Praise

John, married to Sadee, introduces his kids Lolly and Grady. The couple are careful about how and when they praise them. John got very little praise as a child, and didn't know how to react when his father did seem to offer some.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Wayne Jones. Welcome to Lies I Tell My Kids, a fictional memoir by a truthful man with no children. This is episode 1, “Praise.”

It can be easy to let my falseness embrace me, just as it’s easy to transition from sitting up at the corner of this sectional sofa to sink back into the soft intersection where everything meets. Cushions, throw pillows, my head, my aching neck. My back gives up all ninety degrees of perpendicularity and just collapses conveniently onto a randomly placed pillow, thick silk cover, that holds my head at half the angle so that I can look at the ceiling if I want to, or watch them as they play together on the hardwood just on the other side of the coffee table.

Sadee and I are often asked if they are twins as we toodle along the pristine sidewalk of our cul-de-sac on our way to the playground. The girl, Lolly, at the advanced age of seven, is only 320 days older than her brother, Grady. It wasn’t planned that way. Sadee and I had always wanted more than just the one child but we thought that about five years would make a good separation. Distinct generations of a sort, really, and we would get to watch them both grow while living very different experiences, a five-year-old not having much in common with a newborn, and fifteen years later, in her twenties, Lolly would be intending to snip this family arc while her beleaguered brother was focusing on girls and on getting better grades in high school and on whether it was too early to start shaving.

We also didn’t plan on the sing-songy, diminutive ee-sounding endings of both their names. We were always set on Grady as the boy’s name, after Sadee squealed one day at the epiphany of finding it in an online list of “most popular names for your new mister!” Lolly was somehow gradually born out of her given name, Laura, and we resisted it at first but when Laura’s friends all started calling her that, and then their mothers, it seemed pedantic and stern for Sadee to launch into her brief lecture whenever she heard Lolly, and so the new name stuck. I kind of like it now, I have to say. My own name is John, by the way, and for whatever reason Johnny with a y or Johnnie with an ie or especially Jack were never ever suggested as I grew up.

So here they are in front me now, the twins, because we are in that 45-day period where Lolly is lolling at seven before her birthday finally arrives and she can declare supremacy again, and Grady will file back in line in second place, again. They’re kids and of course that’s part of the reason why this little calendar trick, this magic even, makes any difference to them at all, or even gets noticed. But Sadee goads them as well, asking them how her twins are doing today, or shouting upstairs to lure them down to dinner, “The first one down is the best twin and gets the biggest slice of pie.” And on and on: she’s an idiot sometimes.

We’re careful about giving them praise. The main effort is to make sure that praise is meted out equitably while also being careful not to be patronizing to either of them. There was a big blow-up a couple of months ago when both kids were behaving quite well, and Sadee, albeit with the best intentions, praised Lolly for not having chocolate on her T-shirt and Grady for having reorganized, tidied, and even cleaned his own room.

“Are you shitting me?” Grady asked.

“Grady!” (a mother’s reaction to any level of swearing or to the ill-defined cluster called bad words).

“I took three hours to convert my room to what you’ve always been asking for,” he continued. “And Lolly kept it off her shirt, yes, but check out the trail of it from the kitchen and the splotch on our couch.”

Sadee and I survived that one but learned a lesson. We are not bad parents. I know from the snippets of a dozen so you’ve-got-a-new-baby books that Sadee read after each that it’s important to dispense praise. You have to tread carefully the rocky terrain of speaking up whenever they do the most minimal, liminal act along the border of good and normal, and on the other hand being careful and attentive when they do something that they are legitimately proud of. It’s tiring. Sadee is able to be natural with them and the chocolate/room-cleaning fiasco was an anomaly for her. I love my kids but I feel too objective about the management of them. I tend to make my assessments like performance evaluations.

I grew up receiving very little praise at all from either of my parents. It was so rare that it would always stop me, and I’d wonder whether they were joking, or whether it was an ironic setup for a severe punishment that I was always berated into believing that I deserved.

“John, decent job on that math test,” my father might say, and I’d just stare at him for a few seconds at first, my jaw slackening nearly to the level of my usual academic performance. A flurry of possibilities started up in my head, blinding me a bit, making me have to work hard to determine just what was what and where it was located exactly. My thoughts would spin with the wind and I’d start to wonder what the word decent meant at all, and then what it meant to him in relative terms. Did he mean that it was solid work? I’d think of the decent wage he often bragged about getting even though he never made it out of high school. Or was decent just a tiny step up from indecent? “You’d better get your fuckin shit together, boy, or I’ll kick your ass out of this goddamn house before you even get the chance to fail out of school.” That might be his meaning.

But mostly by the time I focused on him again he had already moved on, turned his head back toward the news on TV or his find-a-word puzzle. I had just travelled an enormous distance from what I thought was a compliment – had to be a compliment, didn’t it? – and now I was back and the shine of it wasn’t so shiny any more.