Last night was the kind of night that only parents can know. After it was over, I wrote the following.
fighting all day...
parenthood is tough
— Tenjōka[1]
if only one had been
a girl
— Tenjōka[1]
Last night was rough. Any parent of young boys knows the pattern: things can be totally normal one moment and, in the blink of an eye, the entire house turns into a battleground. Mine usually get along fine, but occasionally they land in some strange chemical reaction together: one flares, the other explodes, and then the rest of the evening is spent trying to contain the blast radius.
My younger son has a strong internal sense of fairness, so when he feels even mildly wronged he goes from zero to sixty instantly. My older son, meanwhile, is physically incapable of ignoring provocation. If something is said to him, he has to fire back. If something is said about him, he fires back harder. So when my youngest starts something, my oldest takes it and amplifies it. It’s like having a smoke detector wired directly into a fireworks factory.
The good part about night fights like last night's, if I’m forced to find one, is that when the dust finally settles, they fall asleep nearly instantly. Once I got them separated and calmed down, they fell asleep within minutes, like flipping a switch. The whole house exhaled. It’s funny how silent silence can feel when the evening has been nothing but shouting.
After they were out cold, I sat for a while in the quiet. That post-storm stillness is one of the hidden gifts of parenthood. Another one of the good points, I suppose. It’s the moment when the adrenaline drains and your thoughts finally line up again and things are quiet again. I ended up writing down the two haiku above. Not polished, perhaps, but at least I got something productive out of things.
The first is maybe straight-forward enough. The second may be too. I suppose raising girls brings problems of its own, but at least girls tend to be calmer and less physical than boys.
Raising boys is many things; it can be joyful, bewildering, and exhausting. But it’s never dull. I don’t actually wish one of them were a girl; I only wish they’d stop treating every minor disagreement like a matter of samurai honor. Still, there’s something almost comic in it. Children fight loudly, sleep instantly, and wake up as if nothing happened. Meanwhile the adults are left recovering, trying to reconstruct how the night got away from them.
But that’s family life. You take the battles, you take the calm, and in between you write a haiku to make sense of it.
❦
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |
