Shark Week

The fundamental difference between my husband and me on the issue of childrearing comes down to this. Shark Week.

Shark Week and Dog Week, exactly six months apart, are revered times in this house, well, for some people. Dog Week, a week in February that begins with the Westminster Dog Show and ends with the U.P. 200 Dog Sled Race in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is harmless and sublime. No one ever covered their ears and ran from the room after watching the judging of the Herding Dogs. But any single second of Shark Week could have that impact. It’s the 26th year of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel for the uninitiated; this means wall to wall programming about sharks, shows with titles like Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives. Survivors play huge in Shark Week. That should tell you something.

So my husband, an experienced parent of four children, thinks Shark Week is an opportunity for him and his seven-year old granddaughter to develop a common interest in sea creatures. I try to tell him that episodes in which amputees are the primary characters will color her attitude toward swimming in the Pacific Ocean when we visit her cousin in a few weeks. He looks at me as if this is the wildest stretch of logic he has ever encountered. “Why?” he asks.

I’m not sure if he thinks that her little seven-year old brain can distinguish between Discovery Channel theatrics and reality or that she will somehow forget the teeth, the jaws, the terrifying underwater snatching of swimmers’ legs and just leap into the ocean waves as carefree as can be. Unfortunately, since much of Shark Week is about shark attacks that actually happened, it’s a difference without a distinction. If one ripped off arm is filmed from 26 angles, it makes an impression. My husband thinks it’s ‘camp.’

He negotiates with me. “Since we can’t watch True Blood (a fantastically gruesome HBO series about vampires) because Squirt is here, let’s watch the first two hours of Shark Week.” I glance over at her sitting on the couch under a blanket with the dog. She covers her head. He starts to reason with her. And by this, I mean he uses what he believes to be a reasonable argument to have with a seven-year old who doesn’t want to watch sharks devour people and things.

“They’re not really attacking anything tonight. It’s all background for the rest of the week.” Right. Ok.

Last night, sitting in bed, my granddaughter and I read ‘Spot Has a Birthday Party’ before she went to bed. That’s where I like her little mind to be. Thinking about Spot and his little friend dogs. What kind of cake and who to invite. Simple stuff. My husband and I differ on this, obviously.

He thinks kids should accommodate adults (within reason) and I think adults should do things for kids, sacrifice their own interests, and put children’s fun first until they get to the point of total resentment and frustration at not having a life of their own.

It’s a minor difference of opinion but a chasm when you really think about it. So we don’t.

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Photo by Laura College on Unsplash