The Great Sock Caper

In terms of abilities and personality, a baby enters the world as a bag of reflexes, and it seems, not much more.  But it does not take long at all before the child’s interface with the world around begins to produce amazing results.  A personality emerges, and skills begin to develop.  Within days of birth, an infant is making rudimentary attempts at communication with his or her parents.  Shortly thereafter, the child gains the ability to focus and begins to learn the art of reading others’ minds by watching their faces.  Motor skills soon follow, the ability to grip objects, the ability to roll over, strength to hold up one’s head. 

Each day brings with it exciting developments in the child’s progress, and when I was a young father, I took a keen interest in each stage of my son’s growth as a person.  What a wonder he was to me!  What a magnificent thing God crafted when he designed Caleb!  A new aspect of God’s creation, which he had planned since before the world began, was taking shape right before my eyes.  What a high privilege to have been selected to play the role of father to this amazing new masterpiece of our Creator!

Those first days were amazing, but the realization of just how fun fatherhood would be began when Caleb learned to crawl.  Crawling vastly opens a child’s horizons, and with this skill comes the ability to have the first of what can be termed adventures.  Adventures are where daddies excel!

So it was that as I was getting ready for work one morning shortly after Caleb started crawling, I detected a sound from the doorway of the bedroom and glanced over to see my son, on unsteady arms and legs, laboriously making his way into the room.  Being in the early days of crawling skill development, he frequently collapsed under the burden of his own weight, and often this resulted in him rolling all the way over onto his back.  No matter; he would struggle back to the crawl position and onward he would come.

I do not now recall for certain, but I suppose that on this particular morning, I was talking to him as he progressed.  His mother and I generally heaped praise on him when he accomplished new skills, and making the difficult pilgrimage from one room to another was definitely cutting edge stuff for him at that age.  What I do recall was that I had laid out the socks I intended to wear for the day and that at some point I turned my back on my son and the socks.  When I turned back around, I discovered that Caleb had taken one of my socks and just as arduously as he had come, he was exiting the room, sock in tow behind his little balled up fist!

“Hey!” I cried out teasingly.  “You’re stealing my sock!”  I chased him down and scooped him up, kissing his neck and teasing him about being a little sock thief.  He squealed with delight.  I took my sock and went to work, thinking that the fun was all played out.

But guess what…The next morning, as I was, once more, getting ready for work, I again heard that telltale crinkling sound of an approaching diaper in the doorway.  Glancing over, I discovered that the little miscreant had returned, this time with the most impish look of mischievous delight animating his features.  One glance and I knew the sock thief had returned.  I pretended not to notice as the little villain stealthily tumbled across my carpet, grabbed a sock and made good his escape.  Only when sounds of his shuffling little diaper had reached the doorway to my bedroom did I chase him down and once more playfully chastise the little booger!

So began a game that went on for months.  Each morning as I readied myself for work, my little sock thief would make an appearance, that same gleam in his eye, that same determination to relieve his father of one sock, maybe two.  Although he always thought he was really sneaky, he did not realize the extent to which his any success at this game was due only to my pretended inobservance.  Eventually, however, his speed and craftiness did increase enough that by the time he and I abandoned this pastime for other amusements (months later), he had been successful on a least a couple occasions at forcing me to make a second trip to my sock drawer.

(I as a father and he as a son never had any difficulties maintaining the distinction between the game we played and real theft.  He knew the difference.  He’s a normal human being, and as such, God designed him smart enough to know the difference.  To think it would have been otherwise is just silly.)

Caleb turned twenty years old today.  He still remembers stealing my socks.  I am sure glad that he does remember, for that means that he, like me, remembers back to the very early days of our friendship.

Around the time Caleb was born, there was a parenting curriculum named Growing Kids God’s Way that was, shall I say, “all the rage” in Christian circles at that time.  Some friends of ours gave us this curriculum with a strong admonition that if we were to be good parents, Growing… was the model to follow.  I read a lot of the Growing… curriculum, and I suppose that much of what it had to say was good advice.  However, there was something that bothered me very much about it.  It advocated a very controlling parenting methodology, and it sought to justify this level of control by repeatedly emphasizing that children need parents, not friends.

Right on the face of things, it seemed clear to me that being a parent is more important than being a friend.  I understood that much, but what I could never understand is why being a parent precluded me from also being a friend.  It seemed to me that being both a parent and a friend was possible…and necessary.  Growing Kids God’s Way had set the bar too low.  In my estimation at the time, any parent who had been one but not the other had failed to do the whole job, and I determined that my son would have in me both a parent and a friend, right from the beginning.

A key reason in my willingness to discard the conventional wisdom was that I always felt that my own father had been my friend right from the start, and I never perceived that his having been so ever interfered with his ability to act from his position of authority as my father.  I wanted the same for my relationship with my own son.

My son reached the Biblical age of majority today.  He’s now an adult in every way except the ability to buy beer.  From what I recall of Growing Kids God’s Way he is now at the age at which they say I can become his friend!  That’s great, but there’s no need for anyone to introduce the two of us.  He and I have been the best of friends dating all the way back to The Great Sock Caper of ’95!