Mirror, Mirror, on Your Wall

The two phrases, “Actions speak louder than words” and “Do as I say-not as I do,” both mean essentially the same thing. No matter how hard you try to use words to teach your children, they are going to “listen” more closely to what you do, than what you say.

Hammering home the dangers of alcohol, while keeping your BevMo! membership card current, sends a mixed message to kids. More likely the message that lands closest to home is the one that says, “like father-like son,” or “like mother-like daughter.” 

Or how about, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?”

My father never said the words, “You kids need to go to college in order to get a decent job,” but from Day One, it was always expected that higher education was the ticket. Himself, having never made it through high school and gainfully employed as a heliarc welder, at $7,000 per year, had higher expectations for his nine children.

Indeed, two doctorates and three masters degrees later, with the rest of us content to stick with Bachelor of Arts degrees, he had made his point. Included are a doctor, a lawyer, three educators, a couple of mental health workers and a couple of postmasters general. Nary a steel factory worker amongst us.

There is nothing wrong with being a person who works with his hands, if that is what he wants to do. Clearly, my father resented it but never varied from the path of what was required to put food on the table.

Every late afternoon, at 3:45, he would arrive home from work, exhausted, his hands grimy from a day of work in a huge steel building, that served better as an oven in the summer and a refrigerator in the winter. 

As I peeled potatoes and diced onions, under Papa’s supervision in preparation for the evening meal, I got an earful about awful work conditions, listening to him relay the day’s injustices to Mama. Over two cocktails concocted from your basic rotgut bourbon, the story would emerge, before the two of them tag-teamed to get dinner ready for the tribe.

I did not need any more motivation that that, when it came to deciding that my hands were better suited for pens, paper and ink, than grease, grime and cleansing powder. It was all about cause and effect: Because one goes to school, one increases one’s options in life.

Not only was my father able to cook, he could build a home from scratch, he could plumb it and do the electrical as well. He could work with concrete, including building fireplaces, and he could craft kitchen cabinets, fine chests of drawers, hope chests and any other kind of finish-work carpentry.

He never specifically “taught” me how to do anything, but I nonetheless learned a great deal being his helper. All of his sons were Robert’s helpers during their upbringing, sometimes individually, and sometimes as part of a work force.

Papa smoked cigarettes when I was a kid, but he quit in the late sixties, when awareness of the harms of tobacco were being heightened. I smoked tobacco recreationally when I was in college, but had my last ciggie in 1985, always aware that what I was doing was harmful.

Papa refused to call into work, sick, asking rhetorically, “Why should I stay home and be miserable, when I can go to work and be miserable, but at least get paid for it?” That way, when his friend Bob Kinney wanted to go fishing in the middle of the week, he could use his sick time to have some fun.

I am a pretty healthy guy, so that probably explains why, in sixteen years of teaching middle school language arts in the local school district, I never called in sick once. I did miss two days, one due to a toxic spill on Highway 101, and one to having such a heavy amount of snow on the ground, our 4WD Trooper bottomed out, wheels flopping in the breeze.

Maybe there is a connection between my father’s work ethic, and mine, and maybe there isn’t. Or maybe writing sub-plans and feeling guilty about leaving my kids with a sub, was enough of a reason to always answer the bell.

How about reading versus television? Do you want your kids to become avid readers for life? Read to them as kids and read yourself. Do you want your kids glued to the TV set? No? Then monitor how much time you, yourself, spend in front of the squawk-box.

And how about relationships, and respect for women? In this house, with three sons and no daughters, my boys were going to take their cues from me. Did they notice that I brought Gluten-Free Mama coffee every morning when I went to wake her up for the day?

Did they listen when I told them violence was unacceptable in any way? I wasn’t sure. Did they listen when I told them not to hit one another? Did they notice that I was willing to back up what I said by not spanking them?

And did they happen to notice that not only did I not lay a hand on their mom, but that I refused to even speak disrespectfully to her? Could that have been because that was the behavior modeled for me by my own father?

At his worst the best Papa could do to diss on Mama at the dinner table, was to comment that “the wall-paper paste [the pudding for dessert] was especially, well, wall-papery this fine evening.” He might even have hollered at me a time or two, but he never raised his voice to Mama.

Throughout their upbringing my three sons watched me and their mom, care for our aging parents. Gluten-Free Mama even did hospice care for her own mother in Willits, being there to usher her mama into the afterlife, all by her lonesome.

We all cared for Pauline up here on the mountain, from 1996 until 2011, after Robert passed. When it became impossible for her 89-year-old-self to remain up here without companionship, we moved her to Willits. The boys were all three a part of this process.

Now, when I am remodeling the bathroom and laundry room and HeadSodBuster fits time into his hectic schedule to bust out the plumbing and electrical, it feels good. When SmallBoy hauls off the detritus from the same remodel job, a pile of rubbish the size of Rhode Island, it feels good, especially when he makes a return engagement, to remove the dead refrigerator.

Finally, when Ben-Jam-In makes life a lot easier for me and GF Mama, by transporting a truckload of kitchen-sized firewood from up above, to the back of our house, and stacking it, it feels good.

You reap what you sow and whether or not your harvest is productive, may depend on what you see, when you look in the mirror. Do you like what you see? Because others see it too, especially your kids.

If you don’t like it, change it, the way my father did when he quit smoking cigarettes. Is that why none of my eight siblings smoke either? I can’t say for sure but the evidence indicates thusly. Sometimes a lesson is more powerful because it is based on a mistake or a poor decision.

Never mind that you made poor choices; we all do. Correcting a poor choice takes a lot of work and therefore makes a bigger impression on the ones doing the observing. 

Remember, little pitchers have big ears, so if you do not want to hear the f-bomb coming out of your child’s mouth, don’t put it there in the first place, by using it in front of her.