A Critical Parent Will Linger Inside Your Mind for Decades
Their voice will correct you for the rest of your life.
Sometimes tiny, seemingly insignificant events from childhood stay with us forever. For me, it was raking leaves in the backyard.
I was eleven. It was a crisp, November morning in southern Mississippi, a few weeks after the blueberry bushes had yielded their last. Being a sixth grader, I had a dozen more interesting things on my mind, and every second I spent pulling that rake was a second I wasn’t playing basketball with my friends. After scraping and bagging a sloppy, orange-brown mass, I deposited my goods in the garage and informed my P. O. the community service had been serviced.
“Thanks, son, go enjoy the rest of your Saturday,” he didn’t say.
Wordlessly, he went to inspect. As we stood together looking down at my work, I held my breath. It should have been fine. 85% of those leaves had ended up in a bag, easily, in all of twenty minutes. It was efficiency itself. The air left me when my father said the words that would burn into my gray matter for the rest of time.
“Dammit, Brad, you shouldn’t half-ass everything.”
My memory stops there, but I can guess the rest. I probably raked up that last 15%, and my Dad probably…
