Then I thought, a shower. A cold shower. That’s humane, right? It doesn’t hurt the child. It just offers a dose of surprise refreshment. The more I mulled it over, the more I was convinced it was a good idea, which is NOT TRUE.
“Listen to me,” I said to the girl. “I need you to calm down and I need you to promise me you’ll never hit your brother again. Or else, you’re getting a cold shower.” Secretly, I think I wanted her to make me do it. Seemed like a worthy experiment.
“Faka.”
“All right, then.”
I grabbed her and brought her to the bathroom and undressed her. I turned on the shower as she tried to slip out of my grasp.
“No, Daddy! NONONONONO!” she said.
“You will have to learn.”
I put her in and when the cold water smashed against her body, the tone of her screaming changed from anger to sadness. I could hear the shift. I could feel it splitting me open, leaking all the poisonous anger out of me. Her skin went taut with cold and she tried desperately to get away from the water, as if it were attacking her. The fuck am I doing? I pulled her out and she clung to me, crying her eyes out. She was heartbroken.
“Sweetheart, I just wanted you to listen.”
And she looked me dead in the eye and shouted out, “BUT I LOVE YOU!”
That was all she needed to say to leave me utterly defeated. She loved me and I had just done something that made it seem like I didn’t love her back. The regret was instant and total. I loved her. I loved her more than anything in the world and I didn’t even know how we got to this point and now that we were here I felt so dumb, so unbelievably fucking dumb. I took a towel and I wrapped it around her and I wept on her shoulder as I dried her off. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I’m so sorry. I love you too. I just . . . I hate fighting. I don’t wanna fight with you. Am I a bad father? I feel like I’m doing a horrible job.”
I wanted her to say, “No.” I wanted one of those little movie moments where the child turns all precocious and offers words of wisdom to a failing parent. But the girl just ignored me instead. I dried her off and sent her back to her room to get dressed, which she did quietly. I came back downstairs and lay facedown on the floor, crying and pounding the carpet in frustration. My son came out of the playroom and walked up to me, like a dog walking up to sniff a dead body.
“Deddy, are woo oat-kay?”
“I’m okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for asking. I love you guys. I just wish I knew how to figure this out.”
He ran away and I scraped myself off the floor. Every time I have a fight with my kids, I feel like I have to start from scratch. I feel like I’ve tumbled back down the mountain, as if all the good effort I’ve put in before has gone to waste and I’ve fucked everything up permanently. All I want are streaks—little runs of good parenting days. I have a vision in my head of a never-ending streak—a time when I have a perfect relationship with my children that involves mutual respect and lots of outward affection. I don’t know if that’s a real thing or just some pipe dream that only adds to the pressure. Getting up off the floor, I felt like that mythical tipping point was even further away from me now. All I wanted was to get there, and I wasn’t gonna give up. It’s so easy to turn your child into a villain and let yourself hate your life, but you can’t. You can’t let misery win out because it will destroy everything.
I composed myself and swore I would never again throw gas on the fire to escalate the conflict. All I had to do was walk away from the girl and the fight would have been over before all this horrible shit happened, but I didn’t. My wife came through the door and I shuddered to tell her everything that had happened: The Voice, the arm grab, the spanking, the shower. I didn’t want her to know any of it. But I have a big mouth. Nothing stays inside this vault for very long.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“She hit him and I lost my shit,” I said.
“It’s all right.”
“I spanked her. I’m so fucking sorry. I spanked her and I tried giving her a cold shower to get her to stop being horrible and it was all so stupid.”
“It’s all right. It’s all right. I’ve spanked her too.”
“You have?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “It does nothing.”
“Why doesn’t it do anything? I want it to WORK.”
“I know! I wish it would.”
“Why don’t they listen to us? What’s wrong with them? I did whatever my dad told me to. In fact, I did what he told me to do just now. And I’m thirty-five, for shit’s sake.”
“I dunno. Just don’t spank her again. It makes everything worse.”
“I made it so much worse, you have no idea.”
“It’s all right.”
My daughter came down the stairs and there was no more screaming or evil laughter. She had been replaced with an actual girl, the one I’d kill for. She didn’t seem to have any hard feelings about our power struggle. Kids affect a kind of multiple personality disorder—they become entirely different people for a bit and then have no recollection of that identity once the storm has passed.