By austininva
There comes a moment in every parent’s life when you realize that the inmates are no longer just running the asylum… they’ve unionized, appointed a representative, and now they’re demanding hazard pay in chicken nuggets.
For me, that moment came last Tuesday.
We were in the thick of post-dinner cleanup, which, if you don’t have kids, is basically like crime scene cleanup—except with more ketchup and other random stains, just fewer police reports. I was mid-lecture. The kind where my voice gets very calm, very even, because I’ve gone past mad and into that strange parent dimension where you can see sounds and smell colors.
The older three had been waging their usual civil war. Something about who got the blue cup, or who “looked at me weird,” or whose foot touched whose sacred square of couch real estate.
So there I was, in full Dad Orator Mode™️. Monologuing about respect and consequences and “how we treat each other in this house” like I was delivering a TED Talk titled “Surviving Sibling Apocalypse With Only Mild Parental Screaming.”
And that’s when she arrived.
My youngest. Barefoot, smug, eyes twinkling with the mischief of a thousand gremlins. In her tiny hands, held aloft like Simba in The Lion King, was… the Spanking Spoon.
Like a symbolic holy relic, its revered. It’s like the nuclear football: you don’t want to use it, but you keep it around to keep people nervous. A psychological Cold War of parenting.
But my youngest? She treats it like it’s a microphone at an awards show.
She strutted into the room, spoon in hand, held it out to me solemnly, with a look of firm resolve—like a medieval squire to her liege lord:
“Your duty, Father. It is time.”
I froze.
The older kids, sensing impending doom, stopped fighting mid-breath. Time itself paused. Somewhere, a Gregorian monk began chanting.
And there she stood. Waiting. Beckoning. As if I were the executioner in some 1st-grade Game of Thrones spinoff called House of Timeouts.
I tried to maintain authority. I did. I really did.
But boy it’s hard to discipline when your preschooler is offering you the instrument of wrath like a holy relic, whispering, “Do it, Daddy. Smack them all down.”
I sent her out of the room. Holding the implement of her wrath. She came back ten seconds later, this time with a second spoon—backup, in case I broke the first one on their insolence, apparently.
Long story short, no one got spanked this day, one person got a very serious lecture, and that person was me, by my two-year-old, about “not doing my job right.”
I now live in fear of the day she learns about gavels, or swords, or robes of judgment.
But I suppose I’m proud. She obviously believes in justice. In discipline. In fair and equal spankings for all, as long is all does not include her.
She just wants to make sure Daddy does it right.
Have a great day,
austininva
