The Exhausted Dad: Retold stories that mutate into nightmares

The stories we tell won’t always belong to us. Such is the uncompromising nature of mortality. My legacy, ultimately, will belong to what my children remember about me.

If my 12-year-old’s current stories about me are any indication, I will be remembered as an inattentive crazy person.

I’m exaggerating a bit, of course, but my daughter tells two stories about me that, I feel, fundamentally distort the truth about my parental abilities.

Neither story stems from her own memories, by the way, as she wasn’t even a year old when both occurred. She remembers my multiple retellings of the events, which I now regret sharing with her. She’s basically changed the facts to make me look like an incompetent fool.

Her version of Story No. 1 goes like this:

I purposefully placed my helpless, immobile, then-6-month-old daughter on the floor of the kitchen so I could stuff my face with microwaveable rice. I ripped off the plastic seal of the newly nuked, non-nutritional snack and began scarfing it, resulting in burning-hot grains of rice pouring down onto my innocent, defenseless child.

What really happened:

My daughter, for the entirety of infancy, refused to sleep anywhere except in the arms of a parent. On this particular day, her sleeping habits prevented me from eating anything decent for several hours. In one of her awake, content moments, I placed her on the floor in the living room, located a good 20 feet from the kitchen. When the microwave beeped, I rushed over to the kitchen, opened the microwave, and CAREFULLY removed the plastic seal from the rice bowl. In that 15-second window, my speedy new crawler traversed the house and settled under my feet as a SINGLE GRAIN OF RICE fell from the top of the packaging and landed, almost impossibly, on the top of her hand.

It burned. She cried. I felt terrible. But she went back to her normal, happy, never-once-slept-in-her-own-crib existence. Full functioning use of her hand, by the way.

Her version of Story No. 2 goes like this:

I purposefully left a Cutco steak knife on the edge of the entertainment center after opening one of my action figures. My daughter, again around 6 months old, then crawled over to the entertainment center picked up the knife and started waving it around. I watched her fling the weapon around for several minutes without intervention. She then cut her own hand open, and I traumatized her.

What really happened:

My wife (NOT ME) left a Cutco knife on the entertainment center for a reason neither of us can recall. For whatever reason (no judgment!), the knife didn’t get put away, and I was completely unaware of its dangerous location. When she picked up the knife (admittedly from the sharp side). I IMMEDIATELY noticed and carefully removed the weapon from her tiny grasp. She did NOT cut her hand. Not even a scratch. So much for Cutco’s boasts about being the sharpest knives, amirite?

Both these incidents happened within a few weeks of each other. While neither resulted in serious injury, it shook my confidence. I had only been a parent for six months. I was staying at home, alone, with a speedy crawler who NEVER SLEPT. Clearly, I failed all the child care tests.

My daughter, who will generally praise my fatherly efforts if I ask her the question directly (so long as I show the appropriate insecurity), tells HER version of these stories to her friends at school. Also, she tells them I’m “so weird” which is either a. what middle school kids say about their parents or b. probably fair.

I just hope these stories don’t get further exaggerated as she grows into an adult. By the time she graduates college, the first story will be how I threw her into a cauldron of hot coal and the second story will be how I encouraged her to become an ax murderer.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, a full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 6-12. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.