Give Them The Ice Cream

My wife gets on me sometimes about giving the boys ice cream. Not in some serious way, and she is probably right that they do not need ice cream every time Dad decides ice cream sounds like a good idea. But I already know this is one battle she is probably never going to win with me. I will give those kids an ice cream cone on a Tuesday afternoon for absolutely no reason other than the fact that I can.

There does not need to be a birthday. They do not need to have straight A's, finish some enormous chore, win something, or do anything particularly deserving of a reward. Sometimes I want them to walk into the kitchen and have their dad hand them an ice cream cone. Sometimes I want to be driving somewhere, see an ice cream place, and pull in because why the hell not. I want good things to occasionally happen to them without there being a transaction attached to it.

I think I understand why now.

When I look at my boys, especially as they move through the ages where some of my own childhood memories begin, I have a harder and harder time understanding how somebody could hurt a child. They are so fucking little. They can make enormous messes, fight over completely ridiculous things, ignore something I have told them six times and somehow turn putting on shoes into a twenty-minute operation. Then one of them looks at me and I see exactly what he is: a child who is learning how the world works and trusting the adults around him to teach him.

There were times when I was little when I would have given anything for the world to just be good for a minute. I would have liked somebody to interrupt whatever fear, confusion or pain I was carrying and hand me something good for no reason. It did not literally have to be ice cream. I just wish there had been more moments when somebody made being a kid feel safe and easy instead of moments when I was getting my ass beaten by someone who was supposed to be an adult.

Maybe that is why some of the little things other parents might debate are absolute no-brainers to me. I know too much about what children can carry. I know how long a childhood can follow someone after childhood is technically over. If one of my biggest parenting offenses is that my kids occasionally got too much ice cream because their dad liked seeing them happy, I can live with that charge.

I am not trying to give them some perfect childhood. They have rules. They get in trouble. They hear no plenty. I make mistakes with them, lose my patience sometimes and have nights when I am tired enough that the last thing I want is another request from somebody who should have been asleep twenty minutes ago. Loving children does not mean giving them everything they ask for or protecting them from every disappointment.

But I think children are deserving of more good than adults sometimes allow them to have. They deserve little surprises. They deserve ridiculous traditions that make no sense outside their family. They deserve to know that happiness does not always have to be earned first. They deserve memories that are so ordinary they may not even realize until they are adults how much those moments meant.

I hope someday my boys think about their childhood and remember things I have already forgotten. Maybe they remember sitting outside with ice cream running down their hands. Maybe they remember Dad saying yes when there was no particular reason he needed to. Maybe one of them laughs someday about how their mother would roll her eyes because Dad was giving them ice cream again.

They will probably remember some of my mistakes too. I am not naive enough to think a freezer full of ice cream erases every time I get something wrong. Parenting is going to leave them with a complicated collection of memories because that is what growing up does. I just hope that when all of those memories are put together, there is never any question about whether they were loved.

There are things from my childhood that I still cannot make sense of because I look at these boys and cannot imagine doing those things to them. I cannot understand looking at a child that small and deciding that pain is what he deserves. Maybe I will never understand it. Being their father has made some parts of my own childhood harder to comprehend, not easier.

So yes, I give my kids ice cream.

Sometimes there is a reason. Sometimes there isn't. Sometimes the entire reason is that I remember what it felt like to be a little boy wishing somebody would make the world good for a minute.

I can do that now.

Give them the ice cream.