[title subtitle=”words: Stoney Stamper
images:courtesy April Stamper”][/title]
It was a gorgeous spring evening in east Texas, and my little family was enjoying our first taste of non-winter weather in months, there in the backyard. The temperature was perfect, there was a gentle breeze coming out of the north, and the sun was beginning to slowly sneak down behind the trees. I was having one of those moments. You know what I’m talking about. One of those moments when everything in life just feels perfect. Everything was in its place. I had no stress about work, no worries about money, nor was I fretting over the long list of things that needed to be done around the house. Instead, something uncommon occurred. Something that is truly very rare in my life. I felt peace. I felt calm. My busy, crazy, anxious mind found a brief moment of wonderful solace.
I then looked around proudly at my family and my home. The older girls, Abby and Emma, were running through the green clover in the pasture, chasing each other and laughing as their mother watched, smiling from the porch swing. Then my gaze focused on my beautiful blue-eyed toddler, Gracee. Only a few weeks had passed since her second birthday. She was a sight to behold. Her eyes caught mine and she smiled, and then in the most adorable Southern belle voice, she said, “Hi, daddy.” And just like that, my heart nearly burst with pride. How could I have possibly been so lucky to be blessed with this life? What did I do so right that the good Lord saw fit to give me this little piece of paradise?
Then, as if Gracee could hear these peaceful thoughts running through my head, she raised a chubby little hand to her lips, and staring me dead in the eyes, she put a big, steaming, fresh, wet pile of chicken poop into her cherubic mouth. Panic quickly replaced my blissful serenity. “Gracee, no!” I yelled. Alas, I was too late. The damage had been done. I stared at her blankly, in shock at what she’d just done. She then grinned at me through poop-stained teeth, smacked her lips a few times, giggled at me, and spit the remaining chicken poop into her hands, and then wiped her hands on her shirt. She said, “Eww, Gracee, no-no!” Then she laughed and laughed as she walked away, as though absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.
I wish I could say that this was the first time that something like this had happened. But that would be a lie. A big lie. Because the truth of the matter is, something like this seems to occur on nearly a daily basis. Countless times in the last five years I have been completely horrified by something I’ve seen these girls do.
You see, I went a long time with no children. I lived a very clean, neat life. I have admittedly not always been a “kid friendly” kind of dude. Before having my own children, I was an uncle to nephews Braden and Joby, but I don’t know that I was necessarily a really good one. My brother, now he’s a good uncle. He’s fun and laid back and great with kids. But I tend to be uptight and, according to Joby, “Stone’s got lots of rules.”
Of course, here I am now in a house filled with three beautiful daughters ranging in age from two to fourteen years old. And then, of course when you add in their beautiful mother, my life is a drifting life raft in a sea of estrogen. Where there once was order and structure, there is now only a mountain of hair bows, dirty diapers, bobby pins, smelly shoes, math homework, and science projects. In a baptism of fire, I was forced to become a kid person. I slowly but surely learned what it was to be a parent.
Like everything I do in life, I tried to become a student. I read every parenting article I could find online and pored through countless books on the subject. Books on how to be a good “step” father to Abby and Emma and how to earn their trust. And how to be the right kind of dad to Gracee. How to teach all three of them to be well-mannered and kind and confident.
But it was Albert Einstein who said, “The only source of knowledge is experience.” And I have found that to be especially true when it comes to being a parent. No matter how hard you try, some things simply cannot be learned without experience. Sometimes things happen and absolutely nothing you learned in life, or in parenting manuals, articles or videos, NOTHING will ever prepare you for when your one-year-old daughter mashes an entire plate of refried beans and rice in her hair. Or if she breaks wind in a restaurant and starts screaming, “Fart! Fart! Fart! Fart!”
The only thing that I’ve found in parenting that is a certainty, is that you’ll have no idea what’s going to happen next. And once you’re done being disgusted, flabbergasted, and embarrassed, you’ll smile to yourself and think, “Wow, I never saw that coming.”
