Fatherhood, Football, and Turning Forty by Chris Crowe

Author:Chris Crowe [Crowe, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fathers, Priesthood
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 1995-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Little Plumbers

Every father ought to read the book of Job once in a while. Why? Because we often need the patience of Job. There are days—you know what I’m talking about—when if it’s not one thing, it’s another. You wake up late, cut yourself shaving, miss breakfast, and get to work late, a speck of toilet paper still on your bloody chin. You find out about the important meeting you were supposed to attend an hour after the meeting’s over. Your desk looks like someone detonated a paper bomb on it, and you spend most of your day trying, in vain, to find the Very Important Papers you’re sure you left there yesterday. The freeway on the way home moves like the Cougar Stadium parking lot at homecoming. You get home late for the fifth time that week, after you promised your wife, guaranteed, that you’d be home on time tonight for sure. And now that you’re home, all you want to do is eat dinner, slink into the living room, and hide behind the newspaper for a while, then go to bed.

But—and you know what I’m talking about if you have kids—you can’t, or don’t dare, do that. They need someone to tell them to turn the TV down, help with homework, provide a ride to Mutual, cough up money for tomorrow’s field trip, referee squabbles, and, when they’re little, provide constant supervision. Older kids have their own ways of getting into trouble, but it’s usually outside of the home; little ones can make mountains of headaches right in the privacy of their own home. Those are the days when you need Job’s patience.

I’ve had my share of such days, but one from several years ago remains etched in my mind like a kid’s handprint on a newly poured patio. In those days, Christy and Jonathan liked to team up for fun and mischief while I read the paper and Liz was busy with dinner. Christy was four, Jonathan was two, so she called the shots.

That evening’s shots were called from the bathroom, where the two little plumbers had locked themselves to splash, play, and generally enjoy a little kid’s life without any annoying interruptions from Liz or me.

An ominous silence (all silences in a house with two kids under five are ominous)—followed by a series of toilet flushes, giggles, and gurgles—alerted Liz and me to the scene. When we crashed their indoor beach party, the kids, the floor, and the walls were drenched with toilet water. Jonathan’s yellow bathtub boat bobbed in the gentle tide of the toilet bowl, while the two little culprits, dripping with wide-eyed innocence, tried to explain what had happened.

Liz and I had been in the parenting game long enough not to be fooled by a couple of cherubic looks; the overwhelming circumstantial evidence condemned them on the spot. We disinfected them, spanked them, and sent them outside to safer and drier activities. The evening wore on, as evenings do; the bathroom returned to normal; and we forgot about the incident.

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