Control Your Fluids

Sometimes my friends (and by friends I mean people who still have lean bodies, date like field-bunnies and spend their Saturday’s buying clothes not decorated with licensed cartoon characters) ask me, “So what’s it take to be a good dad? Love, money, patience?”. Actually, there’s a much simpler answer~control your fluids.

Yep, it’s that simple. You control the fluids, you control the chaos.

Do the math.

You’re at dinner. Your fluid is wine. It must go in to your mouth. Repeatedly. Easy.

Trickier is your three year old who has within arm’s length a glass of milk, a glass of water and of course, your wine.

Lose control of any one of those three glasses and its game over. Liquid finds its own level. Which means it flows under and around your paper napkin, the plates, the stem or base of any glass and eventually, off the sides or end of the table.

What’s left is a table coated in a base of fluid and any number of saturated napkins. In other words, you’re now trying to eat dinner in a swamp.

Time to get the check, dinner’s over.

But if you can manage to deftly wield fork-bites of 1500° flesh-searing pizza in to your mouth, while chugging glass after glass of house wine and using one arm to keep your child from leaping off their chair and on to the table next to you in a full-out body-slam while you use your other free limbs to keep every fluid-filled glass vertical and your table dry…

…then winner winner chicken dinner, enjoy your night out with the family.

And if you do manage that minor miracle of fluid control, then you get to move on to the master class.

Controlling your tears.

Because even more difficult than keeping water glasses from tipping over is managing your own emotions as a parent.

And I use the term “manage” here loosely.

Controlling your emotions is more like trying to catch hummingbirds with your bare hands.

Because after you get home with a water/wine/milk soaked shirt, peel off your clothes and jump in the tub with your screaming toddler who refuses to brush her teeth after ‘tubbie, then towel her off, spray her hair with organic detangler then wrangle her in to bed before your wife fills out divorce papers, something funny happens.

You miss your child.

You snuggle the blanket around their little body, sneak off the bed as stealthily as a cat burglar, close the door quietly behind you then burst in to tears.

You’re exhausted, fried like a donut, smell like pizza and can’t wait to hold your baby again.

So you open the bedroom door, and tip toe back to the bed. Just to make sure they’re safe.

And they are. Sleeping as quietly and safely as a lamb. Their faces are perfect. Angels don’t look this flawless.

Their tiny chests move gently with each breath like little ocean waves, in and out. They lay quiet and secure. Theirs is the most righteous peace of body and soul.

They don’t know war, or catastrophe, or loss. Or any myriad number of the world’s sharp-edged realities upon which they’ll cut themselves in years to come.

They only know they are loved. And they are safe. And for now that’s all they need to know.

And yet, somehow for some unknown reason you think to yourself wordlessly, “what if?”.

What if I lost her?

And you feel a heavy weight slowly crush you from the inside out. The weight pushes out the last of the air in you, pushes tears to the corner of your eyes that paint your face.

And you feel light, like you could float away. And you watch her little body, so still.

You reach across the space of your own fears and with your weightless body touch her face.

You can feel her breath move through the diagram of your fingerprint and in to your heart.

And you stand there. Unable to move.

And somewhere beyond your control the world’s most frightening question continues to echo right through you.

What if?

And you know the honsest answer is, you don't know.

So you do what you can. You go to pizza dinners. And you drink bad house wine.

And when she reaches for your pizza and knocks over your glass you smile while you mop up the mess.

And you order another glass of wine. And you hear the world in her joyful laugh and the world says “You can’t control the fluids”. And you know its true.

And liquid will find its own level anyway.

Whether its bad house wine, or good house tears.