The other night, Debbie took Carter to one of her appointments. She was doing what realtors call a “walk-through,” where the buyer gives a place a final once-over before they close the next day, just to make sure the seller didn’t leave any holes in the walls or dead cats in the freezer on their way out. They’re usually a pretty low-stress affair (I often get asked to fill in at them, if that tells you anything), so having a three-year-old in attendance didn’t matter.
When they finally got home, I asked how it went. “Oh it was fine, but he would not shut up.” Welcome to my world lady.
Carter is a talker. I assume he gets it from his mother, who puts food on his rubberized plastic plates by being able to talk to people. The boy starts yammering from the second he wakes up until 45 minutes after we put him to bed. On the surface, it’s cute in a conventional way, because he often says the damnedest things (”Carter, what does ice turn into if you put it on something hot?” “A chicken tender.”), and I’m glad I have an apparently bright and inquisitive child. But an adult, even one who’s biologically sworn to love him until the end of days, can only take that shit for so long.
The frustrating part isn’t the noise; I can easily tune that out, the same way I can ignore some ass braying into his cell phone on a crowded train. The part that drives me barking mad is that the boy is implacable–he simply will not take my word for it. And I’m not talking about typical parent-child arguments over why he can’t have another popsicle, I mean simple statements of fact, where I’m answering his questions with the absolute, hands-down truth.
For instance, on one of our daily dog-walking tricycle rides, excursions he’s been known to extend into Lewis and Clark-like proportions with his observations and civic involvement, we saw a rotten banana peel on the sidwalk:
“Why it’s brown?”
“They turn brown when they sit out too long. It’s rotten.”
“That’s silly. Bananas are yeyow. They’re not brown.”
“Bananas start out yellow, but they turn brown when they get too old.”
“Can we just go to the store and buy some new bananas, they be yeyow?”
“Right, because the store wouldn’t sell them if they were brown.”
“Why they be brown?”
Repeat. 12 times.
The most emasculating part of being a stay-at-home dad isn’t pushing strollers or carrying diaper bags or learning to divine diets from poop like an Indian tracker, it’s spending the bulk of your time with someone who DOESN’T BELIEVE A WORD YOU SAY.
Even on my worst days in IT land, when I was swimming in corporate apathy and managerial indifference, people would have believed me if I told them why bananas turned brown. And while it wouldn’t have felt like signing the Treaty of Versailles like it would today, it would have been a small reassurance that 31 years of living on this planet have earned me some credibility, if not a complete grasp of spontaneous sidewalk composting.