No, my Father’s Day wish has nothing to do with geopolitics. The warring parties are our two-year old twins Khalil and Ariadne. Last weekend, my daughter patted me on the knee and said quite seriously, “Khalil hit me with a spoon.” 

“That’s not good, honey,” I said. “Khalil, did you hit your sister with a spoon?”  

“Yes!” he said gleefully.  

The incident had occurred hours earlier, and my wife and her sister had ensured Ari was okay and Khalil understood what he’d done had caused his sister pain. Ari told me just FYI. In fact, she approached me several times that afternoon with the same news, as if she were Wolf Blitzer with election-night results.  

My presumption was that Ari was trying to milk sympathy from Papa, and I was happy to oblige. “That must have hurt, Ari! Give Daddy a hug.” Little did I know her toddler mind was actually turning over a white-hot coal of resentment and formulating a plan for unilateral action.  

Bath time! Happy time! Until Ari picked up a pumice stone, sweetly intoned, “Khalil hit me with a spoon,” and used the hard block to clout her brother over the head.  

“Waaaaaah!!!!!” Khalil screamed. 

“Ari!” my wife and I screamed in unison.  

Ari did a little happy dance of delight. Smile-shimmy-shimmy.  

A centimeter lower and the pumice stone would have gouged into Khalil’s eye. I don’t know about other parents, but I can only intone the positive-discipline mantra, “kind and firm,” a few times before I lose it. That’s the thing about escalating conflict, unrepentant aggressors, and wailing, injured toddlers. It’s hard to keep your cool even when you know—with an objective portion of your brain that is currently locked in the trunk of a car lying on the bottom of the Pacific—that hollering, finger-wagging, and stern words will produce nothing more than an additional wailing child (and, of course, later, a guilty-feeling parent).  

Parenting twin toddlers can be like being dropped off in the middle of Death Valley with two jugs of water; that is, it can be physically and emotionally draining. Every day you’re presented with an opportunity to take sides: with your son crying over a stolen crayon; with your daughter who just got shoved into a cabinet; and someone, surely, must have been holding that monkey doll first. And each day, with greater and lesser degrees of success, you’re asked to summon your inner Dalai Lama instead of going ballistic on the tiny tyrant of the moment. Let’s face it, the sonograms showed that they’d been kicking each other for months before we’d even met them.  

So my Father’s Day wish is simple. Put down that rock, Ari. Use your words, Khalil. Be the mossy rock, Mama and Papa. And recall the tenderness we felt toward them, and toward the world, when Ari cried about spilling milk in the kitchen and Khalil rushed over to hug her.    

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Harold Taw’s debut novel, Adventures of the Karaoke King (AmazonEncore 2011), is a karaoke grail quest about transplanted people who keep falling just short of their dreams. He lives in Seattle with his wife, children, and bossy-yet-sensitive dog in an extended-family household.