Road Rage

On occasion I screw up as a parent. No, no, it's true. I have days when I'm less than perfect. As I mentioned in the previous post, we went to the zoo on Friday. On the way home, we ran into some heavy traffic which spurred my latest poor display of behavior.

Traffic had basically came to a very slow methodical pace. We were in the middle lane, keeping a car's length behind the person in front of us. To our right was a semi truck. I looked in the rear view mirror to see our children all asleep. I was fighting the notion to do the same given that my wife and I were both exhausted from our excursion.

As I looked out towards the semi, I noticed it was getting closer. I jerked to attention because I thought I had drifted toward it. I then figured out that I was not moving toward it, rather the truck had decided to change to our lane. The problem with this was that the enormous vehicle was going to run right into us.

We were forced into the left lane, and fortunately, the driver in that lane noticed the situation and made a complete stop allowing us room to transition over. I was furious. We were very close to being pinned under the trailer of the semi. What an idiot. The next chance I got I decided to share my criticism of the semi driver's abilities.

The passenger side window was down so I leaned over my wife's lap and yelled up to the rather burly man behind the wheel. I can't remember exactly what I said, but it felt good to say it. He in return shouted back at me, but the truck's loud engine drowned out his voice.

I like to think that he simply stated, "My apologies, good sir. You have every right to be upset with me. I do not know what I was thinking to force my way into your lane. You are an awesome driver and I am not. By the way, your minivan is sweet." However, by the accompanying gestures he was making, those words were nothing like what he said in reality.

The traffic tempo picked up and soon we were traveling at a normal speed. I was still fuming a little bit about our near death experience when I heard a tiny voice pipe up in the back and ask, "Daddy, why did you yell at that man in the truck?"

Crap.

My wife glanced at me with an amused look on her face. "Well, Daddy, why did you?" she said tauntingly.

Double crap.

"Well, dear," I said thoughtfully. "It's because that man driving the truck did something very dangerous that almost hurt us. I just let him know that I was not happy about it."

Silence.

I could see in the rear view mirror that she was really thinking hard about everything. I began to feel guilty. To be honest, not so much that I yelled at the idiot in the truck, but rather that my little girl witnessed it. Man, I really thought she was asleep.

I can sense when she is uncomfortable with certain things, and this was one of those moments I feared. I think my sudden burst of anger kind of freaked her out actually. She was entitled to a further explanation. Some sort of life lesson could be made out of this experience I thought. She needs to know that Daddy's behavior is not how you interact with other people. So I contemplated what I was going to say, hoping for wisdom in the situation. And then it came to me.

"Who wants ice cream?" I shouted.

Cheers erupted from the back of the van.

Problem solved. She never said another word about the idiot in the truck.