My daughter learned how to perform armpit farts in school today. That's right. You heard me. When she came home she was flapping her little arm over her flattened hand like a mini bagpipe player. "Look what I learned today!" she squealed, diminutive farts puttering from her tiny armpits like fishbowl bubbles. "I'm really good at it. Aren't you proud of me?"
She is really good at it, and she's so proud of herself I don't have the heart to tell her to stop. When we got home the first thing she did was demonstrate her new talent to our 85-year-old neighbor, Dot, who was standing out front in the flower bed, wearing sunglasses and a nightgown. Dot was duly impressed. "I bet you're proud of your girl," she cackled to me.
Of course I'm proud. It's an amazing feat. It's miles ahead of me when I was her age, when my biggest talent was shoplifting at the local Thrifty drugstore. At first I just stole candy. Charleston Chews were my favorite, but their long shape made them hard to heist, so I developed the masterful trick of stuffing things into a rolled-up beach towel. It worked great until I got greedy and graduated from Charleston Chews to Slinkies, then to kites and then to entire sets of Tonka trucks. By the time I tried to leave, my beach towel was so stuffed it looked like I was trying to transport a corpse in a rolled-up area rug. I got busted, of course.
"Where's your mother?" the store manager asked me.
"She's at work," I said.
"Then where's your father?" he demanded.
"He's at home asleep," I said, and even though it was 3 in the afternoon, I probably wasn't lying. My dad napped a lot during his bouts of unemployment, probably due to the increased voracity in his beer consumption at these times, which is one of the reasons I was so deft at escaping the house to shoplift at the Thrifty store. My two sisters were probably, at that moment, trespassing onto the property of the small motel across the street from our house so they could swim in the pool, and my older brother was engaged in who knows what horn-dog activities common among postadolescents. The last place any of us could be found was at the forefront of someone's mind, it probably seemed.
"Well," the store manager exclaimed, looking at me with an odd judgmental sympathy, "if your father wasn't worthless, he'd be ashamed of you," and that was all he said as he ushered me to leave. When I got home, I was relieved to see that my father was not waiting on the other side of the door like I'd worried he'd be, all freshly informed of my thieving, slapping his belt against his palm, growling. Instead he was — I swear this is true — baking a cake.
This was another way he spent his time during his bouts of unemployment, and I loved his cakes. They were amazing feats. He used to let me pick out the kind I wanted by pointing to the pictures on the mix boxes ("The brown cake with the beige frosting, and stacked up, not flat!"), and I was always amazed that they came out looking relatively similar to their advertised images. I didn't know not to be proud of my father until that day I got caught shoplifting by the Thrifty store manager, and I didn't know my father's pride in me could be so important that the thought of losing it would make me quake for days after I got caught, not sure which I feared more — that the Thrifty manager might track me down and tell my father to admonish me for what I'd done, or track my father down and admonish him for what he'd allowed me to become.
As the days wore on, my mother continued to go to work, and my father continued to bake his cakes and take his naps and deal with his circumstances as best he could, and my siblings and I continued to wander so freely and so far from home that sometimes I'm surprised we survived, seeing as how kids are considered downright endangered these days unless they're raised under surveillance like lab mice.
But we did survive, to become business owners, executives and parents ourselves. I stopped shoplifting that day I got caught, because say what you will about my unemployed dad, but the fact is he had made his pride in his children matter more to me than my klepto ways, no matter that my own pride in him noticeably waned after hearing him called worthless by a drugstore clerk. Today, though, I am more attuned to the fact that parenting is as painful as it is almost impossible. People are rife with insecurities and inner demons, and sometimes it's all they can do to protect their kids from their own crumbling opinion of themselves. To raise a child, let alone four like my dad did, amid this inner and outer turmoil is, quite literally, an amazing feat. I used to wonder if, had he lived, my father might be proud of me today, seeing as how our parenting styles turned out to be so contrary. Lately though, I spend less time wondering how proud he'd be of me, and more time amazed at how proud I am of him.
Hollis Gillespie authored two top-selling memoirs and founded the Shocking Real-Life Writing Academy (www.shockingreallife.com).
