The Words Get in the Way

Tags

boys, children, communication, fatherhood, four-year-olds, humor, parenting, words

I’m a word person. I work as a copywriter during daylight hours, and I write creative prose and essays in my spare time. I have also been told – usually by a supervisor who is trying to find something positive to say in my performance review – that I have excellent verbal communication skills.

In short, I am good with words.

Why is it, then, that I struggle to communicate the most basic things to my own four-year-old kid? Last night, my son was in the bathtub, and he wanted to get out. I have been trying to teach him that he needs to pull up the plug before exiting the tub, allowing the water to drain. For some reason last night, the right words weren’t coming to me.

“Pull the thing! Pull the thing!” I commanded as my son dangled a wet leg over the tub.

“What thing?” he asked.

“The, um, the metal thing that holds the water in,” I stammered. “The plug! The plug!”

He smiled at me and started singing a song he had made up about his favorite colors. Then he wrapped his arms around my legs and got my jeans wet. He loves doing that.

Even the king knew how to talk to his children.

A few minutes later, as I was coaxing him to put on his pajamas, he asked me what the term, “inside-out” means.

“Well,” I said slowly, trying to conjure up the right words, “It means that the inside of your shirt is on the outside, so your shirt looks funny when you wear it.”

He gave me a puzzled look. He was standing naked in front of the TV, clean pajamas and underpants scattered around him on the floor.

“It’s the opposite of the way you should wear your shirt,” I tried again.

“But what does inside-out mean?” he asked.

“You know what it means?” I blurted. “It means you need to put on your pajamas by the time I count to three, because you know what happens when I get to three?”

He looked down. “I go to Time-Out.”

“That’s right,” I said, feeling a little bit more in control.

“But what does inside-out mean? You still haven’t told me.”

I know why I sometimes have trouble communicating with my son. First, when I am around him during the work week, in the early morning or after six o’clock at night, I am often tired and my brain is not functioning at its sharpest. Secondly, shifting gears from interacting with adults all day to breaking a concept down so a small child can understand it takes a lot of thought and patience. Finally, I have never been comfortable issuing directives, which, unfortunately, is a big part of managing life with a four-year-old. Sometimes when I tell him what to do, I talking haltingly and sound unsure of myself. The right words do not always flow naturally off my tongue.

It bothers me that much of the time I spend with my child occurs when I’m tired or, if it’s near the end of the week, exhausted. I also worry that my son sees his father as this tongue-tied guy who stammers to express even the simplest, most rudimentary thoughts. As the week winds down to Thursday and Friday night, I feel like a middle-aged Forrest Gump, a kindhearted but mentally feeble man, struggling just to get his kid out of the bathtub and off to bed. Sometimes, when I’ve turned off the bedroom lights and my child looks up at me, eyes wide open, and asks one of those Troubling Questions, (“Why do people die?” “Why do I have to go to school?” “Why can’t we have a cat?”), I actually wish I was Forrest. He always seemed to know how to tackle the big issues with a little metaphor that sounded simple, but had a more depth to it once you thought about it. “Life is like a box of chocolates,” sounds more profound than “Life isn’t fair,” although they both pretty much mean the same thing.

Forrest Gump: a man in command of his words.

Hopefully, when my kid reaches the age of 10 or 12 or 25, he and I will able to sit down and have a conversation that doesn’t revolve around finishing his dinner, brushing his teeth, or watching very carefully while I tie his shoes. We’ll sit down and have a real, heartfelt, man-to-man talk (in between whatever programs he has queued up on Netflix, of course). Then, my son will realize how thoughtful, wise and articulate his dad really is.

That’s the hope, anyway.

Stephen Roth is author of the humorous novel, A Plot for Pridemore. Be sure to “like” his author fan page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenRothWriter

Happy Birthday To You

Tags

birthday, boys, disney world, family, fatherhood, fourth, kansas city, kansas city royals, parenthood, parenting, playgrounds, summer, toddlers

Dear Son,

Saturday is your fourth birthday. I hope you will enjoy it. Nothing could top your third birthday, which we celebrated by spending a week at Disney World. You may remember your birthday dinner at Chef Mickey’s in the Contemporary Resort, the procession of Disney characters who stopped by our table, working you into a sugar-fueled, nap-deprived frenzy. You became so uncontrollable – rolling around the floor, hooting and screaming, doing somersaults out of our booth – that we had no choice but to put you in time-out right next to the gift shop and below the monorail station. Your mama and I felt awful about it, but that was the only way we could calm you down. It was really the one black mark on a trip that involved four Disney parks, countless character encounters and, amazingly, us training you how to go potty on your own.

Your fourth birthday, which will be spent with your friends at an indoor inflatable playground, won’t hold a candle to Disney World. But it will be the celebration of a year in which you continued to grow and thrive and learn so many things. As already mentioned, you graduated from diapers (at least during the day). You spent almost the entire summer at the swimming pool, finding the nerve to hold your head underwater, paddle around the shallow end, and even jump in all by yourself. You rode a big-boy bike with training wheels, learned the basics of football, soccer and basketball, and saw your first movie in a theater (Turbo: the animated tale of a snail who has the need for speed). You sat still and paid attention in your pre-K class, earning innumerable smiley faces on your performance chart. You learned that a pepperoni and sausage pizza from Casey’s General Store was the best food in all the world, except for your mama’s own spaghetti and meatballs.

The year 2013 was a challenging one for our family. You were a joy and inspiration through it all, however, even after you stopped taking naps on the weekends. When the weather was nice out, we toured the area playgrounds, including your beloved Penguin Park. When it was lousy outside, we did puzzles, played “catch” in the basement, and watch the same episodes of My Little Pony over and over again. We took you to your first Kansas City Royals baseball game, where you sat through two innings, devouring a hot dog and Cracker Jacks, before moving on to the outfield playground. You began a fascination with dinosaurs, and the T-Rex Café became your favorite dining spot.

Through all of this, you talked, sang and laughed constantly. Not a day passed when you didn’t say or do something that cracked your mama and me up. You showed a knack for one-liners, as I sometimes documented on my Facebook page (Me: We don’t ever whine in this house, now do we? You: Yes, but we can pretend to whine). You were smart-alecky, sassy and spoiled, but a blast to be around most of the time. When you got out of hand, you would reluctantly accept time-out, serve your punishment, then greet us with a grin and a hug. You were happy most of the time, and you never held anything against us for very long. Every single day, you said “I love you” to us, and that more than made up for all the unfinished meals, spilled bath water, and arguments over TV time.

These are just a few of the observations I can conjure up from what was another memorable, discovery-filled year with you, son. I know your fifth year is going to hold even more adventures, shenanigans and hilarious quips (“We ran out of batteries!” you said when the house lost power last summer). I can hardly wait for it to begin.

Love,

Daddy

I Sure Am Going to Miss My Dad

Tags

dads, family, fatherhood, my life, Stephen Roth, tribute

Dad talking business; me playing with my stuffed giraffe.

Some time in the summer of 1977, when I was a six-year-old happily growing up in LaGrange, Georgia, my mom took me to a fish and chips place for lunch. She ordered me a basket of hush puppies and explained that my dad’s job was going to be transferred to the headquarters of Milliken & Co., and that he would be moving to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

“Well,” I said after some thought. “I sure am going to miss him!”

My mother then went on to explain that she and I would also be moving with him to Spartanburg, and the strange reality of an impending uprooting, away from all my friends and everything else I had ever known, slowly set into my six-year-old mind. There would be other moves, all of them between South Carolina and Georgia, in my growing-up years as my father’s career evolved. It was nothing compared with Dad’s own Army childhood, which took his family from Washington, D.C., to Germany to Seattle to San Francisco, as well as some other places in between that escape my memory now. My dad, like me, was an only child.

Today, I’m reminded of my naïve reaction to my mom’s big news of so long ago. “I sure am going to miss him!” I had said in the carefree, confident tone of a kid whose dad was smart and strong and probably going to be around forever. Today, I say the same thing, but in a different tone. Art Roth Jr. passed away early Monday morning, October 14, after more than a year battling bladder cancer in the same tenacious way he took on everything. This foe, however, proved even more persistent and formidable than Dad, who had survived two tours in Vietnam and later three firings in his long career as a brilliant turnaround artist for several different companies. Each time he experienced a setback, my dad came back stronger and more successful than before. Nothing, it seemed, could keep him down. It would be the same way with cancer, we all felt, until the last two months, when tests showed it had expanded to other parts of his body. “Like an unstoppable rebel force,” as Robert De Niro’s character described his late mother’s cancer in Meet the Parents. It was an uncomfortably funny line in the movie, perhaps because the description is so very true.

My dad traveled a lot when I was growing up. I used to entertain my friends and their parents with a Ricky Nelson song I had heard on television (“He’s a traveling man and he’s made a lot of stops all over the world.”) My friends could relate – most of their dads worked for the same company and also traveled frequently. Still, my dad was around for almost every big moment of my childhood. He was at every birthday, every school event. He helped me learn how to swim, helped me craft a Pinewood Derby racer from a block of pine, and taught me how to throw a football with a tight spiral. When I jumped into the corner of the Country Club pool and busted open my chin at age 3, my dad was just arriving from work to have lunch with us. He drove me and Mom to the hospital, all the while insisting to me that the cut wasn’t all that bad, and how tough I was being about it. Years later, when I went to retrieve a ball underneath my aunt and uncle’s deck and was stung by about nine wasps, my dad marveled at how fast I shot out from under the deck and into the swimming pool a few feet away. “Butch, that was probably the most perfect dive you’ve ever made,” he told me, and that made me feel proud.

He was a fun dad, but he could intimidate when necessary. I feared him a little, knowing he’d survived West Point and Vietnam, and now had an important job with one of the largest companies in the South. He did not need to scream or yell, because he possessed a cold, withering stare. I remember being trapped in that gaze for several long minutes after being caught lying about my grades. It was worse than any spanking or grounding I could have ever received, and I retreated as soon as I could to our living room piano, where I was more than happy to do my mandatory 30 minutes of practice. “Very nice playing,” Dad said when I was done, and my fear subsided.

As it is with a lot of fathers and sons, we grew closer as I got older. My dad never pushed me to get into sports, but I know he was pleased when I began taking an interest in football, tennis and golf. Some of my favorite memories involve watching sports with Dad, and I have ticket stubs to football and baseball games from Atlanta to San Francisco because of him. In 2009, he took me to the Augusta National for the Masters, and it was like getting to visit heaven for three days. Not just golf heaven, but actual heaven, with almost every blade of grass pristinely manicured. I opened a box of Dad’s things last night and there, atop all his Masters tickets dating back to 1975, was a spectator guide to the 2009 tournament. I’d like to think he saved it because it was the only tournament he and I attended together.

Perhaps my dad’s greatest gifts to me were always letting me know that I was loved and supporting my dreams, even if they weren’t what he would have envisioned. Every phone conversation we had ended with an “I love you.” He had a great way of building me up and making me feel good about myself even in the worst moments. He was always optimistic and excited about what I was doing, whether it was taking a $16,000 job as a reporter in Mexico, Mo., or getting to work for Hallmark Cards. “Butch,” he told me when I took the low-paying reporter job, “I’ll bet you’re going to be making $36,000 a year within five years.” He was wrong, but it was a nice thing to say.

He wasn’t a hugger. His way of affection was tossing the football, or playing “mercy,” or rubbing my back as we watched a game together, usually with a bowl of popcorn nearby. I miss those times most of all, feeling his hand giving the back of my neck a tight squeeze, and me trying not to let on that it hurt a little. I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss my dad.

Happy Birthday, Max

Tags

babies, fatherhood, loss, Max, Maxwell, parenting, SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

Seven years ago today, our first son, Maxwell, was born just before midnight at the end of a very long day at Overland Park Regional Medical Center. We took him home three days later and were amazed at how old he seemed, already mugging for the camera during an impromptu photo shoot in his new crib. Sitting in his bouncy seat on the kitchen table, he often watched us intently, as if he were quietly taking in our dinnertime conversation. We wondered what he was thinking.

Our summer with Max was something of a blur, as the first few weeks usually are with a newborn. I remember a string of 100-degree days, having to wait until the early evening to push his stroller around the neighborhood, Max staring up at the big trees and listening to the eerie buzz of the cicadas. I remember watching him sleep through during a July 4th fireworks display, walking him around the yard so he could feel the cool blades of grass on his feet, I remember letting our dog, Keiko, give him a lick on the face. I remember holding Max and reading him Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, and anything else to lull him to sleep.

That summer ended for us on August 14. Max went down for a nap at day care around noon that day and he never woke up. The medical examiner called it Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is a common diagnosis when a child under the age of one year dies for no apparent reason. Max was just shy of 11 weeks old.

My wife and I have grieved, struggled to understand, and blamed ourselves for Max’s death. Seven years have passed, and the pain is not as strong, but it is still there. Today, however, is one when we celebrate the time we had with our first son. We will remember Max by releasing some balloons into the sky as we do on his birthday every year, and as we did at his funeral.

Below are a few of my favorite photos of Max. Happy Birthday, little Boo. Mommy and Daddy miss you!

“Do You Need to Go Potty?”

Tags

bathroom, children, fatherhood, humor, jayhawks, parenthood, potty, potty training, toddlers, university of kansas

This is a proud time in my household. We are walking around with more spring in our step and our heads held just a little bit higher because, after six months of trying, our three-year-old is potty-trained. I say this with confidence because he has been going Number One and Number Two by himself on the toilet for more than a month now. Oh sure, we still outfit him in pull-ups for bedtime and naps but, really, that’s just a precautionary measure as much as anything. And, yes, we still have the Diaper Genie, but that’s mostly because I have a hard time parting with something that has been such a fixture in my life for the past three years. I’m sure I’ll get past that eventually.

So our son is potty-trained. And, yet, maybe because we are older parents who are slow to adjust to change, my wife and I still ask him the same question at least a dozen times a day: “Do you need to go potty?” We ask this when he wakes up in the morning, after he eats a meal, and when it’s been more than an hour since the last bathroom visit and he seems particularly engrossed in an activity. It’s a question we have been asking for so long, through months of on-again, off-again training, through interminable weekends with potty chart stickers and soiled underwear and crying fits (some of them mine), it is now engrained in our daily routine.

“Do you need to go potty?” one of us asks as soon as we get home from daycare.

Our child responds with the weary look of someone dealing with an elderly relative who has lost all short-term memory and keeps telling the same story over and over.

“I just went potty,” he says.

“All right. Well, just checking.”

“Ooookay,” he says, and heads off to the important task of jumping off the downstairs sofa.

Is this what parenthood is about, parroting the same mundane questions over and over, long after they have lost all relevance and meaning to our offspring? Several years ago, when I was a reporter for The Kansas City Star, I did a telephone interview with a University of Kansas basketball player named Greg Ostertag. It was the typical jock interview, filled with awkward pauses and monosyllabic answers. I can’t even remember what the story was about. What I do recall, however, was that our conversation was punctuated with Ostertag occasionally blurting the words, “Ya poopin’?”

I let it slide the first couple of times he said it. Ostertag was a big, country-boy center who had led the Jayhawks to a Final Four and was also known for an off-the-court incident in which he somehow managed to roll a car over his own foot. An intellectual heavyweight, Ostertag was not. So maybe he was uttering some kind of hillbilly expression with which I was unfamiliar. Maybe he was even making fun of me.

Finally, after the fourth or fifth, “Ya poopin’?” I had to ask what was up. Ostertag laughed and explained that he was in the bathroom, urging his toddler to use the toilet. Then I heard a flush and an excited whoop from the Kansas center. I guessed the kid had finished pooping.

At the time, I found it annoying that someone would conduct an interview with a major daily newspaper reporter while taking a child to the bathroom. Now, 20 years later, I get it. Potty-training, when it’s happening, can take over your parental life. It becomes an obsession that can quickly spiral into purchases of books, toys, stuffed animals and miniature toilets, all in the hope of someday getting your kid to use the bathroom on his or her own.

The good news is, once they learn, you can check that one off your list. Some days, a warm smile will wash over my face as I realize that I may never have to change a dirty diaper again. Still, the question persists:

“Do you need to go potty?”

“No, Daddy. I just did.”

If toddlers could roll their eyes, I’m sure he would.

The Tossed Angel

Tags

angels, fatherhood, humor, jailbreak, marriage, scultures, storytelling, thin lizzy

As I recall, we paid about $45 for the concrete angel. My wife’s best friend had a neighbor who liked to mold sculptures out of cheap concrete. He was a shaggy, middle-aged guy with a nose full of burst capillaries who showed us a few of his sculptures and said he could mold an angel for my wife in about two weeks.

“It’s not as simple as it looks,” he said as we eyed the concrete gnomes, mushrooms and forest animals lining the walls of his garage. “It takes time to do it right.”

The guy made good on his promise and, two weeks later, my wife took home a very realistic depiction of a cherub in flight, one arm held high so that you could hook him to anything sturdy enough to bear his 15-some-odd pounds. We later learned from our friend that her neighbor was a chronic womanizer who practiced his concrete-molding skills on some of his favorite female subjects. His wife found those particular sculptures in a garage closet behind all the smiling gnomes and woodland creatures.

That wasn’t important. What was important is that my wife liked the angel. She hung him from a metal arbor that we put in our backyard, a place where he could keep watch over the starlings, finches and cardinals that frequented our feeders, and where my wife could watch over him through our second-story living room window. She did that sometimes on quiet weekend mornings, drinking coffee and staring out at the birds and the angel and the clematis hanging from the arbor. There were other angels she began collecting soon after we moved into our new home in the northern part of the city. We moved up there after enduring a family tragedy and, in a way, my wife felt the angels might stand guard and keep misfortune from following us to our new home.

One early evening in June, I was spreading black velvet mulch in the garden bed beneath our backyard arbor. It was the end of a long, hot day of watching our one-year-old son, then mowing the lawn, then doing some more yardwork that I’d put off for a few weeks. I had on my ear buds and my iPhone was cranking out Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak album. Everything was peachy: mulch, sweat, bumblebees, The Cowboy Song and occasional sips of water from my giant St. Luke’s Hospital & Women’s Clinic bottle. The only annoying thing, other than the bees, was my tendency to rise up from my work and bump my head against the concrete angel hanging from the arbor. This happened enough times that I started to get a little testy. “Next time I hit my head against that stupid angel, I am going to grab it and throw it as far as I can,” I thought. I might have even said it.

A few minutes later, with “The Boys Are Back in Town” blaring in my cranium, I gathered myself into an upright position and, bam! hit my damn head on that angel again! I knew what I had to do. I picked that cherub up by his wings and tossed him over our picket fence. I took no pleasure in the act. I had told that angel I was going to do it, and damnit, how dare he test me like that! I calmly returned to my work with the mulch.

A few seconds later, I felt a pop on my head. Then another one against my arm. I pulled off my ear buds and looked up at our backyard deck, where my wife and son stood, staring down at me. My wife took another piece of ice from the drink she was holding and threw it at me.

“I saw the whole thing!” she yelled.

“What?”

“Don’t tell me ‘what.’ You know what I’m talking about.”

“Hi, Daddy!” my son squealed, waving a burp towel at me.

“The angel was hitting me on the head,” I explained. “I had to get it out of the way.”

“Oh, the angel hit you in the head and so you threw it.”

“I tossed it.”

“Hi, Daddy!” my son squealed.

She took our boy inside and returned to finish our conversation.

“You have no idea,” my wife hissed, “What an asshole you looked like.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“It’s broken.”

“It’s not broken. I just tossed it.”

She went back inside the house and, after a few minutes, I walked around the fence and into the tall grass to retrieve the angel. Sure enough, his little arm, the one that had held him aloft, had broken off from the impact of the fall. I took a deep breath and walked into the house to give my wife the news.

“You were right. It’s broken.”

“I told you it was.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I know how much you like it.”

“That’s okay,” she said in a way that clearly meant it wasn’t.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” I said.

“Good luck finding the guy who made it.”

“I’m not buying it from him. God knows what he was doing with that concrete.”

“It’s really okay,” she said.

I, of course, did eventually get another concrete angel that we could hang from our arbor, though not one nearly as big and majestic as the old one, which now sits grounded in our garden bed as a reminder that I am not perfect and, yes, sometimes an asshole.

The angel, after the fall.

The Dark Side of Springing Forward

Tags

children, commentary, daylight savings time, fatherhood, government

Okay, so the time change… is it really necessary? I have asked this question of various friends and Facebook contacts in recent days, and no one has been able to give me a compelling reason why our government-mandated time changes twice a year do our modern society any good. If it’s a case of saving electricity or promoting commerce, then why don’t we go to Daylight Savings Time all year long? If it’s about helping the farmers, then how does that work? Seems like they would want more daylight hours in the morning this time of year, not less.

I’m sure there’s a strong case out there for changing the clock twice a year, and I would really like to know what it is. Because “springing forward,” has created just a little bit of havoc in our household. Here is our three-year-old’s sleep schedule for the four days after the time change:

Sunday: took a two-hour afternoon nap; set a personal record by staying up until 11 p.m.

Monday: skipped his afternoon nap; found swaying and muttering like a drunken frat boy when picked up from day care at 5 p.m.; crashed 30 minutes later and slept until 6 a.m. the following morning.

Tuesday: took his afternoon nap; stayed up until 10 p.m.

Wednesday: took his afternoon nap; stayed up until 9 p.m.

So we are seeing some daily progress in the sleep routine, and I am sure we will be back on schedule by week’s end. And, of course, it will be great to have sunlight until 9 p.m. during the summer months. Still, in the near term, it is frustrating to endure this without a clear understanding why most of the country elects to abide by the Daylight Savings and Standard Time calendar.

(Also, it’s just weird to switch to summer hours in early March, when there’s still snow on the ground. A friend recently told me that that moving the DST switch to March was President George W. Bush’s greatest achievement, “because he put a little more sunshine into everyone’s lives.” And, yes, my friend was serious).

So, can anyone give me an explanation as to why we need to have Daylight Savings and Standard Time in this day and age? Anyone? Anyone?

School: Even Less Fun Than It Used to Be

Tags

children, commentary, education, fatherhood, guns, media, parenting, schools, standardized testing, testing, violence

There’s an article this morning about a seven-year-old boy who was suspended for two days from school for chewing his breakfast pastry into the form of a gun and saying, “Bang, bang!” I understand the nation is terrified about gun violence right now, but this punishment seems horrendously excessive. This kid is going to have a school rap sheet about a gun-related suspension on his record. And he’s in the second grade.

This is obviously an extreme example of administrative stupidity, but I worry about schools and what they might be like when my son enters kindergarten in a couple of years. In addition to the hysteria about guns and lock-downs, there’s also the matter of standardized testing. I hear parents of older kids complain about the amount of assigned homework and the pressure to achieve good test scores. Their children are stressed out, scared and, in some cases, depressed. And these are grade school kids! Imagine what the emotional abyss of junior high school is going to be like for them. That, in my mind, is the appropriate time to be frightened, strung out and depressed.

When I was a kid, I hated school. It was hard for me to sit still in the classroom for hours on end and pay attention. Some of my teachers ridiculed me for this and it affected my self confidence for a long time. And this was in the golden days of the 1980s, when the biggest concern for a grade school boy was getting a bathroom pass at 2:50 so he could sit in the stall until the bell mercifully rang ten minutes later. Now, there is so much more to worry about at school – violence, testing, vaccinations, peer pressure, cyber-bullying, ADHD and zero tolerance for kids doing the kinds of stupid things kids will do. Like nibbling a pastry so it takes the shape of a gun.

Boys love guns, by the way. There is no getting around that. So far, we have successfully kept our three-year-old away from toy guns, but eventually he is going to discover one and want to try it out. That doesn’t mean he is a threat to anyone or will even want to own a real gun someday.

Anyway, I worry about what is happening in American schools, which weren’t so great when I was a child and have seemingly become even more miserable, humorless, demanding places. Especially for active boys who have a hard time sitting still and paying attention. I hope I’m wrong about all this and that my son will get to learn and grow in a supportive, encouraging, relatively safe place. But, like scores of parents and educators these days, I have my fears.

A Boy and His Wolf

Tags

bad guys, bedtime, big bad wolf, boys, dads, evil, fatherhood, humor, three little pigs

Most of us are fascinated by bad guys. Doesn’t matter if it’s Lex Luthor or Saddam Hussein or Bernie Madoff. We are repulsed by their terrible acts but we also wonder what causes them to behave that way. Maybe we recognize in ourselves some flaw or weakness that, if provoked, would turn us into villains, too? We are taught from an early age to believe there is some shred of humanity in even the worst of us, which make explain why evildoers are so interesting. Even the devil was once an angel. Bad guys have layers, man.

For my three-year-old, the ultimate bad guy is that infamous threat to homeowners everywhere, the Big Bad Wolf. My son finds him terrifying but also strangely alluring. As a result, the Golden Books version of The Three Little Pigs is well-worn in our household, as is the satirical True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, which tells the wolf’s side of how things went down.

This fascination has taken over bedtime. “Tell me about the Big Bad Wolf,” my son says as I tuck him into his toddler bed and turn out the light. “Tell me how the Big Bad Wolf come to our house.”

“Well, okay,” I reply, getting on my knees so I can look into his gleaming eyes. He wants to hear a story I concocted in which the Big Bad Wolf emerges from the woods behind our house and attempts to, well, blow our place down. There are several opportunities in the story for my son and I to recite the “I’ll huff and I’ll puff…” line, and, in the end, our heroic Australian Shepherd Keiko runs out of the house and chases the evil wolf out of the backyard, across the creek, through the woods and into the next county. “And,” I always conclude, “we never saw the Big Bad Wolf ever again.”

“Little pig, little pig… Let me come in!”

I was pretty proud when I came up with this tale. Even a relatively clueless dad like me knows the story must end with the wolf vanquished, as opposed to going on some lunatic rampage through our neighborhood. Also, in making our dog the hero, the story seems realistic. My three-year-old would never buy into the idea that his parents, who struggle each morning just to pull him out of his Jake and the Neverland Pirates pajamas, would ever summon the nerve to defeat the Big Bad Wolf. Keiko, however, seems resourceful (and mean) enough to pull something like that off.

Now, being a word person, I enjoy telling a good story. Still, there’s a certain point when one tires of telling the same story over and over, night after night, just as I am sure that Bruce Springsteen sometimes tires of playing “Born to Run,” at every show, no matter how proud he may be of its creation. I told The Big Bad Wolf Comes to Our House every night for about a month, waiting for my boy to tire of the subject. Instead, his obsession grew.

“Tell me,” he growled each night in a way that was intended to sound just like the arch enemy himself, “about the BIG, BAD WOLF!”

So I mixed it up a little, inventing a story called The Big Bad Wolf Comes to Grandma’s House, which ends with the wolf falling into a big pot of scalding water. I also devised a gentler story about my son as a zookeeper who takes care of the Big Bad Wolf and eventually befriends him. There were other variations as well and, like most sequels, all were inferior to my original wolf story. But I had to add some new wrinkles to our bedtime routine just to keep from going completely insane.

So now I have a problem. We are six months into the Big Bad Wolf craze with no end in sight. I am officially out of wolf stories. And I am weary of recycling the old ones. I am tired of describing the wolf as having “beady green eyes that glow in the night,” and possessing “teeth as sharp as scissors.”

Now, I could easily tell my son that Daddy is a little sick of these stories about the Big Bad Wolf, and couldn’t we just read a nice book like Green Eggs & Ham instead? But what would that say about me, the self-fashioned “creative” dad? The one who invents stories on the spot to captivate and inspire his young son, even when that dad is so exhausted some nights that he finds himself sprawled next to the toddler bed, patting his child’s back and murmuring something about a wolf and the dog and Grandma and, are we getting sleepy yet? Want Daddy to go get you a cup of milk?

I know someday my son will tire of the Big Bad Wolf and will probably move on to something mind-numbing like Chuggington or the Power Rangers. One day, I’ll ask him if he wants to hear a story about the Big Bad Wolf, and he’ll say, “No. I want a story about Lightning McQueen.” And I’ll feel sad that one door of his toddlerhood has closed and another one has opened.

But, damn, right now I am sick of that psychopathic wolf. I wish he would go away, like he eventually does in all my made-up stories.