I think I’ve discovered a secret recently. It’s something that I’ve always chalked up to generational gaps or humor changing with the times. You see, growing up I routinely found older gentlemen (particularly fathers) to be one of three things.
1- They were dull as hell, which I assumed was just the way they lived life.
2- They were cantankerous and worth steering clear of.
3- They were absolutely insane and completely awesome.
This was always based strictly on face value. I didn’t devote even a spare moment to consider my teenaged opinions remotely flawed. In my eyes my dad fell onto the border of dull and cantankerous. This is despite the proof I already held to the contrary. He had driven across country in the sixties, skied the Alps, went to Germany to buy a VW bug etc… He might have been pretty great, but why let the facts get in the way of my prejudices??
Now that I’m a dad I’m starting to understand my perceptions a little better. I’d say that 70-90% of that matted personality was all an act. It was a way to dampen some natural tendencies of rambunctiousness the son/daughter exhibit. They didn’t want us to know that what we did was awesome or that they were proud the dangerous stunt we just attempted came off without a hitch or a trip to the ER. I know this now because I am constantly suppressing my inward joy when my kids do something amazingly hazardous, or say something hysterically absurd.
It starts out with little things. We play a rhyming game in our car to keep the kids entertained and they’re pretty good at it. I’ll say “What rhymes with plant” “ ant can’t, rant, supplant”. My son is a bit young so he’ll just use random letters to start the words. “Lant, fant, sant”. Every time we play this game my daughter will throw out the word “Duck” to rhyme with. And every single time my son’s first rhyme begins with an enthusiastic F. He doesn’t
know what he’s saying and we suppress our reaction because he cannot know how funny we think it is.
Of course, for more serious things I need to be stern with my kids. The other day my son asked me to take a picture of him standing on the ottoman. I don’t know why I didn’t suspect anything so… “yeah, sure I will”. Just as he says cheese, he leaps from ottoman to couch, head first. It was very very impressive. And not just the jump, but his planning. He obviously wanted an action shot and he got it. Well-done sir! After I got over my initial shock, I put on my dad face and adopted my voice of disappointment. All of it an act, carefully crafted and passed down through the generations of fathers as an outward display of disapproval, despite what’s actually going on in my head.
My daughter knows where we keep the cookies in the house. They’re way up high where they (and sometimes I) can’t reach them. Well, one day she decides she wanted one and channelled her inner Edmund Hillary to scale Mount Refrigerator to get to them. When I caught her, precariously balanced on the top of the teetering tower of furniture she erected, I was extremely impressed! Not only did she stack chairs, a table 
and a stool in a somewhat architecturally sound formation, but she did it in stealth mode with me not 15 feet away! Well, I buried my joy at the discovery and put on an Oscar worthy performance of shocked disbelief, that my daughter could be so devious and so very very reckless!
A friend of mine relayed a story to me that perfectly sums up the need for absolute suppression when it comes to things blurted out by the kids. His wife was cooking dinner and his 6-year-old son was bothering her because he wanted to eat immediately. Then this conversation took place:
“Mom, I’m hungry. Can you give me something to eat.”
“I’m cooking dinner now. It’ll be a little while.”
“But I’m hungry right now!”
“It’ll be ready in a minute.”
“I DON’T WANT A MINUTE. I WANT MY GOD DAMNED DINNER!!” My friend said he yelled it “as if he was a factory worker in the 40’s coming off of a 16-hour shift.”
His wife turned to the sink, took a few breaths to compose herself, and calmly turned to her son to tell him how unacceptable that was. Inwardly though, she was in hysterics at his outlandish demands!
Sometimes I wish I could be more outwardly excited for the crazy things my kids say and do, but part of my responsibility is to discourage those things to keep them safe and keep them polite. When I look back at the dads that I thought were completely awesome, I realize that the kids they were raising probably wouldn’t be winning any charm school awards. Since they seemed to lack that exterior of disapproval, the “do what you want when you want” kids were always the ones that my parents steered me clear of.
I accept it. My kids are going to grow up thinking I’m super lame, and I’m super ok with that. One day maybe they’ll come to the realization that I did today. Perhaps when I was 16 and was arrested for jumping off a bridge in my hometown, my dad was secretly impressed. He certainly didn’t let on at the time, and the 4-week punishment went to show his disapproval. On the inside though, maybe he was just hoping I swam faster when I saw Harbor Patrol cruising after me. Who knows? What I do know, is I’ll keep my mask of outrage on even though I want to be high fiving an impressive feat. It seemed to work moderately well for me and I’m hoping it works on my kiddos too.