The Homework Ate My Daughter

I love language, and most especially, the ambiguity and elasticity of thought symbols constructed of the randomly assigned collection of lines and squiggles we call alphabets. Language is a metaphor for The Captain: I love myself; I’m ambiguous and elastic in my thinking, especially when it comes to reality; and I am constructed of randomly assigned genes, which, when depicted on paper by scientists, look a lot like a bunch of lines and squiggles. I was recently reminded of this when I arrived home from work one day and went to greet my teenage daughter with a kiss and a hug. “Not now, I’m doing my homework!” Licking my wounds, I retreated, scribbling notes about the encounter to use for my blog. There was a time, not that long ago, when I would have been greeted with an enthusiastic “Hi Daddy!” to go along with a great big hug and kiss. What changed? Right then and there the perfect metaphor for this moment fell out of the sky and smacked me in my brain: homework.

Home and Work. Use these words separately and you have two separate thoughts. As I toil at work for a lifeless Insurance company, I long for quittin’ time, when I get to go home and relax after a full day of work. But as I was reminded by my encounter with my daughter, the world is set upon its head for children if you combine them to create a new word: homework, the bane of all students. After a hard day of texting and learning, students must come home and do their homework. All the unpleasant memories came rushing back like flashbacks after a blackout. Homework sucks the life and happiness right out of you.

I remember the rush of adrenalin when my 7th grade teacher taught us about child labor laws. I went straight home and told my parents that child labor laws prohibit them from making me do my homework, and ran up the street to share my revelation with my friends, who all joined me in the streets for a celebratory game of kickball! But the air was kicked out of me the very next day when I was called into the Principal’s office for a meeting with my parents and history teacher, who deflated me by explaining that child labor laws do not, in fact, apply to public schools. But I learned a valuable lesson that day. Children have no rights and adults are lying bastards.

So all these years later, now (debatably) an adult, as I sat there feeling sorry for myself, I experienced something strange and new. I believe the word for it is empathy. It wasn’t me (though, admittedly, sometimes it is); the homework ate my daughter! I realize that one day, my daughter will be regurgitated to me and the pleasant greetings will return. Armed with this new feeling and a new word, I walked gently up to my daughter, braced myself, and gave her a great big hug…and I think I caught a glimpse of the tiniest of smiles.

Believe The Captain when he says: Beware when home and work hook up.

Yours drumming up a game of adult kickball – because I can!

The Captain

You can't blame it on this guy!