We Asked Some Dads About Their Worst Parenting Fuck-Ups

Don’t, dad. Photo via Flickr user Jeff Egnaczyck

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada

Let’s face it: dads get a lot of undue praise these days. Congratulations, you put the diaper on the right end. Way to go, you bought some mushy carrots, and later you’ll swear a blue streak while dabbing at the resulting vomit. Holy shit, you stopped a flying baseball bat from straight-up murdering that baby you made. (OK, that last one is pretty impressive.)

Anyway, since dads seem to get all kinds of extra credit for completing low-to-medium difficulty parenting tasks—I mean, is it technically “babysitting” if you share genetic material?—we decided to even things out. It’s probably how most dads would want us to celebrate Father’s Day anyhow: by endlessly ripping on them for their failures.

*Note: All names have been changed to protect anonymity.

Johann, 49: Parenting on mushrooms

Once when my son was one year old, and his mother (my ex) had some friends over for dinner. The night was young, so we thought maybe we’d take some mushrooms. Everyone took theirs, and I ate what was left. A couple hours later, I was in the room with my son, and we were having the most philosophical conversation involving spirituality, nature, and the future—particularly his and what he was planning on doing with his life.

Partway through the conversation, it dawned on me that he’d actually yet to start talking. I’d been imagining the whole thing. Eventually, his mother came in and sent me on a walk with a friend (which lasted an hour and ended with us barefoot in the snow).

When dad drinks are sad drinks. Photo via Flickr user Ben Piven

Terry, 71: ‘My kid probably swallowed motor oil’

When my daughter was three, I took her and her 14-year-old brother for a ride out to one of my work sites. You know, a nice excursion through Northern BC’s wild winter landscape. While we were at the site, I was under the truck draining the motor oil from the diesel engine. Suddenly, I hear her brother screaming and cursing, so I whip out from under the truck to find my daughter with her tongue stuck to the frozen back bumper.

Now, this isn’t something to really panic about in the North, because it’s relatively common for kids to make this mistake and the fix is simple: pour warm water over the tongue until it unsticks. Unfortunately, we were in the absolute middle of nowhere. It was -30 degree weather, so there wasn’t much around that was warm. I considered running the engine and then retrieving warm liquid from the radiator, but realized that heating the engine would take awhile, leaving my daughter stuck to this bumper the whole time, in pain and in danger of ripping her tongue if she or the truck made any sudden movements. She was three, and she was starting to panic, and her brother was a frantic, cursing mess, so we needed to do something quickly.

I considered the warm liquids we had on hand, and the way I saw it, it came down to two: urine, or the oil I’d just drained from the engine. Not the easiest choice: Poisonous Substance vs. Lasting Emotional Scars. In the end, I chose the one that wasn’t urine.

So, my son and I worked together to pour this motor oil around her tongue, careful not to get any in her mouth—although she probably ended up swallowing a bit anyway. She finally came unstuck, but not without leaving a decent piece of tongue skin on the bumper.

The good news is she doesn’t have any emotional scars, but she had a scar on her tongue for years.

Clayton, 40: ‘Oh fuck’

I’m afraid that my darling three-year-old daughter has had more than one opportunity to learn to curse from me. Still, I honestly thought I was able to downplay it, until one day I knocked something over and she casually said, “Oh fuck.” After asking her to repeat it (which she did without batting an eye), I asked her why she would say something like that.

Her confused reply: “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to say when we drop something?” Apparently downplaying it didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped.

Ugh, children. Photo via Flickr user Matt Rutledge

Steve, 44: ‘I got owned by a bunch of kids’

When my son was three or four, we decided to take him to Crash Crawly’s, the indoor amusement park, for the afternoon. It’s a big place. There’s a lot going on—lots of kids and noise—and it’s easy to lose track of people. And after we let him go, and he ran off into the big central play structure where all the tubes and slides and ladders are, it dawned on me: “Holy crap. How’s he going to get out of there?” There wasn’t an obvious exit, and there were kids coming and going, and he was only little. And then suddenly, he just disappeared. We couldn’t see where he was. I looked at my wife, and she looked at me, and we were just like: “Uh oh.” We panicked. We’re first-time parents. This is all new to us. And losing your kid is scary. So me, of course, I think: “Well, I’ve got to go in there and rescue him.” Clearly that’s the fatherly thing to do in this situation.

So I clambered up into this indoor play structure—heroically, I thought—and within about ten seconds, I realized that I really hadn’t thought this thing through. There are all these tubes kids crawl around, and slide down, and whatever. It’s made for kids. It’s not made for guys who are 6’2″ and 235 pounds. So, of course, I immediately got stuck in one of the tubes. I couldn’t go forward. I couldn’t go backward. It honestly took me almost five minutes just to turn my ass around. And there are kids behind me complaining. I still couldn’t see Jack, and I started to get really claustrophobic. For a second, I was genuinely terrified that someone was going to have to come and cut me out of it.

Thankfully, I managed to un-wedge myself, and headed toward the exit, where I figured my kid would go. But to get there, I had to crawl over a section of netting across from this line of airguns—this area where kids can shoot these little plastic balls at each other. And there are all these nine-year-old boys manning the guns, and the minute I blundered into this netting, their eyes just lit up like it was Christmas morning.

Suddenly, I’m being pelted with this barrage of plastic balls. They’re hitting me in the head, in the face. And meanwhile, I’m just flailing around in this netting, trying to get the hell out of there. I was way too heavy for it, and the thing sagged down about five feet, which made it even harder to get out. It was a disaster. And by the time I finally got out of there, I still hadn’t found my son. So I limped back to the parents’ area, and as I got there, some older girl walked him over and said: “Is this your kid?” Of course, he was completely fine. And he looks at us, no idea what’s just happened, and says: “Can I go again?”

Jesse Donaldson is a Vancouver author and definitely not a dad.