Transcript: "Cold, Hard Lessons Learned", a Story By Matthew Dicks
This is a transcript of Matthew Dicks's story, Cold, Hard Lessons Learned, at a Seattle Moth StorySLAM.
This is a transcript of Matthew Dicks's story, Cold, Hard Lessons Learned, at a Seattle Moth StorySLAM. You can watch Matthew telling the story here:
Cold, Hard Lessons Learned, a story by Matthew Dicks
Staring at my children, Clara and Charlie, and I'm screaming at them. I am hollering at the top of my lungs. I am so angry at them. Clara is a 10-year-old militant feminist who comes down in the morning and asks me questions like, "Do you know who Madame CJ Walker is?" And if I don't know, I catch hell. But she's also a kid who can walk into her room and jump over a mountain of wet towels like they don't exist. She's a monster.
Charlie is seven, and he's funny. He's legitimately hilarious—10 percent of his jokes make me laugh, and that's a good percentage for a seven-year-old comedian. But Charlie is in love with my wife, his mother, and he proposes to her daily. Just a couple weeks ago, he told my wife, "I have a girlfriend," in an attempt to drive a wedge between us. I do not have a girlfriend, so I don't trust Charlie anymore.
And so I'm yelling at them for this transgression they are committing, and I can't believe it. But really, the reason I'm yelling at them in this particular way is because of forty boys at a camp, a YMCA camp, ten years earlier. It's 2009, and I'm at a YMCA camp in Connecticut. I'm a fifth-grade teacher, and we take all of our children there every year. It's normally a fall trip, but a hurricane that turned into some wind canceled the trip, so we had to go in the winter. There's 12 feet of snow, and it's negative three degrees.
I've been in a cabin for two days with 40 boys, and they are killing me. I spend every day saying, "Would you act like a fifth grader?" When in my head, I'm thinking, "You're acting exactly like a fifth grader, and that is the problem." These are boys who leap off bunks to try to break as many bones as possible. These are boys who emit fluids from every orifice in an attempt to make each other laugh, and they won't sleep. It's been two days, and they will not sleep. I'm with 40 boys and two men in the cabin.
On the other side of the pond, my pregnant wife, who's also a teacher, is with 40 girls, but there are 17 women doing braiding and beating and kumbaya, and I'm stuck with one guy and 40 boys. The guy I have is named Paul. And Paul is, if someone made someone who was the opposite of me, that is Paul. He is a vegan from California, and he's got the Grateful Dead concert just playing in his head all the time. He once asked me if my pants were made from organic cotton, and it took me two days to stop laughing at that question. All he does is chill while all these boys make me crazy.
I can't take it anymore, so I tell them, "You're going to have s'mores, and then you're going to go to bed." I try to bribe them with food, which always works, but the equation here is wrong because what you normally do is get kids to do something, and then you feed them. But I can't get them to go to sleep and then jam s'mores into their mouths, so I have to take their word that they will sleep, which is a mistake. These fifth graders are liars.
So I feed them the s'mores, and they don't go to bed. I get so angry, I stand up on a coffee table and I say, "Go to bed! Go into that room, close the door, and I don't want to see you till morning." And they do. They all run in this common room where Paul and I are sleeping, and it's finally quiet. We go to bed.
In the morning, I wake up, and I'm so hot I think the cabin is on fire. I'm on the top bunk, so I call down to Paul, "Are you hot?" He goes, "Oh my God, man, it's so hot." And then I hear the knocking on the door where the boys are sleeping. I say, "What?" The door opens, and a boy pokes his head in and he starts to speak. I will never forget what I see. I see his breath, and then I notice the winter cap he has on and the mittens as he's talking. I can see his breath, and he says something, and I can see he's shivering.
I say, "Yes, come in. What is your problem?" And he opens the door, and a blast of frigid air hits me. I say, "Jesus, what are you doing?" I think they broke in the window. He's dressed in all of his winter gear. I later find out he has all of his clothes on. Every single thing he has on, and a trail of boys—all wearing all of their winter gear—start coming into this common room, and they're all shivering and white.
I'll find out later, they didn't sleep at all. They got out of their bunks in the middle of the night, they made a pile of boys in the middle of the room, and cuddled all night long to stay warm. I look and realize what I've done. The heat source for this room, which is a fall cabin, comes out of our room and goes into their room. So when I forced them to close the door, I cut them off from heat. In the middle of the night, they froze.
So I stop the fire, and I try to follow them out as quickly as I can. That morning, I meet with my colleagues, and a female teacher says, "You know, I heard what happened to the boys last night. They sure learned their lesson. They're never gonna do that to you again." And my thought is immediately that that's the convenient answer. That's the simple way of looking at it. But what really happened was, I frightened a bunch of boys who were far away from home. In the middle of the night, when they were very cold, they didn't have anyone to turn to, and they should have been able to ask me for help.
And that's why I'm screaming at my own children right now. Because I told them to take their bathing suits off while I packed the car, and they didn't. They're on the picnic table in their bathing suits. So I'm in my car with the doors closed, and I'm screaming at them because that's how I yell at my kids. I go far away from them, and then I yell at them so they can't hear me. Every parent has to scream at their children, but they don't have to do it in the children's presence.
So truthfully, I've never raised my voice to my kids, not because I'm a good person or I'm a great parent, but because forty boys who froze one night in a cabin in Connecticut taught me that we should discipline kids, but we should not frighten them while we're doing it.
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