Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:02 — 10.1MB) | Embed
For a little while, I was a god, and I’m only exaggerating a little. I would argue that’s by design, the way it’s supposed to be. It’s also something that’s supposed to collapse from under you, to bring that false reality into proper perspective. Today’s inspiration comes from Adam Savage himself, and while he may be the mythbusting king, even he will tell you his proper place is not on a throne.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode #720, “Dethroned by Design.” I’m Darrell Darnell, I was once standing 3 feet from Adam Savage but was too intimidated to speak to him, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
When my oldest was a newborn, I’d pick up this tiny, red-faced, furious person at all times of day, and unless she was hungry, the crying would typically come to an end. Two beautiful little eyes would find my face and stay there like I was the answer to every question ever asked. She would smile and coo, and my heart would melt.
As she grew to be a toddler, that dynamic remained. Scared? Dad. Thunderstorm? Dad. Strange noise downstairs? Dad. Need a human jungle gym? Dad. I could walk into a room and her whole world got better. For her, the whole world was our back yard, the four walls of our home, and her two loving parents. I was the king of her domain, her mother, the queen.
Now, mind you, I didn’t earn that position in her realm by conquest. I was just the biggest, warmest thing within reach, and that was enough to get me worshiped.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since I heard Adam Savage say something on a YouTube video last year. Someone had asked him what his father would have thought of his work on the Star Wars prequels. His dad was deep into Alzheimer’s by then and never knew. Adam said he was sure his father would have been joyful about his career. Then he turned toward his own kids, and how good they are at things he’s not. Every time he gets to watch it, he said, it’s deeply thrilling. And then he said this: “To the baby, you’re a god, and parenthood is falling from grace in their eyes and them usurping us, which is the point.”
Which is the point. I almost missed those four words. I laughed out loud at the first part. Then I got quiet, because I could see the whole thing play out in my own house, one scene at a time, and because he was calling the fall something to celebrate.
Around four or five, the worship got more practical. I wasn’t a god anymore, exactly. I was the repairman, the fixer. One of my kids would walk up holding a Lego spaceship that had lost a wing, both hands out like an offering, and say, “Dad, can you fix it?”
Not “Do you think you could?” Not “Can you try?” Can you fix it. As in, of course you can. You’re my dad.
Sometimes I could. Other times I’d be staring at one tiny gray brick that looked exactly like forty other tiny gray bricks, and I had nothing. So I’d say, “Let me look at this in better light,” which is Dad for “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Then I’d carry it to the kitchen, find better lighting, and quietly work it out while a small person waited patiently, completely confident it would come back whole.
And it usually did. Eventually. Or maybe I just hid the broken piece and acted like it was put back together. Either way, Those two doe-eyed minions believed in me longer and more confidently than I deserved.
I don’t know when the first cracks in the statue started showing up. Perhaps it was in the car watching me interact with drivers and listening to my exasperated commentary about how everyone around me was an idiot. Maybe it was staring at me while I lost my cool and yelled at them over something they’d messed up despite their best effort and intentions.
But those looks in their eyes said it all. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t even disappointment. It was a kid quietly recalculating everything they had ever believed about me.
After that, the cracks came fast. “Dad, you said we’d leave at four.” “Dad, you promised you would buy us a computer.” “Dad, you’re too old to use that word.” Somewhere in there, I stopped being the guy who knew everything and could do no wrong, and became the guy who was occasionally right and sometimes lucky.
Then came the teenage years, which I did not handle as gracefully as I’d like to tell you. The eye rolls. The sighs. The way a simple “How was school?” could get back a single word that somehow carried a full paragraph about my intelligence.
Just last week I was at church with one thing on my mind: coffee. As I made my way over to the coffee pot, my daughter, now 23, saw me and ran over. I must admit, my heart still melts when her eye catches mine from across the room and she runs over to me. But this time was different. As I stood there filling my cup with Columbian Gatorade, a man walked up to her and began telling her how great she is with the kids, how talented she is, and how grateful he was for her.
I stood there thinking, Oh. There it is.
She isn’t just taller than the throne anymore. She’s sitting on it. She doesn’t have any kids of her own yet, but she comforts and cares for those kids in just the right way. And they love her for it. They put her on a throne of their own.
And standing there with coffee in hand, I, of course, wasn’t bothered by this man’s words to my daughter, I was thrilled. She takes what I always found difficult, and makes it look easy. Watching her do her thing causes me to feel something swell up in my chest that had nothing to do with me being in charge. It felt more like pride with the pressure taken off.
Of course, I know I’m not alone in this. I remember experiencing this with my own dad and the roles were reversed. There’s a line people love to credit to Mark Twain. When he was fourteen, his father was so ignorant he could hardly stand to have the old man around. By twenty-one, he was amazed at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
The folks who track down quotes for a living can’t actually prove Twain said it. The earliest version they found showed up in print in 1915, five years after he died. But it has stuck around for over a century, and I think that’s because whoever said it, the rest of us recognized it. It was certainly true for me.
Then there’s Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician who spent his career watching parents and babies. He gave us the phrase the good enough parent. As I understand it, his idea was that kids don’t need parents who never let them down. They need parents who let them down in small, survivable ways, a little at a time, and who are still standing there afterward. Finding out that Mom and Dad are human is part of how a kid learns to live in the real world.
Winnicott never said parents are gods. That’s Adam’s way of putting it. But I think they’re pointing at the same thing. The kid sees a god. The cracks come. And if we’re still around when they do, the kid ends up with something better than a misplaced god, they end up with a real person. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to be there on the day the curtain gets pulled back.
And then there’s Oscar Wilde, who was not exactly a family therapist, but who had a character say this: “Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.”
Ouch.
Wilde stops there, and I think a lot of us live there. We make it to the judging stage and brace for the rest. But Adam’s line goes one step further than Wilde was willing to go. After the loving, after the judging, comes the part nobody warns you about. Your kid gets better than you. And you get to be glad about it.
That’s the whole arc, the way I see it now. First they look up at you. Then they look closer. And if we let them, they eventually look past us, toward something bigger. Kind of the “be a better man than your father” principle I talked about back in episode 632.
That transition that takes us off that pedestal can be rough. That pedestal comes with power and we humans rarely like to give up power. Our instinct is to fight it, I know I sure did. I said “Because I said so” more times than I’d put on a résumé. Every time I dug in, I was really trying to climb back up on that pedestal, and every time I did, I could see it in their faces. The distance got a little wider, the cracks a little deeper.
Here’s the other thing about a pedestal. Nobody can get close to you up there. You’re admired, sure, but from across the room. And you’re always one bump away from a fall that will hurt a lot more than stepping down would. We fight and argue and “win” arguments, you can call it that.
What I realize now is once I quit defending the pedestal, I got a much better view. A few weeks ago my son called me up and asked me to come down and help him change the oil in his fiancee’s car. The truth was, his car was at my house and his tools were inside. He didn’t need me, he needed his tools. Once I got there, I watched him jump into action and do everything I’d taught him. Master of his own domain, perfectly changing the oil, perfectly taking care of those he loves.
The old pedestal part of me went looking for something to correct, but there was nothing. All I had left was the thing Adam talked about, that swelling in my chest.
Adam was right. The fall from grace isn’t the end of the story. It’s the middle. A god can only be worshiped. A person can be surpassed, and getting to watch it happen is one of the best things I’ve ever been allowed to see.
Here’s what I learned.
You can’t stay a god. It was never going to last, and honestly, it was never my job to be a god. After all, I was never truly a god.
Somebody has to run the universe when you’re two feet tall and scared of thunder. That’s a role I was never qualified for. I’ve come to believe there’s only One who is, and He doesn’t need the position filled. I was just covering the shift for the moments those little hands needed me to.
So the question isn’t how to keep the throne. It’s how to come down from it.
I think there are two ways to leave a pedestal. You can be knocked off, and trust me, the kids will eventually do it, usually in front of other people and while we’re at our worst. Or you can step down on purpose and sit on the floor beside them. The fall is the same height either way. It just feels very different when you choose it.
Adam said the usurping is the point, and he’s right. I spent years bracing for my kids to outgrow me like it was a loss I’d have to survive, never considering it might be the thing I was working toward the whole time. Every night I stayed up. Every spaceship I fixed under the lamp. None of it was meant to keep them looking up at me. It was meant to get them standing on their own, and eventually standing taller than I do.
There’s a quiet sadness in how Adam told it, too. He wished his dad could have seen it. That stuck with me. The fall from grace comes with a clock on it. Somebody doesn’t always get to stay around for the joyful part. So I’d rather not spend the years I have defending a pedestal.
If I could hand you something practical, it would be three small things.
Say “I was wrong” out loud this week. Out loud, with your actual mouth, to the actual kid. It will very likely feel like losing now, but one day you’ll see that it was actually a monumental win.
Let them teach you something. Hand over the phone or controller or remote or whatever it is you struggle with that comes naturally to them. Ask how the thing works. Watch their faces when you’re the one who doesn’t know. You’re not giving up your authority. You’re giving them a seat at the table.
Be the first one to cheer when they pass you. Say it plainly. “I could never do that. That’s amazing.” Don’t go looking for the thing you can still correct. Just clap and cheer them on.
Those little gray Lego bricks taught me something, too. We must have three dozen or more of them scattered around the house and they’ve taught me that the things we fix together hold better than the things I fixed alone under the lamp while somebody waited at the door.
They’re going to take the throne, and then they’re going to do things with it I never could have. That’s not a tragedy. That’s the plan. The only thing left to decide is whether you hand it over with a smile and pull up a chair beside it.
You were never meant to stay a god. You were meant to become a person they’d want to come home to.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on November 30th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page at goldenspirlamedia.com/feedback.