Louds In The Cradle Chapter 4
Previously: Lynn Sr is in the midst of explaining to two baffled twelve-year olds why it is that Lincoln is somehow magically to blame for a road trip becoming a disappointment despite being barred from going on it.
As he looks in on a staring match about to turn back into a screaming match, Lynn Sr told Ronnie Anne and Sid "The reason that I keep harping on that trophy case I keep because I wanna show off how proud I am of my children for working towards a goal is that while we might not want to play favourites, kids want to know which child is favourite anyway. This means that the child who most reminds me of the song "You Might" by Nik Kershaw appears to have turned a sort of scrapbook into a sort of leader board. The idea seems to be that the more cacaraca somebody gets, the 'better' that person is."
Ronnie Anne smiled and said, "Oh, yeah. Lincoln, right?"
"Yes, sadly. What always seems to happen is that he finds something exciting, he bites off a lot more than he can chew because he wants results fast without taking the time to prepare for it (because he wants to prove he's a man or some such thing despite watching Son Goku spend fifteen episodes training to fight Insanely Powerful Guy in a fight that lasts five minutes), he proceeds to fall flat on his face and he abandons said interest because he accepts irrelevant input from the ignorant as gospel. Taking the criticism of the laughably unqualified as seriously as he usually does is why I had to sneak his coin collection out of the donation box when we were getting them to unclutter a couple of weeks back!"
Sid frowned a bit and looked at him as if to say "Should you be talking about your daughters like that?"
Having anticipated that question, he said "I may love them. I (as everyone with a pulse might say) make excuses for them. I may even see my daughters as a sort of reflection of myself….but I'm not blind to their faults. The biggest one is assuming that it's somehow their job to either protect Lincoln from himself or to channel his energies to the 'productive' chore of being their idea of an ideal husband. Also, they tend to have the nasty habit of only remembering when he makes mistakes, antagonizes someone or humiliates himself because (as I said), they're trying to help him avoid disaster. Ronnie Anne has probably told you all about the egg-sitting incident and why he thought that she'd tank her grades just to be a jerk to him because he invites disaster by assuming its inevitability. What no one seems to have figured out, not even us, his parents, is that when those girls laugh at him or judge something he does, he thinks 'They have accomplished things and I have not' and assumes that the ability to hit a golf ball, sew clothes, strum a guitar, work a ventriloquist's dummy, turn every activity into a sort of sport, write a poem, twirl a baton, fix a car or spout technobabble means expertise in something they don't know about. It's why he's a sucker for a pity trophy. "
"And it's not like I'm much help myself. I kind of do dote on the girls because they do things I see myself doing and one of them even expressed an interest in following in my footsteps…..which didn't go too well because I got greedy and made the sort of big, stupid ultimatum usually imposed on male children...a fact I was reminded of shortly thereafter by Mrs Loud. Lincoln had no idea about that, of course. All he remembered at the time is that for some reason, Luan and I had a bit of a spat about the restaurant and had to be told different after OUR great big stupid pointless argument. That's another problem: he only thinks that he knows the girls. There is so much about them that they hide from him while he's expected to be an open book and it makes all of his pointlessly complex plans fail. For starters, he'd had no idea that Lori is pals with someone he thought was her rival or that she and Leni watch Vampires Of Melacholia because they cast a dime store Robert Pattinson as a character because it 'wasn't HIS business.' Also, he has no idea that Lynn Jr has bonded with Mr Grouse or why she's so manic about her little rituals, she made Mrs Casagrande look like James Randi."
"But I digress…...the problem with having two weeks with Lincoln is that much as my wife looks at our daughters and sees parts of herself she doesn't much like, it's human nature for a man to look at his son and see things about himself that he sort of hates. I mean, you don't see that because you're kids but just between you, me and the wall, there isn't a man alive who doesn't have a weird rivarly with his dad on some level. A father wants his son to be like him and a son wants to be his own man and so on and so forth. This kind of boiled over about the same time his sisters were slowly coming unglued because they couldn't hack being medium sized fish in a big pond."