I have a story on Mamalode today. It’s a note to my son’s trying to explain what they mean to me…
If you haven’t already, be sure to follow Mamalode on facebook and check out their site daily… They offer only the finest in writing on Motherhood, Parenthood, Family and kids
http://mamalode.com/story/detail/what-you-mean-to-me
I have a column that runs every Friday on The Good Men Project. Today I recall a phone call I made to my mother accusing her of all sorts of failings. I was unfair, unkind and coming undone. She responded with grace and love and it made all the difference!
Happy Mother’s Day, everyone..
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/call-mother-becomes-painful-transformative-experience/
I’ve had tightness in my chest and shallow breathing for going on a month. It’s largely a result of pollen and my bodies late life decision to no longer recognize that springtime friend that greeted me with joy for so many years as I thawed out from so many winters. What was once my friend, the dawning of life in the blooming and bursting nature outside my door is now my enemy, a predator and my body has chosen, without consulting me, to fight it using all the parts of me I can’t control as it’s shield.
It’s no big deal. It’s a minor pain in the ass that I forget about sometime in May and remember in early spring annually. The older I get the less invincible I am.
I’m changing jobs and as exciting as it is I’m taking on a massive new challenge. I’m looking forward to it and I’m thinking about it and the tightness in my chest feels a natural psychosomatic reaction as well. Though I know it isn’t. It’s merely my body deciding not to work like it once did. Same way the knees did when I tried to run the Brooklyn half 10 or more years ago. I made it one mile before hobbling to a train and turning to low impact ellipticals in the gym. The way my lithe and supple and strong body turned to a big and broad and strong body before turning to a big and unresponsive mass. Thankfully I’m told the heart keeps getting stronger even if it’s harder and harder to make what I see in the mirror reflect what I still think I am in my brain.
Getting older is hard for many reasons. The physical reason’s are a lot to be sure and I’ve only just begun that journey. Being where I am now, mid-career, early family and years from financial security is a constant struggle. The same one so many travel with me. But there’s also the dawning realizations that an active mind, one at rest and given a few minutes to contemplate can’t help but notice. For me it can happen in the car or at work or watching my kids in the back yard as they bounce from one thing to the next, bound by no laws of energy I’ve come to think of as universal since being bound by them years ago. It’s all gonna end and it’s gonna happen soon.
I love my kids beyond all reason. It’s the only way I know how to do it at this point. I understand that their are some terrible situations out there where children aren’t afforded that type of love and it shatters me when I hear of bad things, scary things happening to them. Things I could watch in movies or read about in the news years ago about terrible things happening to young children are no longer things I can ignore. I feel it now viscerally. Iit kills me now in a way it never could have before. It’s empathy for strangers and it’s hard to have at times, but it’s proof to me of some sort of reason for all this. My mind intellectualizes and thinks that reason is survival, we are here and our point is to survive. Even if that’s so, for me that contains within it what others find in God.
I’m a slightly older dad, but in a life so short as this one even slightly older has ramifications. Perhaps nostalgia just overtakes you at this age, I don’t know. What I know is that for me the overwhelming rush to nostalgia and the amplifying emotional response to it is something that came around the same time I had kids. In a real way they’ve been my greatest teachers about what life is all about. I’m living in a museum at this point. Our home is awash in the memories that will be those I sprint to as the ‘time of my life.’ This is the golden passage that will live longest in my mind, this time when we are a small, highly interdependent family who’s only plans, only one’s we can even imagine, revolve around all of us. Their will come a time when that isn’t so, which is sad to think about.
All the stuff to come actually has some sadness in it. For me at least. Because what’s next after our family is our slow walk away. We aren’t going to live forever. Even those of you firmly in belief that this is not it, that there is more after, surely even you must share some of the melancholy I can have when it hits me that what comes next isn’t this. This amazing life all opened up to me, when my kids want to hug me and read with me and kiss me and tell me they love me.
For me it’s good to remember that I’m going to die. It’s a positive reminder that what we don’t take and hold and cherish will be gone. Nostalgia is my guide as I look longingly back at the life I’ve lead to here and all that life yet to happen, yet to be stored in memory. We curate this museum in our minds, Karen and I. We arrange and rearrange the memories because we simply love to hold them. In doing so I’ve come to learn the value of my young memories.
In those memories of my youth the world is colored like 70’s and 80’s quality Kodak film and there are faded edges. My mother is there in her Jean bandana and my dad in t-shirt and Lee’s and we’re eating cereal from little boxes at picnic tables at Hamlin Beach, about fifteen miles from home. They had six kids and it was how we took some vacations. We loved them. or we’re at Hersheypark and loving the rides and smelling chocolate in the air. Or we’re all crammed into any of a series of station wagons driving down the highway on our way to adventures. I’m sitting in the back facing bench seat, crouched so my back is where my butt should be, so I can dangle my bare feet out the rear window, dangling in the Kodachromatic sun as the wind sweeps over the lot of us from all the open windows, always open in the summer, a thing we barely do anymore.
I have to visit there to keep my mom mommy and to see my dad as the strapping man much younger than I am now managing what I now am able to see was a circus of nonstop work, that I lived in and couldn’t possibly conceive of then. I have to go back there to keep the edges from fading in any further than they already have. These are the glory times of my life, just like these times are now, and for the rest of time I’ll return there, here, because I don’t want to go.
Life can only be lived forward and as far as I can tell it can only be lived once which is it’s only flaw. I used to think nostalgia was something silly people did who were afraid of life but I was dead wrong. It’s what lucky people do to remember all that was so graciously and gloriously bestowed on them.
I have a new post up in The Good Men Project today on what we must choose to do together…
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-rights-all-men-are-entitled-to-joemedlercolumn-jrmk/
‘If Charlie starts telling you anything about a coin, there was some confusion, he told us what some other kids did and then they started making him feel guilty… Just, Charlie was a good boy. He did the right thing. Just in case he brings it up, just know that Charlie was good.’
While I was happy to hear that in the judgment of his amazingly wonderful Pre-K teacher my boy used good judgement, I’m thinking that we might be heading toward some murky waters.
Playground justice is as powerful as any other form during childhood and having the teachers get your back, though definitely preferred by me, might not bode well moving forward. No one uses the term tattle-tale anymore, do they? Whatever. Truth is I want my kid to be the Narc, I just don’t want him to be known as the Narc. While it shows good decision making to my thinking, it also is a decidedly uncool position to be cast in. Perhaps uncool is a good thing. Probably not.
Your sense of who you are starts by what you see. Did for me. When I was little I learned what cool was by seeing it. It was easy to spot. It was the kid on the playground with all the other boys around him. The one who understood sports. The one that could talk about the Bills on a Monday and strike me out with a wicked curve in kickball. Yes. Kickball striker outer right here. These boys had it all. They could throw a punch and entertain the crowd by telling them about the witches that lived in the old, stone, windowless building in the corner of the playground. The one you’d come to realize was there merely as a shed for maintenance equipment years later, but one you would still keep your distance from now as you’d never seen anyone open the padlocked door to grab a rake or mow the lawn.
I don’t know what it feels like to be that cool kid in grade school. I know what it was like to see them. I know what it was like to study them. I know what it was like to be jealous of them
I was a baby. No two ways about it. I cried my way out of kindergarten and was a mama’s boy through and through in those early days. The pendulum would swing as widely in the other direction as it could shortly, to the point where i was a full on tool dreading my mom coming to my games come 7th grade. I now thank god I had a mother who would have been hurt by me making those feelings known and ignoring me and coming anyway. But by 12 I’d figured out that having a mom wasn’t cool.
I had a lot of these stupid thoughts about cool and for the most part it worked. After my early days as a playground target who told on everyone because I thought it’s what everyone was supposed to do, I learned. Don’t say anything. Ever. To anyone. Now I was young and possessing an energy that couldn’t stick to such a plan around kids, but I could do it at home. I’d never tell on anyone anymore, wasn’t my business. Besides, didn’t always work out when people find out you told. Leads to some penalties on the playground. Punishments that would last until I left for public schools in the fifth grade where I got a fresh start and was, POPULAR. It was amazing. I wasn’t going to mess it up!
That led to the period of my life where I could maintain my cool by watchfulness. By never betraying vulnerability and by living up to what it meant to be cool, as defined by my peers. I’m trying hard to speak to it without being pejorative because I see now that it was a part of getting down the path for me and having that popularity made me VERY lucky.
Anyone that tells you having a level of popularity in high school is bad is probably actually talking about the part you have to do next, when you have to transition out of that life. That part can be hard. Finding coolness within you and of you, coolness that emanates from within, that might be looked at as decidedly uncool when seen by others. Getting to that, leveling up and determining your own cool, that’s the good stuff, but man, after years of depending on bankable external validation, it’s tough.
In my case it lead to some dark dark times. Times that lasted plenty of years. Times that found me reorienting my view of the world, who was important in it and where I could fit and who exactly I was when I stripped away the tyranny of coolness as defined by others. A thing I didn’t fully do, couldn’t have, until I had kids. My cool now looks like the furthest thing from cool and I’ve never been more sure of it, confident in it. My cool is in me and what isn’t in me doesn’t matter.
My kids gave me that final piece. They were the final step to self-actualizing my cool. A college professor once captivated me with his description of ‘locus of control.’ It was a time in my life when I was thinking a lot about who I was and who I would be. A thing you may have noticed is something I still enjoy working on. In any case, when it comes to cool I’d come a long way from those playground days when I had little clue as to where or what it meant to be cool. So I looked for it. It was easy to find, it was over there. Go be that. And I did and I was eventually successful. But that becomes hollow, because I’m a human, full of life and thoughts and ideas and my own particular set of traits and eventually that had to come out. I hated myself for this at first. I did. I tried everything to suppress and it worked. And I stayed a version of cool that I had grown to hate. On some level that time was important to as it forced me to acknowledge that I knew what my cool was even if I was determined to deny it.
Then I found others. Others who wanted to be more specifically like the me I wanted to be but wasn’t able to be due to restrictions I’d placed on myself in service to others sense of cool. Well, turned out a lot of what I thought was cool, who I thought was cool, wasn’t. It was decidedly mean. I was never going to be mean. Don’t get me wrong I’ve been mean to people a ton, but those were specific relationships and I was human and messed them up. Because I was young, selfish and stupid, but no more so than most. When I found others that wanted to be helpers it was great. It brought control of cool much closer to me. It was in reach. I still worked to serve it, but it was true to me and thus a new level, a more real cool.
Then I met my lady. She looked at me like I was cool. In my basic clothes, tucked in shirts and buzzed hair, she saw right through to the part of me that was smart, funny and creative and loved me for those reasons. For the real parts of me. The parts that were still to afraid to show the world, but were happy to come out and play with her. She really did save me.
Then my kids. They made me stop all pretense. My love for them was so complete that I wanted to be the truest me I could be so I will be able to both model that behavior in hopes that they can avoid some of the pitfalls that I didn’t. That way they might not make some of the stupid decisions I made and might be able to get to who they are, owning their own cool, unshakable by the whims of those around them. Self-actualized cool.
I know that the journey is murky. It has to be. The fact is life has to throw things at you that don’t have right answers. It has to make you make decisions that are yours and yours alone so you can find out who you are. So you can determine what is right for you, so you can make mistakes and grow and learn from them.
But from here, from this angle, seeing them start so young to enter the murky waters of figuring it all out, it does start to give me a little tightness in my chest…
‘I think I’m starting to have feelings for Casey.’
It’s a pretty devastating thing to hear. Not to mention somewhat emasculating. She’s with me, after all. I mean, I didn’t pursue her. The fact that we were dating was a result of her stating we were dating and me nodding in aggreement.
‘What does that mean?’
It was a sincere question. Straightforward as well. I had a sense that something bad was happening but I honestly didn’t understand the phrasing. That said, I knew enough to feel queasy and a little nervous asking. I’d hear and speak both parts of this conversation and variations on it for years to come, but this time, this was the first. She was trying to be nice and I was trying to be cool. I was on my Schwinn Predator, which was a pretty badass set of wheels for an almost 11 year old so I was able to retain a certain amount of pride, even while being dumped without knowing it.
We only dated for the summer. It was 1984 and as a 10 year old I was pretty much free to do anything I could with a bike and a full day of sunlight to mess around in. Kelly was almost 14 I’d guess, at least 13. She was going to be in eighth grade in the fall and I was entering fifth. Needless to say this was a coup that my friends my own age, well my one friend, marvelled at. I was confused by it. I seemed to get some sort of credit for engineering something and I accepted the accolades, but I knew I was a fraud. I certainly enjoyed the make out sessions we’d have in garages and alleyways. The garage was the shed that sat behind my house where we shared floor space with bikes and yard tools and needed a flashlight to see and the alley was the alley behind the Main Street shops that ran between King St and the police station behind the Studio theater. It was as urban an environment as my little town had to offer and I loved being there. It was dangerous and cool.
We were the kids that ran back there that summer. We had claim to the place because Kelly’s mom owned Hairport, though I’m not sure it had that name yet, which had a back door out to the alley. We’d ocassionally go upstairs to the apartment they lived in and watch TV. But mostly we’d all be outside, trying to inhale cigarettes and trying to get into more and more trouble without getting caught.
My older brother was dating her older sister and by the end of the summer there was even flirtations between my younger sister and her younger brother. I think they even joined one of the epic games of truth or dare that were excuses to kiss, with tongue, for longer and longer stretches, always timed by whoever was around. That’s what dating was and it was awesome and terrifying and sad and joyous. Not a bad harbinger, actually.
There I sat, one foot on the pedal, the other on the ground in as cool a pose as a ten year old can take, with no idea why she took me down to this end of the alley to talk. I thought it was cool that she was discovering feelings. I could see why Casey might feel something for her. She was pretty and a good kisser as far as I could tell, though I had nothing to compare her too. I guessed she was telling me that I should keep an eye on Casey, not that I’d know what to look for or what to do if I saw something.
When she started walking back to the group of kids huddled around the steps at the back of the shop she probably thought I wasn’t going to follow. I say that now, at the time I thought I was doing what I was supposed to. When I pulled up and took my place in the loose ring of town kids who were cool she still hadn’t seen me and was leaning on Casey’s handlebars. It felt like a betrayal, but maybe I was being a little kid about it.
‘Hey Joey. How’s it going?’ Casey asked.
Kelly snapped her head around and looked confused. It took her a minute and I am so thankful to her for not speaking out loud what she must have been thinking, but eventually she must have put it together that I didn’t get what happened. That was okay. She may have said something or may not have, but whatever she did she was nice about it. She must have realized that I was 10. I sure as hell realized that Casey was 15. At least. He sat on his bike like a man. Both feet on the ground, knees bent and arms free. To fold. Cool and imposing.
Before long everything was back to normal and it was just a group of kids hanging out, drinking pop and eating candy. Surely someone had some loose cigarettes and someone knew where there were some beers hidden on the towpath, but looking back it was all so innocent. Boys would drift around popping wheelies and trying tricks. The girls were listening for their favorite songs and singing along as long as they could resist laughing and falling into each other. My wheelies were tight so I was good. But it was coming together. I was seeing what had happened. What was happening.
‘Oh my god. Have you heard this yet?’ Kelly said, not to anyone in particular.
‘No.’ I said.
‘It’s Prince. There’s a whole movie that goes with the album.’
‘The 1999 guy?’ I asked.
‘Yes. This is amazing.’ She said as the song was rewound and played again from the start.. Dearly Beloved…
‘I don’t really like it. To electronic.’ I said. I was trying to be cool. Boys in my town, we listened to WCMF. Classic rock. This was that poppy PXY stuff. It seemed unmanly to like it and I was just learning the script and was eager to throw around my wisdom, however newly discovered.
‘I don’t know man. There’s some tracks on here that will make you sit down and think Some that can make you emotional. I don’t think you’re giving it a full shot.’ Said Casey.
It was over. If Kelly never fully put it together that I was just 10, I sure did. Right then. At least I had the smarts not to argue the point. I stuck around for a bit longer, surely. I didn’t want the world to see me slink away. But time and the topic at hand moved on, some kids had gotten enough together to get a couple of the huge slice’s at Papa Joe’s and I decided to head back to my house to shoot some hoops.
You two keep us delightfully, exhaustively, sometimes even maddeningly busy. In the future, a thing that when I was a kid we thought of as 20-30 -40 years hence, but a thing that appears to be forever a year away in this time of ever evolving technology, I hope to be able to keep up better with the details of the news. For now I get what I get through imperfect routes to be sure. It’s hard to filter through for what information is important for me to know.
What’s coming through right now is that voices of hate that hope to marginalize and demonize those that are different seem to be growing bold with the increasing wind of public support. Fear not, there are countervailing winds that are stronger, winds that I hope you’ll join us in generating as you grow up and encounter a world of rich and beautiful diversity. I hope you’ll try to recognize all that you have and be appreciative.
You have parents that likely won’t be able to send you wherever you want to go for college and won’t have you in a new car on your sixteenth birthday. We live knowing that the plenty we have is merely where we need to put our resources for now as what’s most important to us is you guys and your well being. We wish we could give you everything you ever wanted, but we know we will never be able to. We see value in that as well.
What we can give you we give easily and freely and it’s us, all of us and all the love we contain. It’s our greatest pleasure giving it to you and these are our golden years as you have not ever thought of witholding it from us. Any contentiousness that might rise between us at your young ages is gone before it could ever settle in and turn into a thing that might feel permanent.
Truth is it’s normal, at least to some degree, to have tense times with your parents as you grow up. You are duty bound to become independent and as much as we want that for you we are equally compelled to hold on to you for as long as possible. The love we feel for you is overwhelming and we can’t let go. There’s perhaps a fear of mortality thing involved here as well, I’m starting to sense. Whatever it is, you’ll be ready to get out in the world and make your mistakes and learn how to regroup and make them again, as many times as you need to, well before we’ll feel comfortable letting you. I bring it up now because from here, driving toward the fire, I have my wits about me. It seems a lot harder to maintain such perspective, seeing the fire as a controlled burn, one that makes the land it decimates capable of sustaining new life as it comes closer. I’m pretty sure it won’t feel that way when I’m standing in the fire trying to keep you from running in, where all the action is, where all the pain and excitement are that I’m projecting onto you, er, the fire.
I’m losing the analogy. Suffice it to say that the teen and young adult years can be hard on everyone. You are all better for getting through them, but it’s possible for us to lose one another there for a bit.
And what a bit it is. Your teen years are amazing. If they’re anything like mine they will contain Odyssey’s that you will look back on with great fondness, experienced with comrades taking similar though specifically different journeys all of which I’m happy to have behind me and don’t want to go back to.
There is a fear that I have that I can’t shake and I want to make sure, just in case this is a place where you ever find me, to address it.
I love you. I want you to find and feel loved. I want you to know that love is what I want for you most. I want you to know that you deserve to feel loved and to love. What I don’t care about is who you find it with, not the demographics of them at least. I certainly want that person to respect you. I will be over the moon if they make you laugh. They should definitely inspire your curiosity. I want you to find love with someone that challenges you to grow and takes unexpected journeys with you. I want you to be that person that sparks a fire for someone else.
Who’s to say what they future holds. I didn’t find that person, your mom, until much later than many others do. You’re five and three and today I saw pictures of my prom dates kids going to prom. It took me a while, but I’m glad I didn’t stop looking. That said, if your love becomes your work or your family or your boundless thirst for experience and adventure or if you find it in stacks of books or making music or walking in the woods, I don’t care, as long as it makes you happy.
And if you find love with a wife and you have a life that looks like ours, with kids and a yard and walking to school and it’s filled with love, I’ll be delighted.
And if you fall in love with a man and you spark and you make a life filled with love, and laughter and experiences that make you feel the world was made just for you, just like this life feels for me, you will find no one in the world more delighted and happy for you than me.
I need you to know because it all emerges at a time, the teen years, when we feel most alone and despite a world, a country that still insists on retracting the progress that is so hardly won for tolerance and acceptance and love please know that I’m for you and will be so proudly and loudly. Whoever you are, whoever you love.
*This post was originally posted in March of 2015. I’m reposting it now as today is the 9th anniversary of the day I met my wife… *
I met my wife at an Irish pub. More so we met up at an Irish pub. It was a Sunday night in 2007. Sunday night because she had been on enough of these dates to know it was best to have a good reason (work in the morning) to dip early, and Irish Pub, well, because they’re always fairly full. Even on Sunday nights. Which worked for me since I knew it didn’t take a whole dinner to know whether or not you were interested and if you weren’t, and usually you weren’t, you saved a good chunk of change by not committing to dinner too early as this was New York. Besides, at the very least I had someone to drink with for a couple hours.
Before she reached me I knew I was interested. After confirming our identities the first memorable thing I said to her, the first full sentiment, was ‘Hey, it’s too loud. You wanna get outta here?’ There was a charming Irish band playing on bar stools against the wall all of 8 feet or so from the bar. They were good I think. Who knows, only heard them for a few waiting moments while sipping a Guinness. It was a good precursor to how we would hang out for those first few years. The golden years. The years when we were in the spotlight and our relationship took center stage.
She was smiling ear to ear by the time she’d worked her way across the pub to me and she agreed it was too loud. I downed the pint, not the whole thing, I didn’t want to scare her, and we wandered. In the rain. We huddled, giggling nervously and flirting furiously, wandering the Upper East Side. She would insist it was Yorkville, as the ‘upper east side’ sounded way too fancy for a girl from the country, but no one else in any of the places we went would have known what Yorkville was. She will disagree with this when she reads it. To her I say, write a blog and then you can win the debate! Anyway, What we found and where we became a couple was the Mad River Grille.
We took up residence in the to two stools at the street end of the bar and quickly went about socially lubricating. Probably got down two pints a piece in a half hour or so, just to calm the excitement and remove some nerves. This worked splendidly. We talked about our families and our friends and our histories and our jobs and our funny dates we’d been on and about how much we loved the city because we were both upstaters. We talked about our dreams and our plans our joys and how much fun we were having. It was so great that the ‘Sunday night at 8 date’ as I came to understand it, had turned into the ‘wee hours of Monday date’. Which came to be the, ‘Hey guys, you wanna shot?’ from the bartender date. The ‘If you guys wanna stay and drink some more that’s cool, but I kinda want to join you so do you mind if I lock up. You guys are welcome to stay as long as you like.’ date. Which turned into a ‘meet your neighbors while falling in love and no one believing we’d just met kind of date.’ But like all dates, this one too had to end.
Or did it.
‘I have a ton of sick days.’ I said.
I was taking the temperature and she was thinking. Had I known this girl and her work ethic I’d have known just by the pause how much of a good impression I was making. But I didn’t really know her that way yet. So, you know, nothing ventured…
‘Could you take tomorrow off? Would you wanna hang out in the city tomorrow.’ I asked.
She did! We did. We walked the whole city, a thing we would do a lot. We saw a movie that we are both still INCREDIBLY happy was our first… ‘Blades of Glory’. Yep. Will Ferrell and Napoleon Dynamite in a figure skating comedy! Needless to say, as far as first dates were going, and despite this being the second day and meeting up for a second time, this time at a Barnes and Noble, we were nailing it. This was the best date of our lives, and it would last for years to come. And when it changed it changed for something even better. Our Family.
So here we are. We live in a beautiful little town we love in New Jersey. We have our beautiful little house and our amazing little kids. And it’s great. But it’s also a lot to do and not a lot of time left for us. So from time to time when my mind drifts back to those two stools at the street end of the bar, and I think about the bubbles that flowed that night both between us and through us I get a little wistful. The work in this time of our lives is never ending. We have two toddler boys and they are more, frankly then we can handle at times. The noise and the clutter are just part of the job description. But in this wholly beautiful place there are still times when across a room cluttered and crowded with our very full and happy lives I look at her and more than anything in the world I want to catch her eye, get that smile and that look of excitement and walk right to her and lean in and say…
‘Hey, it’s too loud. You wanna get outta here?”
Let’s face it. You guys reading this, those of you not related to me by marriage, if you know what I mean, you know my agent, not me. You know the guy teasing out bits that, while true and genuine, are also curated. I edit out the nose picky parts of me. Of course I do.
Many of you say very nice things to me in comments that I LOVE, please keep doing this. However, I feel it only fair to share with you the, well, um, challenges one might find sharing a life with me. My wife is far too kind and wouldn’t ever write this list, so allow me…
I think I’ll stop here for now. As my shortcomings continue to determine my future I’ll try to check back in from time to time to update and add (and delete?) from this list from time to time.
Until then I’d like to say thank you to the greatest gifts of my life, my family, for seeing past all the rough edges and loving me anyways… I love you…
What? What did you say? I can’t hear you, the Mets are on.
Put aside your beliefs of what is possible and imagine opening your eyes and seeing God. Not the back lit, arms outstretched, hovering in the air with flowing robes God. Imagine if he were just there. Maybe watching TV or sweeping or doing the dishes. A laundry folding God. There to protect you and keep you warm. Saving you from every imaginable danger. Feeding you three times daily and singing you beautiful songs until you fell asleep. A god that would put the sun away when you were tired and one that was there no matter when you cried out for her. A god that knew he was the biggest creature you’d ever seen and spent her time reassuring you that he was always there to protect you.
Now, imagine this god growing old before your eyes. Imagine this god making a handful of mistakes that feel like the end of the world when they happen. God doesn’t make mistakes. One day you realize that it was all a trick. God wasn’t god. She was just a person. Just like you. One that makes mistakes. Not many, but after years of being god it doesn’t take many before you lose faith. How could you have made me so foolish, thinking you were not only special but all powerful? Forget benevolent. A benevolent god wouldn’t have made me so fallible, wouldn’t have been so fallible.
I once watched a NOVA episode on fractals. On the endlessly recurring structural similarities of things. About the Tree whose limbs mimic the parent tree, whose branches mimic the limbs, whose twigs, whose leaves. It was fascinating. It pointed to waves in the ocean being made up of endlessly cresting miniature versions of waves, those made up of even smaller versions of the same. This principle is seemingly isomorphic. Perhaps social science is already settled on this and I’m following a road to an inevitable dead end, I don’t know, I don’t research. To me it looks like their is a good deal of this type of growth in the ever cresting beat of the human story, all of us repeating and taking the rough shape of those that have come before and passing it forward so often to those that come after.
I don’t think there’s any avoiding the fact that someday I will have to apologize to my kids for the mistakes I made. In the midst of all the struggle to be a good parent, of all the effort put in making the best life we know how to make for our kids the truth is that at some point I’ll be held to account for some arbitrary reason and that will build on itself until the ultimate apology might never satisfy someone who is upset that I’m not the reason the sun comes up, I’m not able to assure all the safety I promised, I will make unfair decisions and many wrong ones. I will not live forever and I will not always be there, at least not in the way I promise them I will be. The disappointment is real. I imagine there was a time when my anger left my parents in true pain. Of course it did, they loved me and I was in pain.
This is a point in time in the life cycle of the wave and it to passes.
If you are able to stay around long enough they forgive. Usually long after the time they stop holding you to account for all that they felt broken by. They come to learn that despite not being all knowing, you were incredibly good to them. You were kind and tried your best. You were human, just like they are. Sometimes, as has happened to me only after having kids, they come to marvel at the job their parents did. At the amount of love that was passed on every day in an effort to make sure that you were safe and loved and able to swim. They watched you sink, first in the pool then at the school then with a girl and then with life and all it’s responsibilities they had made invisible to you. They did it all so you could learn to swim, to navigate the lunchroom, to talk to the girl and to pay the bills.
Somewhere in the course of standing up to all those fears, slaying some monsters and climbing those mountains it occurs to you that you aren’t doing it alone. It feels that way at first, but every time you look back they are their cheering. Every time you fail they are their, dusting you off and encouraging you to keep on going. Every step of the way they are holding the back of that bike seat, even after their hand has come off and we do it ‘alone.’ We scream, ‘I did it’ and they cheer, ‘you did it!’ Your win is their win and they share it alone, in their room at night where they take their victories now, quietly so as not to wake you. You need your rest. For there will be mountains to climb in the morning.
As I sit here, atop the peak of the bell curve that is my life I now see the journey of my own parents and I have returned to a place of looking on them with wonder. I’m in awe of the life they’ve lead and feel endlessly thankful for all they did and continue to do for me. I’m more aware and not harboring any illusions about who and what they are and that makes it all the greater. They gave their lives to me and my brothers and sisters and did so graciously and with endless effort to ensure that we would be able to make it.
I look back and see the hills the boys will climb and I gird myself for the journey. It comes with all the unexpected glories and unpredictable pain you can imagine. It’s all of life they will face. I marvel at the journey in front of them, the one I’m only halfway through now. I feel endless empathy for them. I worry for them and am excited for them. I’ll jump every time I see danger coming. A few times too many I’m sure as it will take me longest to learn that they are able. It won’t be a lack of confidence, merely the memory of the boys they were when I was the giant that told them everything would be okay. The one who chased the monsters around the mountains, told them they couldn’t hurt them as long as I was here.
They might never understand. These times, these times that are happening now, they are the most important and indelible moments of my life. They are the parts I suspect will flood me in my last moment on earth. All of it occurring at a time when time is too young to have such importance to them. A time they will forget as they fill their heads with the adventures they need to take to find the life of meaning that their simple existence has provided to me.
developing dad 