Hulking out.

Hey Sam,

We have some control issues we’re dealing with right now…

That’s my Dad voice, in case you hadn’t noticed…

It's taken you six years to call me Dad, before that I was Ragnar. When you were small I used to carry you into the surf calling out ‘Ragnar’ every time a wave hit us (at the time your Mum and I were watching a viking TV show) and the name kind of stuck.

Your version of Ragnar sounded a bit more like ‘Ranran' but in my mind it meant I wasn't just another middle aged Dad getting thicker around the waistline, I was some sort of Norse warrior. It felt cool, heroic. At least it felt different.

But now you've decided to switch to ‘Dad’ to match your classmates and even sometimes to ‘Daddy’, which I have to admit, provokes an existential horror in me. So I've decided that if you're going to call me Dad, then I have full licence to occasionally utilise a 'Dad' voice.

Now I understand that my Dad voice makes you feel as if you’ve done something wrong but you need to understand something; it's meant to do that. The Dad voice has been carefully calibrated to a frequency and pitch that renders the recipient powerless and amenable to suggestion. It’s a mind control trick that has been passed down from father to son for millennia. I will pass it to you one day, but before I do that I will use it to control you.

The problem is you keep ignoring my Dad voice and I’m starting to think I’m not doing it right. Perhaps my own Dad left something out when he passed it onto me, some secret ingredient, a way to stand, a certain timing or pitch. I’m not sure but we’ve been crammed together for a while now (with world news buffeting our doorstep and a virus you tell us you ‘hate’) and it’s clear your Mum and I need to exercise some level of control. You’re back at school now but that doesn’t stop you flexing your independence muscles.

They rip through your shirt, turn you green and make us sorry we ever made you angry.

If we’re honest though, we have our own control issues to deal with, and that leads to the trickiest part of parenting; working out where (and when) to draw a line. I feel like it’s a random choice but a necessary one. While you’re turning green, we’re switching to red, like a traffic light, trying to stop you to allow other traffic through the intersection.

Which works, but you know what? I think you can sense the random nature of our parenting choices.

This morning you spent some time playing by yourself while your Mum and I were sitting on the balcony, enjoying the lack of anything we needed to do. After a bit you fronted up at the door, looking fairly pleased with yourself. You told us you had a story you were inventing and that you wanted to share it with us.

It went like this…

There is a Duke and Duchess who live on Treat Island. All the animals look after the Duke and Duchess and everyone else on Treat Island. Even the ocean is nice to them. If they go for a swim the jellyfish don’t sting them and the sharks don’t eat them.

On Treat Island the children get to do whatever they want, whenever they want. If they want to watch a video they just can. If a parent tries to tells their child they can’t do something, like watch TV, an enormous tube comes down and sucks the parent up and spits them out into the ocean where the sharks eat them up.

Yesterday your Mum made the observation that everything that shits her about you is her, not you. 

We all have our own baggage and we all get frustrated. Our feelings infect our view of the world and we no longer see each other. Emotions rise up. sudden anger, sadness at change, loss, regret, fear. They take so many forms and we don’t know how to deal with them all.

Let me tell you a story…

There was an island called family. Family Island. Only three people lived on the island but it was part of an archipelago, a chain of islands that reached off in every direction. The people who lived on Family Island were happy most of the time and they worked together to make sure they could live off what the island offered, but sometimes they wanted to travel, to go see other islands and meet other people.

Yes this sounds a little like Moana but bear with me.

This impatience made the people on the island feel unhappy but they still had to work with each other to survive. Sometimes there were terrible storms that came in from the ocean. The sky would turn black and waves would rear up and tear at the shore. In these moments their island would feel tiny and they would huddle together, afraid that their world was going to be torn apart.

Often the storm would tear away everything they owned and they would get angry because they missed the things they had before. They would start to argue and the sound of their arguing would ripple across the water to other islands. When the storms passed, they would hear each other in the sudden calm and they would feel ashamed.

The people of Family Island didn’t know what to do with these feelings. They seemed too big to keep on such a small island. They tried to attach weights to them and sink them down to the bottom of the ocean, but they kept bobbing back up to the surface, and when they did, they started to think that, in any case, these feelings belonged to them and should be treasured. So they dried them off and kept them close.

But the feelings kept growing and there came a time when they were so big the people could no longer share their hut with them and they found themselves outside on the sand, while inside the feelings stomped around and broke all the best crockery. For the first time in a long time the three of them looked at each other again. They’d been so busy with their feelings that they hadn’t seen each other in ages and now, when they did, they remembered the love they felt for each other.

They started to laugh at the noise their feelings were making and as they did so, their feelings stopped. Together they cleaned up the mess their feelings had made and then sat outside to watch the sun set on another perfect day.

Love,

Ragnar