Casting Pearls to Swine

“Do you want to hear a dirty joke?” My grandpa asked me this. My dad was in the room. I was six-years-old.

My dad and his father-in-law had just interrupted their own conversation—one that I had been ignoring until now—for this event. As a six year old, I was aware of the following things:

My dad was in the room, so the joke couldn’t be too dirty.
Dirty jokes of any kind were not encouraged.
They were expecting a certain reaction from me.

When kids in 1st grade ask, “Do you want to hear a dirty joke?” the other kids in the vicinity have an instant attraction to the comedian. It’s not a moth-to-the-flame kind of attraction it’s more like super-electromagnet-to-little-metal-shavings attraction. It’s instant and unwavering. So, that’s what I figured was expected of me and I gave it to them. I spun away from the toy cars with which I was playing, scooted in a crab-crawling sort of way to the feet of my grandpa while exclaiming, “Yeah!”

“A pig fell in the mud,” Grandpa said.

I waited.

“Do you want to hear a clean joke?” Grandpa asked.

”OK.”

“He took a bath.”

They were chuckling. I felt embarrassed. I’m sure to the people in the room, I appeared to be merely disappointed, but that wasn’t it. In a six-year-old way, I felt like I had sold off some of my character, but there was no payoff. I had behaved in a way that I normally would not have only to fulfill what I thought was an expectation for my behavior. It turns out that what I thought was an expectation was really a little test.

I went back to my toys. I continued to be embarrassed and began to feel angry, but I don’t think anybody knew that. Dad and Grandpa went back to their conversation.

It is interesting to watch little kids. There is so much more going on in their heads than they let on. They are not simply playing and reacting. They are thinking, learning, assessing, and hypothesizing, too. Sometimes, I think we sell kids short on emotions, too. Lacking the vocabulary to define what they are feeling and thinking has no bearing on the internal reality.

The dirty joke incident was not in vain, though. I remember deciding that I would not do things just because other people wanted me to do them. I would do what I would do. Of course, I have failed that promise billions of times in the last couple decades, and never without consequence. I’m not a people-pleaser as much as I am attempted-people-pleaser. I want to make people happy and I want conflicts resolved, but that rarely happens. (In fact, if I try to make you happy and you don’t get happy in the next five seconds, I’ll probably do something to make you angrier out of pure frustration, but that’s another posting for another day.)

A couple weeks ago, Clara Grace—our two-year-old—was fooling around with her food. To her, it was a funny game. To me, it was a mess to clean up. I told her to stop it, but she didn’t. So I got close to her face, looked her in the eye, and told her “no” as firmly as I could, and I packed it with my irritation and exhaustion for extra measure. She cried, but it wasn’t the cry of a two-year-old that was forbidden to play or a cry of defiance or of frustration. It was embarrassment. She put one hand over her mouth and another on her forehead. When I looked at her, she slid the hand on her forehead over her eyes. I was so surprised; I didn’t realize two-year-olds could be embarrassed. Aren’t they the most uninhibited people in the world?

I picked her up out of the high chair and held her and told her how much I liked her. At the moment, it seemed to be an inadequate consolation.

It made me wonder how often I diagnose her emotions correctly and how often I will inflict an unnecessary embarrassment on her in the years to come.

Clara Grace has a little farm set now and it came with a pig that is permanently muddy. She carries it around saying, “Pig in the mud. Pig in the mud.” I wish she would stop telling dirty jokes.