DadTalk

Hole in the wall

"He'll be fine," I said to my wife for the umpteenth time. I'm the father of three and my middle son, around four years old, had always been a climber.

He was famous from a young age for climbing anything and everything. He’d actually developed his own lounge sport called 'chairnastics' which involved performing amazing feats on the sofa and armchairs – usually wearing just his pants plus another pair on his head. It was quite a spectacle.

But climbing had now become extreme climbing and our current disagreement was whether climbing up the outside of the banisters was acceptable. My wife was anxious that he'd fall and, with a 4-5 foot drop into a narrow hallway, could really hurt himself. I wanted to protect him from such motherly caution and let him roam free to explore his talent. I won the argument that day.

A few weeks later when I arrived back from work Caroline said to Caleb, "Why don’t you show Dad wanted happened today?"

Caleb dutifully took me to a spot in the hallway. There, right about the skirting, was a dent in the plaster the size of a tennis ball.

"What happened bud?" I quizzed.

"I fell while I was climbing, Dad."

"Ouch," I said. "Was that your knee or something made that hole?"

"No," interrupted my wife. "It was his head."

Gulp.

Therein lies one of the many dilemmas of fatherhood. Somewhere between the dad who allows his kids to take dangerous risks and the dad who smothers and controls the life out of them lies the dad that I want to be. Every day it seems has new choices and, as I heard someone say recently, "You're not given a manual when you become a dad."

Indeed.