My daughter and I will have to come to terms with something pretty soon. For her, she will have to understand that for much of her life I’ve been mostly letting her win at games, or at least giving her a fair chance. Parents do that, right? Don’t want to discourage their children, so they let off the gas. Give them a shot. Feign exasperation as they’re completely dismantled by their little one. It happens.
But me, I will have to come to terms with the fact that she’s 9 years old now and none of that matters anymore. Those days are gone.
Letting off the gas is stupid because it makes me look stupid. She can beat me out right. I learned that the other day playing Monopoly. When I didn’t have to feign anything and was completely dismantled by a not so little one.
At one point she had a stack of $100 bills that must have been a foot tall. I had $32, mostly in $1 bills.
I don’t know if it’s her getting smarter, me getting dumber, or just the natural order of things. That I should start asking her to cut up my chicken and drive my friends and me to the movies. Boy, some of that could be great.
But for now it’s disorienting. To have lost fair and square in Monopoly! She had a hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue when I went out. A HOTEL on Pennsylvania! And she owned all the railroads. On the whole board I had one house.
I was like a pauper. I landed on jail five times in a row. My bank account was down to nothing. I had to borrow money to get out of jail. Do you know how embarrassing it is to ask your 9-year-old daughter to borrow $50, so you can get out of jail? She shook her head. “Tisk-tisk. So, what did you do to get in there?” she asked.
I know it’s just a game, but I fumed. Where was all my money? Had I been betting it at the races? I knew this game. I’ve played it all my life — a life that is filled with real mortgages, real bank accounts and real financial decisions.
“Tell you what, you don’t even have to pay me back,” she said, handing over the $50 for bail, pity in her voice. She felt sorry for me! Or maybe $50 bills were now below her. Crowding the big bills that were stacked high. I imagined her using her 50s to feed the goats at the petting zoo she had just installed over on St. James Place.
As the inevitable loomed — my bankruptcy, the lawyer bills, the tax implications, the shame — I considered slamming my fists down on the board and ending it in a grand temper tantrum. That worked when I was a kid. But how would it look now? What lesson would that teach?
Instead I decided to go down gracefully, accepting the offer to move into that roach-infested hovel on Baltic Avenue that I had turned up my nose on since she bought it. Good real estate move, madam slum lord.
There I could ponder the reality that my days of easy wins were behind me, and that I had better start upping my game, lest I spend the rest of my life taking pity loans from my daughter and letting her cut up my chicken.