Silly Dadda Can't Function in the Middle of the Night
I read The Divine Comedy when I was 13. Before you think I'm bragging, let me tell you something.
I did not think it was that great. Honestly, overrated.
The whole thing was lost on me.
If I am being honest, I thought the book was a pretentious, steaming pile of words I did not understand. That's a review you can expect from a 13-year-old because, at 13, you think the world revolves around you, and you don't think anything is great.
But unlike The Iliad and The Odyssey, to understand The Divine Comedy, you need to know so many players from obscure 14th-century Florentine history to understand the action –which I consider to be impossible for a 13-year-old or any human being with hopes of mating.
The poem read like a collection of disgruntled and angry Yelp reviews.
With a lot of time on his hands because of his exile, Dante Alighieri thought of everyone who wronged him and fantasized about how they would be punished in the afterlife because there was nothing he could do about it in real life. "Horney devils will molest this big wig. This priest will be boiled. My boss will go to a certain circle of hell."
This poem is just a collection of complaints à la Letters from a Nut, stemming from his dissatisfaction with the world when the obsession of his life, Beatrice, did not correspond to his love.
Of note, Dante said he only met her twice.
So The Divine Comedy, this highly revered book, was just about a creepy dude wanting love but not getting it –which is what all Yelp reviews are about, anyway. "No one loves me, so your restaurant staff is rude and pretentious, and your gyozas were soggy!"
Reviews are a way for people to tell us they are not being loved; they go online to give one or two stars to this or that restaurant because they feel no one in their actual life is listening.
So they act out their despair on internet forums.
The classics, as some fartsy-artsy people referred to them, were the kind of titles I had access to because I had easy access to my grandfather's library. And I kept the practice up for as long as I lived in Colombia.
When I was sixteen, I saw a small, thin book in my grandfather's library.
It was called The Peter Principle, written by Canadian educator Lawrence J. Peter.
The Peter Principle simply states, "Everyone rises to the level of their incompetence."
It is a very pessimistic but fascinating way of seeing the corporate world. We all rise to the level of our incompetence, meaning we all eventually get to a job that we can't hack. And because we are incompetent in it, we can't keep getting promoted, but we are still incompetent in the position we have.
Remember that one friend in high school who read one philosophy book, and then for every situation that happened, he paralleled it to that one book.
Yep!
That was me with the Peter Principle.
And guess what?
No one wants to hear that they have reached the pinnacle of their incompetence, and there is nowhere else to look but despair and angst for the remainder of their lives.
I thought this only applied to our professions and crafts, but it accurately describes parenting.
I can't think of any other endeavor where what we learn at a specific age of development for our kids is so quickly outdated and will be obsolete in the next.
We are constantly faced in parenting with the fact that we are utterly and helplessly incompetent.
We show up, but we know that it is likely that we will mess up because we acquired some tools for yesterday's problem, but today's problem is not yesterday's problem.
When my daughter was four, she shouted for me almost every night, between three and four in the morning. I waddled and jumped to her room with a crooked spin like a primate before Homo Erectus.
I would step into her room for one of two things.
She either needed me to pull up her blanket or she needed me to take her to the bathroom.
I know she was at a stage where she could've done those things independently, and maybe I should've forced her to. But I took those little moments to hug and kiss her because I knew they would be gone, and they are gone.
So, I took what I could right then.
But to be fully functioning that early in the morning was unrealistic.
One morning, she needed me to take her to the bathroom. I managed to help her and then took her back to bed.
Fifteen minutes later, she started screaming for me.
"Dadda!! Dadda!"
I ran back to her, doing my best impression of "Weekend at Biden's," and stepped into her room.
"What's up, baby?"
"I do not want a diaper!"
"What? Babe, you don't have a diaper."
I checked to make sure that, even though she hadn't worn a diaper for nearly two years, I didn't put one on her.
There was no sign of sleep-diapering.
Then she pulled a giant waddle of paper from her pants.
I remembered then that instead of throwing the waddle of paper away after wiping her, I just dropped it in her pants and put her back in bed. She handed me the toilet paper and laughed, "Silly Dadda, you could've given me an injury!"
And doesn't that summarize parenting?
We try our best, but inevitably, sometimes something goes wrong, and we leave some injuries in our path – hopefully just emotional, but that depends on the state in which you live.
I just keep showing up, even when I know I have reached the pinnacle of my incompetence.
Even when I know my review will come in her teenage years, and it won't be that dissimilar from a Yelp review: "I found you rude, pretentious, antiquated, racist against ladybugs, and your arepas are a little soggy. I would give you zero stars if I could, but since I can't, I'll give you one."
