Until yesterday, I thought I was the luckiest woman in the world. My husband and I have weathered all sorts of hardships and came through it all together and strong. He has a great job, we bought our first house recently, we have a beautiful, intelligent three-year old daughter and another one on the way. Besides being just a little sad that I’m many hours away from friends and family, I’m completely content.

Currently, my husband’s job is stressing him out and he doesn’t have any backup or help (read: idiot assistant, out of touch boss). Last night, our three-year old was fully in her testing-the-limits glory and was messing with his chair. After repeated requests for her to stop, he reached out and gave her a shove. He didn’t hurt her in any way, but he clearly had reached out in anger and made physical contact.

I was very upset. We really only have one hard and fast parenting rule: nobody hits anybody, for any reason, period. I felt like he crossed the line, and told him so — out of earshot of our daughter, of course. He apologized to her, and to me, and feels so badly about it that he decided to seek counseling.

I’m still pretty upset and concerned for the future. Our daughter is not difficult, by any stretch of the imagination, and we’ve been in what I consider to be way more stressful situations without him blowing up like this. My guess is that despite his words to the contrary, the impending arrival of the second daughter has him more stressed out than he’s willing to say. He thinks that counseling will help him figure out why he did this and he won’t really talk to me about it much. I love him too much to see him torturing himself — I don’t want to punish him or have him do penance forever. I just don’t know if therapy is the magic bullet or if there are some long buried issues (he was a sexually abused child, and has been through therapy for that) being brought to the surface from excessive stress.

I’m in desperate need of a “freak-out” meter: Do I pack up the kid and hit the road for fear that this is just an iceberg tip, or do I let the past 15 wonderful years equal a “get out of jail free” card?

Loving but Scared

Okay, with the usual disclaimers to the effect that I don’t have children myself, and that everyone has a different idea of what constitutes “appropriate” discipline…I think you’re both overreacting.

First of all, I don’t think the occasional swat on the ass or arm-yank is harmful to kids. Again, I don’t have any kids of my own, but I had parents, and my parents were not hitty, generally, but they also weren’t afraid to dole out a hand-smack if seven choruses of “Sarah, I said don’t touch that knife” weren’t getting it done, because…knife + kindergartener = tragedy. You know? And I’m talking really mild physicality, which did not hurt us so much as get us focused, and which was both rare and ultra-predictable — it almost never happened, but when it did, we always knew why. And we got the message.

“Well, we have a zero-tolerance policy on hitting.” That’s fine, of course; my parents weren’t perfect child-rearing paragons and there’s no need to do what they did on my say-so, obviously, but that’s my second and more important point: you’re not going to be perfect parents, either of you, every minute. You’re going to get frustrated at times. You’re going to park them in front of videos to get an hour’s peace, when you swore you wouldn’t. You’re going to give in to whining at the grocery store, when you discussed not doing that. You’re going to fuck up, daily, in various small ways, because you’re human beings and you’re just doing the best you can, and do you know what irreparable harm all of your screw-ups will do to your kids? DO YOU?

None, most likely. If you love them and you give them as much consistency and stability as you can, emotionally, in their routines, and they know you two have their backs no matter what? They’ll be fine.

So, you know, it’s unfortunate. Your husband reacted in anger, which was startling to everyone involved, and it’s not consistent with what your daughter’s used to, which to my mind is the real issue here — someone took a swat to the tuchis every now and then at my house, for failing to stop at a crosswalk and wait for a grown-up, but that’s how we did things and it wasn’t confusing to us, whereas it might be to your daughter. But he didn’t hurt her, and as long as you don’t make a big hairy deal about it, she’ll probably forget it happened in a few days (if she hasn’t already).

I don’t think counseling is a bad idea, and maybe you should both go — or just sit down and come up with fail-safe strategies for when one of you is getting really annoyed, so that it doesn’t get to that point. And with another baby on the way, having a kind of structure in place for one parent to say, “Dude, I need ten minutes of alone time on the porch,” that’s really important.

But I just don’t think it’s a situation where you need to pack up your shit and go to a safe house, I really don’t. You’re both doing the best you can, and you’re a team, and as a team, I think you have to give yourselves a break. It sucks that it happened, but talk frankly about how to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and try to remember that raising kids is hard and exhausting sometimes, and that you’ll get a lot of things wrong, but that you’re getting the important things right.

Dear Sars,

When I received the Marcia-Cross-is-not-very-nice issue of Vanity Fair, I turned immediately to the column of my beloved James Wolcott. Not only was it disappointing, in that it consisted of a rather contradictory rant about today’s stand-up comedians (and the late-night talk show hosts who present them to the viewing audience), a paragraph on the first page began with the sentence, “That power and glory are gone.”

Now, that sentence sounds awkward to me, but is it wrong? I would think that “that” always takes an “is,” not an “are,” even though “power and glory” is plural. I stared at the sentence for 20 minutes trying to figure this out, and then realized that in my own writing, I avoid that construction because I’m not sure about the rules governing its use. Even if it’s right, it strikes me as unbearably awkward, but is it wrong?

Would you believe I’m a writing instructor?

---

Dear Sure,

It looks fine to me — but I see your point. I think the confusion comes in with the distinction between “that” as a pronoun and “that” as an adjective; obviously, in its pronoun form, it should agree with the verb, but here, it’s an adjective (or definite article), so it’s modifying “power and glory.”

That seems a bit tricky, too, because if “that” modifies “power and glory,” then “power and glory” is a compound noun and should take a singular verb…but I think it’s actually that there’s a second “that” implied: “That power and [that] glory are gone.”

I read that piece, and didn’t notice it; again, it read fine to me. I would just mentally substitute another “that” in there. “That power and glory is gone” would also have read fine to me, though, so: call it. I will say that VF, for all its other flaws, is generally faultless when it comes to clear construction, so I’m going to assume it’s correct.

[7/20/05]

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