The Saddest Day

 
     From the perspective of a little boy, sometimes a reprimand can be like a random lightning bolt, seemingly without rhyme or reason.
     I remember sitting in my crib, barely three years old, back when we lived in the house where the dinosaurs were. I could reach over to my bedside table on which there were books and stuff, and I took down one of my favorite picture books and a pencil. I had a good idea: I would play "Dugan's".
    Dugan's was the baked goods company which would deliver our bread several times a week. The man would park the van in our driveway, and one time, while he was carrying our bread into the house, my brother and I sneaked into the delivery van and "helped", by selecting certain pies and cakes that the man seemed to have overlooked. He was talking to my mother in the kitchen and making the marks in his little book, when my brother and I marched into the room carrying a couple of pies and stuff. My mother was shocked and annoyed when we did this, but the Dugan man was very good natured about it. He gently guided us little boys back into the truck and showed us where to put the things back on the shelves.
     I liked the Dugan man, but he, too, had to obey my mother.
     Anyway, so one day I was in my crib for my afternoon nap, and I couldn't sleep, so I decided I would play Dugan's. I took down a picture book from the table, and a pencil, and I began "writing" down the orders in the book, just like the Dugan man does. I held the pencil in my fist and inscribed loops round and round across the page. It looked very official, I thought.
    But later, when my mother saw how I had defaced the book, there occurred one of those sudden shocking bolts out of the blue. Much later, I understood that I shouldn't have marked up the book, but at the time of discovery, my mother's reaction seemed much warmer than necessary. My tears weren't so much from the pain of the spanking she gave me, as for innocence lost: now I was a bad boy, who did bad things.
     Another time, maybe a year later when I was four, I discovered a can of my dad's shaving cream. I had never seen anything so amazing; when you pushed the button, all this lovely foam came gooshing out.
     So I pushed the button and drew a nice line of foam across the floor, up the side of the couch and across the back, down the other side of the couch and across the pillows. This was the most magical thing I had ever seen, and when the foam ran out I was disappointed. The magic was all gone.
     Well, needless to say, when my mother found this latest example of my handiwork, you can imagine what happened. When I was doing it, it had all just seemed so amazing and mysterious. But when she saw what I had done, I experienced another one of those blinding thunderbolts out of the blue. I never saw it coming.
    
    Now I am grown up, and I have children of my own. I have all my childhood memories as a valuable guidepost to help me understand my own children, to help me not repeat the mistakes my parents might have made.
    But sometimes it seems as if experience is useless, after all.
    When my firstborn Mathew was little, we would spend all our days together. Being a father, taking care of my little boy, taught me for the first time what true love really is. All I wanted was for him to be happy.
     But of course, kids do things that can be annoying, sometimes disturbing, and a parent can lose his temper. In spite of how much I love my boy, I had been getting angry with him a lot lately; I was stressed and tired.
     He did something on this one day, which doesn't seem like anything much now. We had been having a sweet day together, enjoying our time, and laughing so much. But then he jumped into a bed with his play clothes on, which were covered with grit from playing outside in the dirt. He jumped into the clean bed, and smiled up at me mischievously, not thinking any great harm. He was only three years old, and he was just teasing me. But I lost my temper. The bedclothes were freshly laundered, his play clothes were heavily soiled, and it triggered me. I shouted at him bitterly. That's all I did, but it was far too much. As I say, I had been losing my temper too much lately, and now, again, out of a clear sky of blue comes a lashing storm of anger. Then I froze with shock when I saw the look on my son's face, and then he ran out of the room.
    With a feeling of dread, I followed him into the kitchen, and I found him crouched under the chair by the kitchen table, just huddled there in pain and confusion. My little three-year-old baby boy.
     He couldn't understand where the sudden storm had come from, the bitterness. I would have given anything to have taken it back, but how can you?
    I sat down next to him on the floor, hugging my knees. I realized that there was so much anger and frustration in my own life, from things in my past that had nothing to do with him; things which he could never, and should never, have to account for. Neither of us spoke or moved for a long time; we just sat there in wretched silence, on that saddest day.