M.A.S.H: Molding A Seven year-old’s Headspace, a personal narrative
Close-mindedness is a trait my family (at least my immediate family) doesn’t accept, not even with the haphazard cop-out, “you can’t teach them anything, they just grew up in a different time.”
They instilled in me from a young age to keep my mind open and see things from multiple perspectives, which is useful not only to grow up more apt to be an understanding human being, but also not be a whiny brat the minute somebody disagrees with you.
My father in particular never misses a moment to drop of what he sees as “much needed wisdom on his kids.¹”
If you’d asked my seven-year-old self if a singular moment on the drive home through a Rochester snowstorm after CYO basketball practice would have shaped my identity as a human being, (and scored me an A in my freshman writing class) I wouldn’t have believed you, but here we are.
I was sitting in the backseat of my dad’s 2002 Buick Rendezvous, trading my sweaty Air Jordan’s for my winter boots when my dad asked me how my day was, as dad’s do. I told him it was pretty good for the most part, except Saxon Math time tables were giving me grief and my cream cheese-and-jelly sandwich got squished in my cubby hole before lunch began. Second grade problems at their finest, right?
Well, boy was I just getting started.
For any of what I’m about to say to make any sense, I have to explain the newfangled millennial pastime of M.A.S.H. When I mentioned it to my Dad, he thought I was referring to the 1970’s sitcom starring Alan Alda, to which I raised my 7 year old eyebrow and asked, “The show that Mom falls asleep to after Larry King Live ends?”, much to my dad’s entertainment and dismay.
The game essentially works like this: you and a couple friends decide to play.
To start, you rip a piece of paper out of your marble composition notebook and write MASH on the top, which stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shack and House. These are the designated living spaces.
Then move clockwise on the page and write down potential partners. One is someone you want to marry, one is someone who’s just eh, and someone who you absolutely wouldn’t ever picture yourself marrying. Of course at 7, marriage is unimaginable anyway, but often for the latter of those three options my friends would choose the kid in the class that shoved crayons in his nose, ate paste, you know the type.
Next is number of children, typically to make it easy, you stick with 1,2,3 and 4 to coincide with the four letters in MASH.
Last but not least is career, which follows the same suit as the rest (one incredible career, two average but not undesirable careers, and career that was seen to be the bottom of the heap of career paths…you get the gist).
Finally, you have a friend take your pencil and dot the paper a certain number of times before you tell them “STOP!”, and you count the category options using that number until the fortune is determined.
After relaying (and partially monologuing) the rules of the game to my dad, I told him I’d played the most unfortunate game of MASH known to man.
My lavish future included living in a shack, married to Nickolas K², having to somehow manage to put food on the table for 4 kids with an opulent career as a janitor. I must have sounded like a seven year old elitist, despite the game being purely in fun, stupidity and jest, because my father spared not a second before sitting me down in a proverbial chair and dropping some sound wisdom on me.
The conversation went something like this (forgive the paraphrasing, as it’s been twelve years and my memory fails to serve me perfectly):
“I can’t believe I got janitor, Dad. You should’ve seen the look on everyone’s face, they were all laughing like it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.”
“What was so hilarious about it?”
“The fact that I have to spend my whole day cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors, that’s what. AND I lost out…I could have been a fashion designer or a doctor. Just my luck.”
“Do you not think being a janitor is a respectable job?”
“I mean I don’t know. Not like a doctor is. Plus, cleaning toilets is so gross.”
“Do you and your friends look down upon janitors? You shouldn’t, they work just as hard, if not harder than some, as anyone else.”
I, in typical 7 year old fashion, retorted:
“We were just having fun! And anyway, how do YOU know, Dad?!”
My dad, knowing full well he was about to school the living shit out of me, returned with:
“Maddie, back in college before I worked in the dining hall, I WAS a janitor. Do you think any less of me because of it?”
YIKES. I felt so bad. I saw genuine concern and hurt in his eyes in the rearview mirror. How on God’s green earth was I supposed to respond to that without looking and sounding like an ignorant, uneducated heathen?
So I didn’t.
I sat in my seat as quiet as a mouse for 5 minutes (which after that, felt like a gazillion years to my young self) and then apologized to my dad. I told him I really didn’t mean anything by playing the game, and tried to explain in the best way possible (which failed miserably, given my limited vernacular and ability to form sophisticated sentences) that I didn’t look down upon custodians, it was just the worst job of the bunch in that particular game of MASH.
My dad forgave me right away (as dads do), but duringthe 10 remaining minutes of the drive my dad explained that all jobs have value, and you can’t equate the value of a person with their profession, there can be doctors that have questionable ethics, and custodians that have hearts and work ethics of pure gold.
Six years later, in middle school, I had a custodian who brought in baked goods for the students and would often give life advice.
What my father told me during that car ride has stuck with me since that day because of its profound lesson, and how the views in something as trivial as a game of MASH could corrupt kids’ thoughts on occupations, ways of life and the human experience if a reality check isn’t taken.
My dad recognized the deeper implications and used the outcome of the game as a teachable moment, one that will forever be ingrained in me, and a lesson I can teach my kids if I’m ever lucky enough to have them.
From that day forward, I made a conscious effort to stand up for those with jobs that are belittled, and corrected my own thinking if I began to think lowly of any profession. In fact, this moment (along with many others, and a few (okay, a LOT) of decision changes in career path) has inspired my current projection to be an investigative journalist.
My father encouraged me to think deeper, and consider the implications even if the situation may seem trivial. His wisdom and my journalism roots inspire me to always question (and ask the right questions), write with conviction and do all I can in my power to exhume the truth and make a positive impact through my work.
I recently talked to my father and told him I’d written a personal narrative about the lesson he taught me in 2007 in the back of his Buick after basketball practice, and asked if he remembered it. He chuckled (as fathers do) and said, “Those are the moments for YOU to remember, Moop³, and more importantly to take them and apply them.”
So I did.
Endnotes:
¹Schooling my brother and me, as the locals call it.
²the paste eating, lefty-scissor chewing, screaming kid in our class who just couldn’t seem to pick up on social queues.
³My father’s childhood nickname for me that’s stuck ever since.
