My daughter Becky number seven is my favorite of all my children. I know, you are never supposed to admit that any single child is your favorite and me, a man who has upwards of 17 children by god knows how many different mothers, it becomes insane to not have at least one or two favorites along the way.
I actually get asked all the time, how can I be a great father like you? When I am asked that, my first response is always and I mean ALWAYS, are you being sarcastic? Then, when they claim they are being genuine, I still treat it as though they are being sarcastic, because while I am a better father than some fathers, I am a much worse father than most.
That said, Becky#7 has and will always be my favorite because she seemed to inherently understand that I had a deeper level of parenting going on than just getting dishes done, getting the fields plowed, the sheep sheered, the jet washed, waxed and cleaned, the tractor polished, the snow removed, the chickens plucked and the milking of our dairy cow Miss Daisy taken care of every morning before six. No, those chores were the easy part, as was the expectation of a grade of A in every class except physical education, because lord knows, there has never been a member of our genetic grouping that could even run, much less run fast.
Becky#7 realized that my almost constant humiliation was part of what would make her a huge success. I would wake her at 5AM with the recording of me saying such inspiring things as “hey stupid, you think Miss Daisy is going to milk herself?” or on somedays, my recorded voice would boom over the house loudspeaker system, “attention losers, yes, all of you, get out of bed, it’s 4:30 on a Saturday, you have slept enough, time to clean the toilets and deal with Miss Daisy, you know you fat headed morons, she is not going to milk herself.”
When I had the first few children, any number of my first wives would buy these books, you know the titles- Raising Einstein, Bringing Healthy Kids into a Loving World, You Too Can Raise an Undamaged Young Person, oh there were hundreds of books and all of them were written by an ever growing group of bozos and idiots. I would read the first few chapters, skip the rest and tell which ever wife had purchased it that it was a wonderful read and I was really going to work on – whatever.
Everyone one of these parenting books all fell into the same category, if you want to raise a happy human, be nice. Yeah, I got that part, but you know what? I wanted an adult who would not put up with too much shit, and there was not a book titled – “so you don’t need a trophy when you come in third place?” In fact, everything I learned about successful parenting came from the books written by capitalisms titans. Lee Iococa led Chrysler out of its first bankruptcy and into a resurgence that was unexpected and incredibly profitable. In his autobiography, he said his father used to wake him by urinating on his face. Until he was 27 his father referred to him only as Piss Face. Roland Fietman created Amazon.com, but not until moving out of his parents house, a house where he was often ridiculed, called a loser for anything and everything he attempted and told every single night of his life, “good night, loser, if you die in your sleep, we will just bag you up and throw you in the garbage with the other useless trash. We hate you.”
As if to prove his parents wrong, Roland has created three great businesses, beyond Amazon, he also started Freds Homestyle Bagels and Yummy Bagel Sauce and invested heavily in Morty’s Fake Noses, which has unfortunately not always sold well, but has made him more money that most people would imagine. Success has been Rolands way of showing his parents that escaping from all that ridicule and humiliation was a good thing.
What I took away from these and almost every other autobiography written by a business titan is this; kids raised by loud, drunken and abusive parents strive to prove their loud drunken abusive parents wrong. Kids raised by free wheeling hippies end up all in touch with their feelings and everything, but in the end, they all end up with the ability to grow high grade marijuana, sing folk songs that make hardly any sense and get a night school law degree and sell out in their late 30’s.
Not my kids. That was why I installed the loud speaker system. They never got new clothes, when one of my daughters wanted a new dress one time for something called a prom, I said “pretty girls get new dresses, when you get pretty, you come back and we can talk.” Yeah, I know, it goes against every word in every book I have ever read in any parenting book any of my wives ever purchased for me or my 17 children. I say, so what? Creating the next generation of business mavericks is much more important that a happy childhood. You don’t believe me, as Sal Blankman, CEO of Goldfarb Investments, but until age 17, known around his house as “fat ass”.
Blankman wrote a long winded article for Forbes last year, “Growing up Blankman” in which he moaned about the injustice of growing up not only Kosher, but Christian, Muslim and illiterate by choice. His parents were non-conformists who thought that raising children was better left to chance. As a rebellious teen Blankman found a way to get accepted to Harvard, earning 3 degrees and a Fullbright. His parents disowned him. They are my kind of parents. Stick to your guns elder Blankmans.
It was actually Becky#7 who finally figured out a way to get Miss Daisy to milk herself and it is that kind of ingenuity that comes from hardship and years of waking at 4 in the morning. Sure, some of my children are behind bars, a couple of them are still jailed in Baghdad in Abu Gharib, and at least one is on the lam in Mexico, married to a ruthless drug cartel boss known as Burrito Bill, but my attitude is, I did the best I could.
In the end, as parents, that really is what we strive to do. Say what you will about loud speakers and constant haranguing, insults, demeaning and loud obnoxious asides, in the end, Becky#7 found a way to teach a dairy cow how to milk herself and that alone is something of a miracle.
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