I was on my depressingly long drive home from work yesterday and I saw something that concerned me. Well I mean, possibly concerned me. It confused me quite a bit too. It was just before the woods clear for Camp Zehnder, my favorite part of the trip because of the herd of deer I occasionally see grazing there, and just after Pine Grove Day Camp, which used to be my favorite part of the trip until they put up a tall fence around the property, no longer allowing me to vicariously live out my unrealized dreams of a childhood camp experience.
There’s a stoplight now at the intersection between Pine Grove and Zehnder, and it was while paused here briefly that I saw it: a father holding his daughter at his hip. Now normally, I probably wouldn’t think anything of it. Sure, holding the child against the hip is more the seasoned stay-at-home-Mom’s posture, but I’m sure there’s plenty of Dads out there who can do it. I support equal rights in parenting, but in this case, there were three things that struck me about it:
- The father seemed pretty inept at holding the kid.
- The kid seemed way too old and too big for such treatment.
- The father was holding the kid off the side of a riding lawnmower.
The look on the father’s face seemed completely oblivious of the gravity of the situation (as well as the one working against his daughter’s safety). It was as though he’d come home from the supermarket and had forgotten to put his bulk-size bag of dog food in the pantry before deciding the lawn needed a trim.
I spent the rest of the ride home trying to decipher what I’d seen. At first I assumed it was just a horribly misguided attempt at letting the kid ride along with Daddy while he mowed. Then I thought that, given the circumstances and the fact that he was operating a machine with the express intent of dismembering whatever is left underfoot, wouldn’t it have made more sense to take the less cavalier route and just let her sit on his lap? He could have even let her pretend to steer, in a John-Deere-Meets-Norman-Rockwell kind of moment–a series of paintings that would have started by showing the prologue, the daughter sweating and frustrated as she fails to move a push lawnmower comically larger than her own frame while her father watches with pipe in mouth, and ending with the daughter straddling the father’s knee on the riding mower, the larger set of hands on the steering wheel guiding the smaller.
Now that I was armed with the certainty that what I’d seen was not, in fact, wholesome Americana, I came to the only realization I could: clearly this was some sort of punishment. The look on the kid’s face was of extreme unenthusiasm; had I not seen small movements and shifts of weight, I would have chalked the whole thing up to a strange man mowing his yard with a child-size dummy at his side. Instead, this seemed to me a discipline with waning effects and a father running out of ideas. Sure, when she was a little younger and had misbehaved–perhaps refused her vegetables, or failed to clean her room–her father might have been able to threaten her. “If you don’t finish your homework right now Daddy is gonna get the MOWER!” She’d have grappled at her father’s pant legs, crying and pleading. This repeated until one day, in the throes of a particularly strong tantrum, she actually tested his will. He forced her to dangle off the side of the mower while she thrashed and squirmed, kicked and screamed. After a few hours, when the tears had dried and her swollen eyes had returned to normal size, she realized hey, it wasn’t so bad. Now, as time has gone by, the mower has become increasingly ineffectual and, even though she promises to never disobey again, she knows that sooner or later she’ll be too big to dangle.
I feel bad for anyone who saw the title of this post and thought it was about the movie, The Lawnmower Man. Really, it’s about a man so inadequate that as he cuts the grass, he wonders which is dangling more precariously: his skills as a father or his daughter, off the side of his riding mower?
Tags: father, inadequate, Lawnmower
