Horseplay

November 15th, 2024

Last week, my wife, Karin, our little grandson, Asher, and I were visiting our son, Hans, and his family in Texas. We didn’t get to see much of Hans. He was working most of the time. He pumps concrete for a living, and he often works absurdly long hours. Concrete pumping is a weather dependent occupation, so it is feast or famine with regards to how many hours Hans gets during any given week. When Texas has its monsoons, he is idle. When the weather is good, he may easily put in seventy hours in a work week. One week he was on the clock for eighty-eight hours. By any measure that is excessive, and probably unsafe.

Hans work schedule necessarily affects his family life. He and his wife, Gabby, have three small children: Weston, Maddy, and Wyatt. Gabby cares the kids fulltime while Hans earns money. They both have rather traditional roles. Hans does not often get to interact with his children. He is many times absent due to his job, or he worn out from it. It is not a perfect situation for Hans as a father, nor is it the best thing for his kids.

A few days ago, Hans had a relatively short work shift. He was home early, and he had the energy to play with his little ones. I watched how the kids acted with their daddy. Maddy, his three-year-old daughter found a hobbyhorse with a dinosaur’s head on its end. She held the long stick in her hands and attacked Hans with the T Rex head. He pretended that he was being devoured by the carnivore and fell to the floor. Hans got on his hands and knees and crawled on the floor as Maddy jumped up on his back. When she was done using him as a beast of burden, her older brother, Weston, took her place. The youngest boy, Wyatt watched the show in delight from his mama’s side.

After all of the horseplay was done, and its participants exhausted, Hans smiled at me and said,

“I live for that.”

He does. He truly does live for that.

I understand how he feels. When our children were the same ages as his kids, I was working third shift for long hours, and I did not get much chance to just play with them. I missed a lot of their early years. I was never one to play rough with them. What Hans does with his kids is not anything he learned from me. It’s just who he is, and he is good at it.

Hans is aware that children are only little for a short period of time. He knows that he can’t afford to miss any opportunity to wrestle around with them, or just be silly. Soon enough, he won’t be able play with them, or they won’t want him to do so. Childhoods are fleeting. You blink and your kids are all grown up.

It does my heart good to see Hans having fun with his children, and to see them enjoy his playfulness. I think that it is healing for him. Hans had plenty of trauma when he was deployed to Iraq. The laughter of his children does him a world of good.