What?
I just like to be prepared for stuff.
As I asked, our son happened to be bashing a stick against the new red wagon the Easter bunny had delivered with a gleeful look on his face that cackled, “Imagine me in a clown suit with a swastika tattooed onto my forehead! Won’t you wish you would’ve intervened when I was 2?”
I’ll readily admit that my fears can be irrational.
Even before our son’s birth, I worried myself sick that he’d come out with nubs for legs because of an earlier exposure I had to agricultural herbicide.
No joke.
I clearly wasn’t thinking of my future offspring that summer between seventh and eighth grades when, working on a farm for the very first time, I boarded a bean sprayer, yelled out to my buddies to watch me play “Vietnam door gunner,” then indiscriminately started shooting chemicals — 90 percent of which blew back into my face.
But as it turns out, my son ended up being born with the legs of a gazelle, as those people who recently saw me trying to catch him inside the Derr Road McDonald’s can attest. (Picture the pig scramble at the fair.)
So why do I have reason to now fear that my son might one day grow up to have psychotic tendencies?
Could it be because I feel guilty about letting him watch entirely too much TV that’s not necessarily age appropriate?
In my defense, though, I couldn’t take any more “Caillou” — that squeaky little cartoon brat’s politically correct French-Canadian (i.e. socialist) preschool adventures were driving me to think bad things about his pet cat, Gilbert.
It’s not like I’m now letting my kid watch “Saw IV,” but I did make an executive decision to let him skip to “Scooby-Doo” cartoons and episodes of the live-action Japanese show “Ultraman.”
Harmless stuff in the grand scheme of things, but I’m fairly certain it’s not recommended that a 2-year-old watch TV of any kind.
Our son instead has spent so much effort trying to master the DVD player that he might end up entering kindergarten in diapers.
So, not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before I found myself wondering if I’d made a good decision, particularly the night he looked up at me before bed and asked, “Monster get me?”
I acted like I didn’t hear.
“Monster get me?” he repeated, more urgently.
“Oh, God,” I thought. “I’ve screwed him up. I should’ve been the man here and just watched ‘The Wiggles’ again.”
Then, last week, my wife came home to report that, “When I picked him up today, he grabbed a big plastic number seven and shouted, ‘Look, Mommy! A ray gun! Like on Man-man!’ ”
For those of you not fluent in toddler-ese, he meant to say “Ultraman.”
Having grown up in a time before kids brought actual weaponry to school, this revelation admittedly didn’t bother me at first.
However, my wife the preschool teacher clearly didn’t approve.
“They’re not allowed to play ‘guns’ at school,” she warned.
Then I realized what I’d done — I’ve taught him to be both delusional and violent before the age of 2½.
Why don’t I just get him a creepy clown suit now?
As worried as I am, though, I have to remember that all parents end up making a few dumb decisions.
Right?
It doesn’t mean their kids automatically grow up to be psycho-killers.
Right?
My own dad, I’m sure, regrets the time he attempted to get me to finish a grilled cheese sandwich by threatening that “the wolfman would come make me finish it” if I didn’t.
I called his bluff — and he came up the basement stairs growling and wearing a rubber werewolf mask.
Did it mess me up?
Nah. I love my dad.
I just refuse to visit when there’s a full moon.
Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.
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