Lessons and Learns

In my head it was perfect. A shining moment of brilliance and wisdom wrapped up in the metaphor of a history lesson. It checked all the boxes. I damn near broke my arm patting myself on the back for even thinking of it.

My daughter was playing way too rough with her much younger brother and made him cry so I took her into another room but decided the lecture would take a backseat to a teachable moment.

I needed her to understand that he mirrors her behavior.

What he sees her do he understands to be the way to do things from that moment forward.

Like it or not, she is leading him by example and I needed her to understand how powerful that is.

I would even use props!

When we first moved to Ohio my brother and I found and purchased a matching set of Katana so my idea was to get her attention with the sword and while she was captivated by its beauty I’d transport her back to Feudal Japan where this sword meant there was a level of behavior one could expect from the person carrying it.

It was going to be amazing. She’d walk away with a deeper understanding of family and responsibility and want to be an awesome example worth following. She’d think about her actions and how it would play out if her brother copied everything she did and said.

I would be Mister Feeney to her Corey Matthews. That was the plan.

Here’s the reality:

ProTip 1:

Don’t get a kid’s attention with a sword to teach a lesson with words and expect the kid to actually take anything away from those words.

I held the blade up and her eyes went wide. She had seen a Katana on TV before but a blade like that being so close she could reach out and touch it made her awestruck.

“Do you know what this is for?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“Tell me.”

“It’s for swordfights. To the death. Where you stab someone.”

I shook my head.

“This was a sign-”

“But it’s a sword.” She said.

“This was a signal.” I corrected. “There was a time when Samurai were the only ones allowed to carry weapons in Japan, so this sword meant the person carrying it behaved a certain way because being trusted with this weapon was something they took very seriously.”

I gave that last sentence room to breathe before I moved onto the big moment.

“To have the honor-“

I was interrupted immediately by an urgent whisper: “Can I hold it?”

I would not have time to explain that consistency and discipline were the only ways to master a weapon like this. She had no patience for it.

I pointed to my lips and continued, “If everyone acted however they wanted to whenever they wanted to what would the world look like?”

She seemed to think about that.

“Our goal needs to be to act like the best versions of ourselves all the time so it doesn’t matter who’s watching or if no one is watching. We have to be the person we want to see in all the people around us.”

Her face twisted uncomfortably. She rolled her shoulders and opened and closed her hands.

“You need to pee?” I asked.

Her lips peeled back from her teeth, unable to contain the words any longer:

“Can I PLEASE HOLD IT?? PLEASE! I won’t cut myself or run with it I just want to swing it around like I’m fighting bad guys.”

ProTip 2:

All those moments where you had an ‘Aha’ moment in the presence of an adult were accidental.

The adult wasn’t trying to wow you or change your mind. In fact, they were most likely tired as hell and giving the answer that would give you something to think about but stop the incessant questions. Or maybe they just said something they found to be perfectly reasonable but that response was at a level just high enough that it felt like enlightenment.

I didn’t expect fatherhood to be like this. You never recognize the moment for what it is when it happens.

Fatherhood taught me that defining moments of character building usually come when you don’t have time to weigh consequences of your words or actions. You just say or do them and are either haunted or proud from that moment forward. True to life, the lesson becomes valuable only when you look back on it.

I believed my moment to be one of failure and, surrendering to the lesson I didn’t think I taught very well, I allowed her to hold the sword.

The magic moment came between the handing off and the blade being returned to me as I watched my 6 year old daughter carefully test the weight of the blade in her little hands. She adjusted her feet and slowly moved it left to right and back left again, she raised it over her head like she was blocking an incoming strike and then reacted with an exaggerated strike of her own.

“Hi-Yah!”

I instructed her in precisely none of this. A part of me likely hoped she'd hamstring me in a freak accident so I'd get time off in a hospital bed away from this house of madness for at least a week or three.

But nothing went wrong. From the moment she took the blade she regarded it as a weapon and handled with the appropriate amount of care and when she returned the blade to me she did so as carefully as she could and stayed clear while I slid it back into the sheath.

It was a failure of sorts. But my kid reminded me that she still had sense, regardless of how little her father modeled for her in that moment.

Lessons work like that.