I've had a few moments in my life as a father that could go down as my lowest point ever. You may have read about my meltdown in Boston in 2011, but a couple years before that in Colorado I had another one that might have turned out significantly worse. 

We had some garage sale lacrosse sticks we kept around the house, and it was fun trying to play catch with the kids and teach them to scoop up the balls. (They never got into it, though I think nowadays that they'd greatly enjoy flinging a real lacrosse ball against a fence.) We mostly played with tennis balls, but I kept a real lacrosse ball out there just so they could get the feel of things. 

The inevitable happened. One day Lucas threw the ball and hit Landon on the head. It’s hard to judge intent, but when you’re looking at somebody and you hit them on the head with a ball… well, it was clearly avoidable at the very least. Landon cried, though the throw was really just a lob. In response, I went completely apeshit. 

I yelled at Lucas and grabbed the garage sale lacrosse stick in my hand like a minotaur's axe and smashed it down so hard on the porch that shards of the plastic frame splintered all over the yard, dangerously close to the eyes of my sons. 

What would have happened if those shards put their eyes out? 

They didn't. They landed safely in the grass.... Holy shit, I'd dodged a bullet. A terrifying moment because I was the bad guy, not my father. I was the dangerous one. That's the day I learned that my anger can do a lot more damage than whatever my anger responds to. I'd never felt such out-of-proportion anger, and I've never felt it since. 

I'm sure the kids were scared of me and I was scared of myself. I recall hiding in the bedroom for a while, headphones on, as quiet as I could. I'd stuck my foot on loose earth and plunged down a mineshaft of anger and frustration as deep as the history of our species. 

What did I teach my kids that day about anger management? How long will it take them to unlearn it?