My Optimism Is Waning

As I've pointed out in previous posts, parents are amusing in the optimistic appraisals they hold for their children's futures based on what they do when they are toddlers. For instance, the go-to standard: when the child displays basic stacking abilities with blocks, inevitably, someone will say "He's going to be an architect when he grows up!" This is, of course, absurd, but parents can hardly be blamed. Every parent wants his or her child to grow up to enjoy the kind of success that a job as an architect would signify--it is a high paying job that is safe and requires very little manual labor. It makes perfect sense, obviously. Parents want their children to have long, happy, productive, EASY lives, and architect seems like a job that would fit that bill nicely (though, I'm sure, like every job that involves working, it would end up sucking, just like everything does--this isn't me being a pessimist, I am simply basing this off my lifetime so far of working and doing it with other people that usually ends up with them pissing me off or me wishing them dead, two attitudes not typical to my personality type).

We were guilty of those same claims early on as well, I'm afraid. It's difficult NOT to think your child is a genius of some sort (they are, after all, so dim in those early years that ANY act of intelligence seems multiplied a thousand times because it is such a foreign concept). When we saw him stacking blocks, we thought he would be an architect (despite the fact that he only built things so that he could later destroy them) as opposed to being a day laborer at a construction site. When, at the age of two, he counted out nine tires at a tire store, we assumed that he was going to be an engineer or mathematician and not a grease monkey at a Quick Lube (or Monsieur Lube, if he were to move to Canada). When he showed an affinity for moving boxes, crates, or baskets that seemed far too large for his size . . . well, there wasn't much we could assume positively from that, I guess. There aren't many high end jobs that require moving heavy things, though it will certainly come in handy in a household where both parents have back issues (and, secretly, I'm holding out hope that he'll someday be a World's Strongest Man competitor, just because it's still one of my favorite challenge shows to sit down and watch on a slow TV night).

But, the reality of it is, Mozart began study of the piano at age three and his first symphony was completed when he was just eight. Gabe is not displaying these types of traits. Nor would I really expect him to, or even hope that he would. There is little future in symphony composition. The best he could hope for after successfully composing several symphonies, these days, would be a hosting gig at some NPR station or other. Not a BAD life, to be sure, but not one typical of pie-in-the-sky hopefulness.

As with the lifting of heavy things, events of the past twenty-four hours are difficult to spin into an optimistic outlook for his adulthood field of choice. Gabe has become a full-fledged daredevil.

I mentioned in my last post his desire to fall backwards from the couch onto a pile of waiting blankets and pillows. At the time, I was able to dissuade him with tales of confinement to bed for extended periods of time, but the fear of being bed-ridden didn't last long in his mind. By yesterday morning, he was asking me to sort through everything behind the couch to move anything that might hurt him when he fell.

"Sorry, hon," I said. "Those are Momma's things back there. She'll have to move them when she gets home tonight. Be sure to ask her when she gets back from work."

"Ahhh," he moaned, but he let it slide from there and he really didn't say anything else about it the rest of the day. Mission accomplished, I thought. By diverting the responsibility onto Libby, who wouldn't be home for several hours, I figured Gabe would forget about it and we could delay the inevitable for a few more days.

Wrong. As Libby walked into the living room last night, Gabe turned to see her, and the first thing out of his mouth was "Momma! Move sharp things from behind couch so I can 'Pssh'!" "Pssh," or something pretty similar to that, is what he's decided to call the action of sitting on the back of the couch and falling, on his back, onto the padding below.

There was no real way to avoid it now. We were cornered. Our choices were to comply or to shoot him down and deal with the tantrum that would undoubtedly last until bed time. So, Libby cleaned up her mess from behind the couch, and he didn't waste any time trying it out. Libby managed to capture his first attempt on video.

We didn't even have to go to the hospital. As long as this remains a popular game, though, I'll try to keep the phone close at hand to reduce the emergency response time by a few minutes.

And a little more of the same. Notice that I've tried to stay neutral by lying on the floor to stretch my back.

Thus I'm left with a bit of an optimistic conundrum. What positive line of work could this POSSIBLY allude to? Stunt man? Daredevil? Cirque du Soleil performer? Best case scenario for his life as a daredevil, he'd end up a shattered husk of a man who possesses fantastic mythical proportions in the minds of an entire generation, like Evil Knievel. But who, really, would wish that kind of pain on their child? Or maybe he could be a stunt man turned bounty hunter like Colt Seavers in "The Fall Guy." The fact that Colt was "blown up for Raquel Welch" was one of the high points of his career, and I'm just not sure I can get THAT excited about the prospects (especially since, now, he'd be getting blown up for the likes of Megan Fox, which hardly seems worth the effort).

Maybe I'll send Lee Majors an email and see if he has any suggestions. He can't be that busy these days.