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When history repeats itself, a home-made touch eases the curse of parenthood

Listening to my older boy constantly asking for all the things he wants — or, to be more accurate, trying to tune out whenever he’s adding onto his long wish list — I’m reminded of the curse of parenthood.

He’s a great kid who fills the house with laughter and good conversation, but the curse ensures that he throws a share of annoyance my way, too. That’s the nature of the curse: You get to experience the trials you put your parents through when you were growing up.

So far, I’ve been lucky. While the wide range of trials I subjected my parents to when I was a teenager were aggravating enough that the threat of military school came up more than once, the worst I’ve had to deal with as a dad lately has been constant requests to buy him things, mostly sneakers.

I definitely have it coming to me. His wish list is heavy on shoes. For me, it was a specific kind of shirt.

We had a bewildering sense of style back in the 1980s, with our acid wash jeans and Velcro shoes. But there’s one piece of clothing from those misguided days that I’d be happy to still wear today: the Hawaiian shirts that the guys started wearing when surf culture took over our school.

When I was a tween, my brother and I joined forces and begged Mom to buy us those shirts. They couldn’t be any brand of Hawaiian shirt, though. No, it had to have a certain logo stitched on the left side to prove that my folks had paid too much for it.

The thing is, back then my family couldn’t afford to pay too much for anything. My brother and I weren’t aware that money was tight when we were little, but looking back, it clearly was. I didn’t really think about it until I was setting out on my own many years later and my dad gave me a Mr. Potato Head.

It was a baffling gift for a young adult to get, so Dad explained that he’d always been sad that he couldn’t afford to buy the toy for me when I’d asked for it as a little boy. Instead of giving me a Mr. Potato Head, he used to take a knife to apples and empty egg cartons, and he made me cutouts of whatever I wanted to play with — cartoon characters, dinosaurs, cars.

I don’t know that I’d have remembered owning a Mr. Potato Head if I’d been lucky enough to have one, but I’ll never forget those little figures.

And then there were the shirts.

My brother and I must have hounded Mom pretty relentlessly for an extravagance that didn’t fit into the family budget, because one day she sat down at her sewing machine with a length of colorful fabric and made us shirts that looked identical to the name-brand version.

Just like the toys my dad made me when I was smaller, it was another case of an unforgettable homemade stand-in for an unaffordable purchase that I would have forgotten about as soon as I outgrew it.

And there’s my problem with how the curse of parenthood is manifesting itself in my life: When I tell my kid that I’m not buying the latest sneakers he’s after, I don’t have the skills to create a homemade version that will stick in his memory. I mean, I do have an outdoor survival book that shows how to make sturdy footwear from whatever animal hide I can get my hands on, but I don’t think that would have the same effect.

So I do what I can.

Both of my boys are in scouts, which means they earn badges that need to be sewn onto a sash that they wear a couple of times a year. The best thing about scouts from my viewpoint as a parent is how the program gets kids used to doing things for themselves: budgeting for food before campouts, cooking their own meals and maintaining their gear, for starters.

That means I should be handing them the sewing kit every time they earn a new badge, but I keep putting off teaching them how to take care of that job themselves.

It’s one of the few handicraft jobs I can do for them. And even though they don’t seem to care now, I’m pretty sure the curse of parenthood has a flipside that comes later: the glow of knowing that one day they’ll be an adult who looks back with happiness on the things Mom or Dad did for them with their own hands.

Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com. And follow him on Twitter at @respinozakc.