality, Agnes’ cruel aching, my daughters losing their bond with each other, the approaching vehicles, my frustration that I CANNOT CHANGE ANY OF THIS AWFUL BEHAVIOR THAT I HATE –
I … completely exploded.
“S H U T T H E F – – – U P ! ! !”
“Oh my gosh! CANNON!” Jean gasped.
dead silence
I drove, face frozen in anger.
I watched the cars buzz past me in the opposite lane. I kept my speed at 70. My head felt very hot.
I heard Cathleen sniff. I couldn’t tell whether she was maybe attempting a defiant snicker.
I wasn’t moving either way. I couldn’t turn my head.
My shoulders and back started to cramp. I noticed my jaw clenched tight.
The sniffs got louder. It wasn’t a snicker. She was crying. Both girls were crying.
I just said … what I’d just said … to my baby girl, my little Firefly. And she heard it with both ears.
And it broke her.
Maybe that was a good thing. Was it? Maybe this would be a good lesson that she would remember. Do we learn good lessons from pain? Does pain teach anything good? Or do we just remember pain? Would my daughter remember this pain I’d just given her?
I was trying to stick up for Agnes, but I hurt her, too.
I broke both of my girls.
My eyes started to fill and stain my cheeks. Glad I was wearing sunglasses.
I listened to those sobs, and I kept my eyes on the road.
Jean turned around. She unbuckled her seatbelt. While I drove 70 MPH on the curving two-lane highway, she climbed over the center console into the seat behind me where both girls sat crushed and crying. She put her arms around them. She hugged them together. They cried for a long time.
And I drove us home.