Bad Dad Ruins the Game

I’m working in my office on Sunday afternoon when I hear my daughter’s panicked cry from upstairs:

“Daddy!  Daddy!  HELP!”

I’ve never heard her cry for help like that before.  I’m more used to hearing her bellow in my general direction, which she does when she’s bored, (“Daddy, play Uno with me!”), frustrated (“Daddy, these markers keep drying out!”), or hungry (“Daddy, do we have string cheese?”).

So when I hear her call for help with what sounds like fear in her voice, my heart instinctively seizes as I leap up from my desk.  Your child cries help, you run.

I jam upstairs, skipping two steps at a time.  In the 1.5 seconds it takes me to run upstairs to her room, I imagine eight different horrible scenarios: Her bookshelf had tipped over and fallen on top of her (Dammit, I knew those earthquake-proof brackets looked cheap).  Or she leaned too far out of her window, fell out, and is now dangling by her fingertips from the second story of the house (Screens!  Would it have killed me to put in screens?).  Or maybe a sudden, unexpected surge of the electricity in our neighborhood grid had sent a random finger of lightning out of one of her sockets, found her where she was playing with silverware, and now she’s up there having a seizure caused by electrocution, her tongue turning blue.

I burst into her room.  I don’t see her.  The bookshelf is upright, there are no little white knuckles gripping the window frame, and I don’t smell burning hair.

I hear her giggle from inside her closet.

“RILEY!” I say.  Perhaps a little louder than I planned.  She sticks her head out, a mischievous grin on her face.  Clearly she’s put one over on me. 

“Are you hurt?” I ask slowly.

She shakes her head. Her playful smile is quickly thinning as she senses my tone.  “No, I was--”

I'm instantly angry.  “Listen to me," I say, using my Booming Daddy Voice.   "You do NOT do that.  When you call for help, your Mom and I assume you need help.  You just gave me a minor heart attack, do you understand?  When you cried out like that, you scared the life out of me!”

Her eyes get wide.  And start to glisten a little.  

"Are we clear?" I say, trying to turn my own volume back down.  "You can't call 'help' like that when you don't mean it.  I'm not kidding.  You frightened me and Mommy just now."  She nods silently, all the fun and mischief vacuumed out of her.  I have no idea what she was trying to pull just now, but at least now she clearly understands the problem with crying wolf.  I turn and head back down, wondering if I was possibly just a little too harsh with her.

At the foot of the stairs, I see a folded piece of paper I must've missed before.  I hear Riley suddenly following me.  “Daddy!” she calls down, “Wait!  Don’t read that!”

I pick the paper up.  As I unfold it, she bursts into tears, runs down the stairs past me, and out into the backyard.

At this point, I have no idea what the hell’s happening here.  Then I read the note in my hands, and I start to understand.

It's addressed to me.  It says:

"If you would ever like to see your daughter again, give me one hundred dollars.  If you do, your daughter will not be harmed.  Signed, Lex Luthor"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This note is clearly a forgery.  I know Lex Luthor’s handwriting, and it looks nothing like this.  Plus, in today’s challenging economy, a measly 100 dollar ransom is just a waste of time and effort for any supervillain worth his jet pack.

So there I am, standing in the hall, holding a note my daughter painstakingly created in the hope that she and I would play a game of pretend.  Instead, I yelled at her and made her cry.  Awesome.

Out in the yard, she's weeping in a corner.  I sit down, coax her over, and tell her she’s not in trouble.  I try to explain that the note was fine.  I did not think the note was real.  I get that it was part of a pretend game, and she probably intended for me to see the note first, then hear her fake cries for help. She keeps crying, and I start to realize that she feels ashamed.  Of creating a game I didn't join, of fooling me, possibly of playing pretend in the first place, which apparently is considered "baby stuff" by other 4th graders.  

I feel like shit, of course.  All I can do is keep telling her: You are not in trouble.  I just wigged out when you cried for help in a tone I didn't recognize.  Calling for help like that is very different than faking a ransom note from Lex Luthor in cursive.  But you're not in trouble. I'm sorry I realize what was going on.  

We talk for a bit longer.  After the tears dry, she tells me her master plan for the game.  It turns out she wrote the note, then went upstairs and opened one of her bedroom windows (through which Lex Luthor would've carried her).  Then she went downstairs, outside, and planted several footprints that started in the dirt below her window and led around the side of the house.  Lex Luthor’s footprints.  She explains that she’d also wanted to tie her sheets into a rope and dangle it out the window, but couldn't figure out how.

 It was all very imaginative.  It's the exact kind of thing I used to do as a kid, except that I never had my daughter's flair for detail.  I tell her this too.

We sit for a while until she feels better.  Then we go inside and play Go Fish for a while.  Nice, harmless Go Fish.

So.  The result of all this?  Twofold.  First, I freaked her out so much about crying for help that she’ll probably be too scared to ever call out for me again, even if she's actually being carried off by the entire Legion of Doom.  And second, I killed my girl's wonderful pretend game with one swift swing of the Daddy Axe. And made her cry as a bonus.

Nice job, me.  Hell -- maybe I'm Lex Luthor.