Once you enter the A.K. world, there’s no turning back

Diary of a Dad Housewife

Paul Engleman
Chicago Sun-Times | March 12, 1997

Just as historians created the designations B.C. and A.D. to divide the timeline of history, the course of an individual's life can be broken into segments marked by critical events and defining moments.

For example, our perspective on life can undergo a major change from the period before having to work to the one after we've held a job. And there's a difference before marriage and after the honeymoon.

But there is no more definitive division in a person's view of life than the periods Before Kids and After Kids.

In my carefree B.K. days, when I visited my A.K. friends, their children would invariably run up to me holding some sticky plastic likeness or soggy fur replica of one of their favorite characters. If I asked who it was, even their parents would be startled: "What! You mean you don't know who Big Bird is?"

No, I didn't.

Now that I've got little creatures of my own, my area of knowledge has shifted big time.

As an A.K. guy, I can identify the residents of "Sesame Street" just by the sound of their voices. 

I have committed to memory the departure and arrival schedule at "Shining T ime Station." I can name the passengers on the "Magic School Bus" and, if pressed, I could probably piece together the cast members of "Puzzle Place."

When friends of mine who don't have kids come to visit, I try not to be stunned by their ignorance of the new world in which I bravely pass most of my time. We simply travel in separate orbits, and just because our lives spin out of control in different directions, our alien ways should not be cause for alienation.

The basic challenge of child-rearing is to steadily lead your kids from their world into your world. How good a job you do depends, in large part, on how willing you are to enter theirs. If you resist, you can be in for one very long life.

I had a magnificent view of a kid's world one morning last year when my son woke up with an angelic grin on his face and told me he'd just had a wonderful dream.

And what was it about?

"Lollipops," he said. "A giant pile of lollipops."

By contrast, the images in my dream of the same morning found me waking up in a cold sweat: bills - a giant pile of bills.

The world that kids live in can be a wonderful place to visit. Assuming that you prefer lollipops to bills, you might even want to stay. 

But you can't. Which brings up one definite downside to immersing yourself in the world of a kid: Leaving is not always so easy. 

Spend a day with little kids, and you can expect to be babbling like one of them by dinnertime. Even after you've put them to bed and retired to your own private space, the song playing in your head is more likely to be from an album by Raffi than by the Rolling Stones. 

One day recently, my wife came home from work and reported that while at a business lunch, she had barely managed to stop herself from leaning across the table and cutting someone's food into little kid-size pieces.

For people like me, who spend their entire day with kids, the transition can be even trickier. While talking to an editor on the phone last week, I realized that I sounded just like Mr. Rogers. And it's only a matter of time before I'll be out to dinner with a group of adults, rise from the table and announce, "Excuse me, I've got to go pee-pee."

The B.K. people in attendance may be startled, but if there's an A.K. person on hand, the response I get will be instantaneous and unconscious: "OK, be sure to flush-flush."

Copyright 1997 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.