Silence of the Lambs: my training film for fatherhood.
Jack has hit a pair of developmental milestones at the same time. He is copying almost everything we say. He is also openly defying us. I wasn’t anticipating waging full-on psychological warfare with him until he hit fifteen.
(Read this next line in the voice of that movie trailer voice-over God, the late, great Don LaFontaine.) Instead, it has begun.
When Hollywood makes the Always Jacked movie, here are five lines of dialog I’ll push to keep in the script.
Jack, don’t climb on that.
Repeated frequently around Casa Kercinik, it has been said in reference to a chair, the coffee table, a dresser, our kitchen cabinets and, most recently and memorably, our dining room table.
Ass!
This one is totally my fault. We were driving and this terrible human being slowly tried to cut us off and that was my loud reaction. Jack immediately incorporated it into his growing vocabulary and turned it into a song. I have been trying to teach him all manner of words, many of them not even swears. None of them have the staying power like this one.
Plop
Our big sound effect, this is the noise that food makes when it hits our kitchen floor. Jack will hold a piece of food — say a big, wet piece of strawberry — look my wife right in the eye, listen to her tell him not to drop said big, wet piece of strawberry. Then he drops the strawberry. Typically while smirking.
"What are you rebelling against, Jack?" "Whaddya got?"
“You can’t run into the street.”
Screw peanuts. If Jack ends up allergic to anything, it will be holding our hands when we go for walks.
“No beer for you.”
Jack wanting what we have knows few boundaries. He tries to drink our coffee, wine and beer. And he’s stubborn enough to want to dip a crab rangoon into some pretty spicy sauce we could not dissuade him from wanting to try. Thank God we wait to use drugs until after he goes to sleep. (Editor’s note: we don’t use drugs.)
Alan Kercinik is a publicist/dad who, right now, is probably either hanging out with his wife, walking the dog, reading, listening to music, ranting about some movie or television show, toiling away on a novel or telling his son not to climb on something. The opinions expressed on Always Jacked are his and his alone, but they are probably influenced by his wife.
You can contact him at alwaysjacked (at) gmail dot com.
