Superglue

Anything broken, my dad thought he could fix with superglue. I’m sure it only happened a handful of times, but through my four-year-old eyes, Dad was always gluing. You’d think that someone as painstakingly careful and detail oriented as my father would be an expert gluer. But, you would be wrong.

It was winter of 1984. A growing little girl needed a new jacket. Her parents lovingly bought her the puffiest, most colorful jacket they could find because they knew she would love it until it fell apart on her flesh. They took it home. Sure enough—unparalleled excitement. The girl’s mother decided to wash it before letting said girl have her way with it. Upon removal from the dryer, the mother noticed that the bottom of the zipper was breaking away from the rest of the coat.

“We just bought this and it’s already falling apart!” she lamented.

Overhearing his wife’s concern, the girl’s father (always the problem solver) bounded into the room toting the seemingly ever-present tube of glue. This will be an easy fix, he undoubtedly thought promisingly. The glue was applied, and the jacket was left to dry.

When the parents felt that the adhesive had properly bound, they proudly picked up the coat and whisked it off to their eager daughter.

“We fixed your coat! Your dad superglued it!” her mother beamed.

Something didn’t feel right to the girl. What was superglue? And why was it on her jacket?

Zipppp. The zipper did not disengage. Mother and daughter looked at it curiously. They tried again. A cloud of dread hovered above the scene. It was definitely stuck. Dad had superglued the two parts of the zipper together at the bottom. The girl was devastated. Her brand new coat was officially ruined. She cried, she was angry; she wanted her old coat back.

You would think that in a situation like this, the parents would either buy the girl a new coat or complain to the jacket company that they couldn’t even wash it without the thing falling apart. But, this girl had some pretty special parents. Instead of caving-in to the jacket demons, they just laughed, said, “We just bought this coat. It’s still wearable,” and threw it over the girl’s head.

“You’ll just have to step through it, and then zip it from there,” the mother said nonchalantly.

“You’ll be the only kid in school with a coat like this. That’s pretty special,” her father declared with a smile.

Sure enough, she was the only kid in school with a coat like that. While all the other kids were proudly thrusting their arms through wide-open jackets flapping gracefully in the breeze, our heroine was stepping into hers like she was climbing into a kettle to boil and pulling it (and her skirt) up to her belly button.

To most children, this would be humiliating. However, the fact that her parents brushed the accident off as no big deal, even funny or special, made the girl (okay, me) think it was no big deal, funny, and special. That’s why this story is so important.

This experience taught me that if something is flawed, it isn’t necessarily ruined, and that sometimes the imperfections in life are the best part of living. My outlook totally changed after this incident. I became the child who would always look for unique solutions to any problem before giving up. I became the middle schooler who would gladly volunteer to eat her friends’ Little Debbie cakes that had been smashed in their lunchboxes. I became the high schooler who continued to wear her favorite shirt to school even if it was snagged and holey. I became the college student who never cared how many hairs were out of place before leaving her apartment. And I became the teacher who finds extreme joy in her students’ idiosyncrasies, no matter how irritating (within reason).

Believe it or not, this same thing happened with my next jacket too (pictured in blue…sadly, no pictures of the original jacket were found). To this day, I still wonder if it was deliberate. But even if it was, by that time I really didn’t care. Despite my dad’s horrible habit of unintentionally causing more damage to my stuff than there already was, his gluing ineptitude was one of the most important developmental events of my life.