Hello dear readers!
It’s always so exciting when I get the chance to be published on Sammiches & Psych Meds! Today I’m over there with a list of things I truly could care less about now that my life and priorities have been rearranged by parenthood.
Please head over and give it a look and have a laugh!
All the best,
Developing Dad
I’m sitting in the Grand Ballroom at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. I’m at an empty table sitting amongst 25 or so other empty tables as the familiar hum of this Dad 2.0 Summit remains strong even on this it’s last day. The conversations I’m not eavesdropping on but I can’t avoid hearing them. They are dads talking to other dads about being dads. The topics run the gamut from the funny foibles we’ve all experienced, to the money challenges to conversations about writing about your family and all the glories and pitfalls that can entail. There are men learning that they aren’t alone in the specific challenges they may face around diseases that have effected their families and challenges that feel slightly more manageable now that they know someone who understands. There’s a LOT of dad humor and no one here that finds it anything but funny. From the hall there’s the din of conversations with sponsors teaching about products and dads learning and building relationships with brands to try to create mutually beneficial relationships.
The formal learning has been exceptional. The challenges facing parents these days may or may not be any greater than they’ve always been. But what’s undeniable is that many of the challenges are new. A simple example is social media. My kids are only 5 and 3 and I’m already scared of all that it can do to hurt them. Of all people I should be able to see it’s benefits as I’ve truly found my voice in that space. But nope, I’m a dad and since the day that my kid was born I’ve adopted a new personality trait, I’m a worrier. So be it.
Yesterday morning the keynote address was given by the novelist, children’s book author, comic book writer and all around raconteur, Brad Meltzer. I’ve strangely become a fan of his work through the podcast tour he did a few months back ahead of his most recent release. He is a genuinely thoughtful person and someone that really seems to get it. He understands that this is all a gift, all of it. His talk was on ‘Legacy’. He spoke about ways in which we will be remembered. His point, at least what I gleaned from it, was that we are how we treat people and how we treat people is how we will be remembered. It’s a message I agree with intuitively, but it’s always helpful when someone puts words to such a thing. One message he emphasized was that it’s critically important that we thank the people that have made a difference in our lives. Well, I have quite a few people that deserve a ton of thanks from me. I’m lucky, blessed, whatever you want to call it, to have had so many people that have made a truly amazing impact on my life who I’ve probably never fully thanked. I’d like to make a tiny dent in that list today. I won’t be listing the biggies, Mom and Dad, siblings and relatives, my amazing wife and my kids. I thank those folks all the time and will continue to. But sitting here it occurs to me that there are particular folks that I Have to thank who’ve played a role in my being here, confident about writing and sharing my life. People who’ve really built me up, had faith in me and pushed me to challenge myself. It’s a small list and there are so many who will be left out, but I have to start somewhere….
Sharon. Sharon was the camp director at Harriman Lodge, the summer camp for adults with disabilities that is amongst my favorite places on earth where I worked happily and ceaselessly for my entire 20’s. Sharon gave me chances and saw something in me that I suspected was there, but never knew. She identified me personally in my first year and told me she thought I had what it took to run a place like Harriman (a dream I haven’t YET realized but at this stage it’s largely been due to circumstance, and the fact that the current director is AMAZING!) Thank you, Sharon. Thank you for giving me true responsibility. Thank you for giving me the space to fail and to learn from it. Thank ou for believing in me.
Briton, et al. Briton is a writer and a dad. When I first started writing about parenthood and my experiences I was pretty happy having my stuff read by friends and complimented from time to time. I was scratching at surfaces and feeling like I was getting somewhere. But Briton decided he had faith in me and thought I could do more, better work and he was right. Eventually, and he may only be learning this now, I started feeling competitive with him. With his work. He’s brilliant and his highs are things I still strive for and am inspired by. Beyond this, he literally built my support network of fellow writers and editors. While the original landing spot for these relationships has fallen apart, the core group of my writing friends who I can rely on for everything still exists and remains strong. You’ll know who these folks are as they will all, in some way, support this piece when it goes public. They are all exceptional writers and you should read them. Thank you, Briton. You are quite the generous scribe and you have been a beacon for me and so many others on the journey.
My friends from home, all my homes. All of you. I see you on Facebook and I am overwhelmed by the constant and unceasing support. Every single time you write an encouraging commment you are adding years to my creative life. I couldn’t be luckier to have the Brockport, Elmira and Camp friends that I’ve had. Thank you all.
I’ve been resistant to being active in the ‘Dad Blogger’ community. I’ve been completely turned around by my experience these last couple of days. To have the opportunity to read some words, to be vulnerable and supported, to laugh and to cry and think, I’m incredibly lucky. Thank you Dad 2.0 Summit.
I’m married to a wonderful woman and I have two happy, healthy boys, one 5 and one 3. I had plenty of time to learn plenty of things about life before diving in to this whole ‘family man’ lifestyle. In fact I’d worked for nearly two decades in the ‘caring’ professions and had managed behavior and cared for children that required more support than mine do. You could argue that I was as prepared for fatherhood as one can be. In addition to all of this I am lucky enough to be the son to two genuinely amazing parents and I grew up in the middle of a gigantic family. Like smack dab in the middle. Life has always included room for everyone at the table for me.
All of this gave me a leg up I suppose. But that leg up made me merely, ‘completely unprepared‘ as opposed to say the dad I would have been at 22 who would have been ‘utterly and completely unprepared and destined to fail.‘ I appreciate the advantage I had. Still there are some things that you learn when you become a dad. Here’s a short list of some of the more important and impactful ways I’ve changed and things I’ve learned.
The learning curve is steep for all parents. Moms have to start sooner and as a result men sometimes make big mistakes early. Have some patience. Good men don’t know anything about being good dad’s until they are given the chance to learn from experience.
Kevin Smith is many things. Many of which might make it hard for someone to see his humanity. He’s a famous person, which seems to be enough of a reason for many to dismiss someone as a thinking, breathing, feeling person with 99.9% in common with the rest of us. He’s an artist as well, producing art and putting it in the world, another reason for people to feel not only dismissive of one’s humanity but entitled to say cruel things about something that a person clearly has put out as an extension of at least a part of themself. He’s also a vulgarian, a trait many of us find endearing but one that alienates many, I’m sure.
Whatever else he is he is also human. And tonight, while I was doing the dishes and listening to him eulogize his dear friend and colleague, Alan Rickman, I found myself crying. Tears falling and breath heaving in fits and starts as I listened to someone processing publicly, generously, their feelings of loss, their sadness and perhaps something so universal and personal as mortality.
Much of what I write about here is parenthood. I find it to be an experience that provides, amongst so many profound and beautiful and human things, a bridge to connectedness. I’m not a dogmatic believer and I’m not one prone to much magical thinking. What I am, like Mr. Smith, like you and like my kids and yours, is human.
One of the things I’ve learned with age is that humanity is capable of inspiring wonderment and awe. It can summon it’s natural state of curious sentience and without intending to draw out an emotional response from me, one that can take my breath away and instill emotion in me that can circle and swirl throughout my being and bring tears that I have no control over. I know that we are merely actors on a tiny stage in a giant universe and too often we can overestimate our capacity to know what meaning there is. What is not lost on us is love and death. The rest we get wrong a lot. But love and death, well, they amount to meaning to me. Meaning I can’t and don’t want to analyze or understand fully. Meaning that I want to live in and die amongst.
It’s strange to be in my 40’s with such young kids. I didn’t plan it this way, at least not from the start. But now that I’m here I’m privy to so much of life. Every day I revel in the world my children are discovering. Worlds full of what I’d mistakenly come to think of as ordinary and mundane before they retrained me. They are able to reintroduce me to the world and are able to reignite within me the spark of curiosity, the fire of creativity. They move me to joy and deliver an endless bounty of love to my life in between testing me by walking me to frustration and even occasionally nudging me toward rage. At the same time it’s a time of life when I can’t help but notice mortality. It’s creeping in at the edges of my life and it’s a present reality in the day to day lives of so many people I care about. I have visions of my parents at my own kids graduations and weddings and even holding their great grandkids someday. I can even imagine them at my funeral, one where I’m being interred at a ripe old age having died of too much life. I can imagine myself dying. That seems natural to me. But even in my minds eye I see my parents there looking down lovingly on me, happy to have known me, sad I won’t be around anymore. It’s crazy, but it’s true. Because I live in denial and fear, the knowledge, like so many of the rest of us do, those of us still able to hug our parents and tell them that we love them, that a day will come when my world will die and it will be at once the most natural and human experience one can imagine and it will also be the most devastatingly painful reality I can conceive of while still being able to live.
I cried tonight listening to someone share what it means to be human. When I was younger I couldn’t cry. Now I can and I do. If I’m really moved it’s like a fit of uproarious laughter. I can’t control it. I can stop thinking about the funny thing, but eventually I have to think of it again, and when I do, the tears and gut busting roars of laughter come right back and they won’t go until they are done, regardless of my schedule. It’s kind of wonderful. Likewise, feeling the pain, or sorrow, or whatever emotion it is that emanates from others when they are hurting also arrives and departs on it’s own schedule. This empathy is meaning to me. It’s a style of connecting and it’s redemptively human. It’s why we grieve communally. It’s how we express respect. It’s how we honor each other. It’s how we share humanity. It’s empathy and it’s what keeps us together and unites us in the end. We all can empathize with loss. We all will succumb to mortality and if we are all lucky we will all know love in many forms.
Kevin Smith lost a friend last month. A dear friend and each and everyone of us knows what that means. It is what makes us special. It’s what makes our lives have meaning.
I am so very sorry for your loss, Mr. Smith. I hope that in time you will be able to tell the stories of your friend and feel at least an ounce of comfort in feeling his presence again and having a laugh with him, or even a cry, from time to time.
I’ve always been hypersensitive. Which isn’t something I’ve always been comfortable acknowledging.
When I was growing up it was a real issue for me. It’s still a thing that can be hard for me. But as I get older, especially after having kids, it’s practically unavoidable. When I was young everything I felt was turned into the only emotions testosterone could amplify. Rage, Joy, Jealousy, Sadness or Frustration.
Having feelings, being filled with emotion was terrible. The loss of control was awful. It felt vulnerable. It felt dangerous and I chose instead to express my feelings, at least the joy, jealousy and sadness ones through stoic denial of them. Which conveniently turned them all to rage and frustration. The two emotions I felt comfortable showing the world. Somehow those two feelings felt invulnerable.
But sadness was there at times. Sadness is still hard. It tends to come out as rage, but I can at least recognize it now. Jealousy is mostly gone. Sometimes I might feel a touch of envy but it’s mostly for made up stuff like money. Sometimes I read something brilliant and wish I’d thought of it, but I don’t know if that’s jealousy.
The world instills in boys the misconception that painful feelings are the opposite of strength. They aren’t. The fact that I couldn’t kill them completely, those vulnerable, painful feelings is because they were important. They were protecting a part of me that couldn’t be fully removed. No matter how hard I might have tried. The part of me that is ultimately my greatest strength.
The only feelings that can own me are those I hide. The ones I keep to myself. The ones that I’m afraid of people seeing.
I would never have believed that I’d ever have been comfortable sharing so much of my concerns and so many of my worries with the world. So many of my shortcomings, failings and feelings. I was invested in them staying hidden. I’d made them shameful by keeping them hidden. I’d made such simple and beautiful things as feelings and need and frailties and worries my undoing by being so afraid of them that I loaded them into my bones and my body and my bags and anything I could carry and then dragged them with me wherever I went. When they inevitably became too heavy and I’d become weary I’d crumble, drop it all in private, curse my weakness and then add that weakness to the pile that I’d once again pick up, pack on and carry around. It was untenable.
I don’t imagine that I would have carried this burden forever. I imagine that some event would eventually have shown me the light and taught me that I needed to unburden myself. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been an event. Perhaps it would have been the slow learning of a lifetime of pain that would have taught me my lessons and prodded me and encouraged me to finally let it go by putting it down, laying it out and sharing my load with anyone who’d care to see and take stock of it with me. I imagine I’d have gotten there some way or other had I not gotten there as I did. But thankfully I didn’t have to wait for either of these things.
What let me know it was okay to be my entire person in front of the entire world was becoming a father. I have two sons who will grow up in a world that is prone to teaching it’s young men that ‘manhood’ means being more powerful than feelings of frailty and weakness. It’s an unfortunate tradition and residual instinct of a time less enlightened than one I hope we get to some day soon. But until we do I need to be the proof that having feelings and being sensitive to them, all of them, rage and compassion and needing and passion and frustration and sadness and guilt and all of them, is a strength. It’s in fact how you grow strong. Having feelings, expressing them, then putting them down is the only way to move on. It’s my duty and my pleasure to show them this, to be the proof of this valuable nugget of earned wisdom.
More so than that even, it’s my pleasure to show them gratitude for teaching me this lesson. For making my life so much more harmonious with the life that has been coursing through me that I could never fully come to grips with and feel comfortable in before meeting them and learning how to be brave and strong because of the love I have for them.
Thank you guys. You opened life to me. You made me strong enough to live it fully and honestly. You’ve made all of it, the joy and pain, pure bliss.
I’m stressed. We’re stressed. It’s mid January and I’m stressing about how we’ll handle things come September.
I have a fairly Idyllic situation. I drive both my sons, Charlie and Teddy, five and three respectively, to and from daycare every day. I’m able to do this because I work where the best daycare we have ever seen happens to be. Every day has challenges, some have really big challenges, but in all it’s a pretty great trade off.
For every time I snap and growl aggressively at one of them for not listening to me about opening the garbage can full of salt for melting the yet non-existent snow or have to carry a kid into the building who isn’t yet ready for the ride to be over, squirming and fighting to run back to the car I get ten chances most dads don’t. Most parents don’t for that matter.
I get to see them throughout the day as I bump into their class heading here or there. I get to poke my head around corners when I know they’re going to be somewhere and watch them making friends and being three or five and breathtaking. I have a relationship with the people that take care of them all day that is just a tad more than it would be if I were to drop them off and leave for the day. Hell, I get to relax my shoulders all day knowing that they are right around the corner and I can see them whenever I want.
Still, I’m stressed. Tense.
It’s time for us to sign Charlie up for Kindergarten next year and we don’t know how we are going to do it. While we live literally across the street from where he’ll be going to school, we both work a half hour from there. On top of that the kindergarten that’s offered is of the half-day variety. Meaning we’d have to come get him by 11:30. So this kid, who’s thought of ‘school’, which is how we refer to the daycare, as something that runs about 8 hours a day every day for several years now has to go to ‘real’ school, where its serious. And where it lasts a couple of hours.
Logistically this causes a good many problems. How are we supposed to get him from there, again a half hour away, back to where I work, which will give him free aftercare, five days a week. I can’t take that much time every day. For Karen it would be twice as much time as she works about a half hour away from me.
We’re investigating everything but nothing seems simple. The local place that could do aftercare costs $900 a month for 2 days a week. There’s another program that is held where we took him for a few months for daycare before I took this job a couple years ago where they might be able to take him and we might be able to remain solvent, emphasis on ‘might’ for that last part. But he cried literally all day every day there. He’s so comfortable in his school now and the thought of that is traumatizing to us. We could and will if we have to, try to pick him up everyday. It will be a very stressful year but of course we could figure it out. The consideration at the top of our list is to move out to where I work. This is for kindergarten. Public school, half day , no wait list or crazy application process kindergarten.
I’m tense without a solution. I’m the ‘don’t worry, we’ll figure it out spouse’ in my marriage and even I’m fretting this one from here, 8 months out. Who knows what we’ll end up choosing and who knows if it’ll work.
Truthfully these are wonderful stresses to have. He’s a lucky kid (at times) for having parents this concerned. The stress is endurable and the solution will be whatever it is we choose. We’ll see how it goes and if we need to change course midstream it wouldn’t be the first time. Woudn’t even be the fiftieth time. We’re actually getting better and better and switching saddles whilst wading in low waters.
I’m not bothered by it, even if I am a bit annoyed from time to time. Because I remember ten years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday. I can tell you what was on TV and what it was I was doing on Tuesday nights at that time. It was a flash. All of it. It was a blink of an eye. Ten years from now I’ll be starting the conversations with him about college. If that’s the direction he goes. If not I’ll be talking to him about a thousand other things and I’ll be looking back on all the time we spent driving back and forth from wherever he may end up in September and back to work with me. I’ll be remembering it with a full heart and so much wistful nostalgia for a time that was the fullest of my life. A time I thought was stressful but was actually the most joy filled days I’ll ever know. None of it lasts forever anywhere else but in my mind and I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to be stocking my memories so generously.
Our first, our not so little Charlie, is turning 5 this week. It’s not going too fast for me. Not today at least. I may feel differently at his sixth, but for now things are moving along nicely. It’ll also be my fifth anniversary of being a dad but do you think he’ll remember? Nope. So rude.
From time to time life provides a moment for you and your lingering sense of loss that inevitably accompanies all the changes you go through. When it does it’s a good idea to look back and take stock.
The only constant in life is change.
It’s a theory that holds up. At least to my way of approaching it. It being both life and its nature as ever changing.
First a primer on who I was. I was a summer camp guy for 18 years until 2013. It wasn’t a job. It was a passion, love and career. It was a fine way to spend the rest of my life if life had proceeded that way. I worked with populations of kids and adults with differing needs and helping, being a cog in a wheel that provided such a wonderful opportunity to folks that often didn’t have such opportunities was the proudest accomplishment of my life. I was wedded to the work. I would disappear for months at a time to enter a new life and be fully present in it. I love that world only slightly less than the world of my family. And far more than any other potential life. It’s where I’d be forever were my kids not to come along. It’s where I hope to return in my golden years and it’s where I’d run to if my world came crashing down around me.
I was also a largely functional alcoholic. The serious kind of functioning alcoholic. The several hundred dollars a week, perhaps a bottle of vodka or scotch and a 12-pack of chasers in a night type of drunk. I drunk myself to sleep for years. More than a decade, easy. Even after settling down with my wife. I don’t think she understood that what I was doing was moderating while we were dating as she was trying to keep up and it was an epic binge for her. I was a bad influence.
That said, we really loved having drinks together. Loved it. Did it really well. It was so much fun to be decent earning adults in NYC. We ate out all the time and had drinks in and out and endless laughs and nights that were so epically wonderful that we still reference and revere them years later. The nights of wine and roses as we wandered through the festively lit streets of Astoria, lightly lit ourselves and finding romance while blizzards drove all the revelers out to the streets to feel the palpable Christmas in the freezing air, wandering from restaurant to bar to wine bar to dollar store to home to decorate and continue the party with just the two of us in a fourth floor walk up overlooking the white roofs and urban backyards of our new world ancient neighborhood are some of the giddiest most endorphin inspiring memories I can conjure.
We had endless time to contemplate and consider. Our feelings, our finances, our vacations and our careers. We would ponder and consider like pros. We could make a good six months out of debating the relative merits of buying a car. This was when our future was so crisply and cleanly defined as a life spent together, making each other laugh and smile. Infuriating each other over things so silly now I can’t even remember them. Making up over whole weekends we’d spend seeking bliss and washing it down with cold beers in gardens and world cuisine served to us by intriguing people with decorous accents. We had stronger convictions then. Why wouldn’t we. It’s much easier to make the world fit your will when you have nothing bigger than yourself to consider.
Now it’s funny to remember how serious our conversations were about whether or not we should try to have kids, try to become a family. We stated our concerns so sincerely and so naively. It’s hard not to see the funny in that combination.
What we had right was how much things would change.
I tried to keep my camp life after we had kids. I’d seen so many of my colloeagues, people that started as I had, as counsellors in our teens and early twenties, be able to manage it. But I didn’t find love at camp, oddly enough and the worlds don’t always mesh that way. Besides, all the others had managed to get those jobs that came with a house year round and I hadn’t gotten there yet. Might never have, who knows. For me the job required me driving 125 miles each way 2-3 times a week and staying over night a couple of times a week. This was the compromise I could manage when the first came along. Prior to that I was gone 6 days a week and likely to leave on day 7. This lasted for 8-10 weeks every summer. It was better than my first camp where I’d pack up and move in mid-May and return in mid to late Sept. My utterly understanding wife, and new mom I might add, had more patience than seems humanly possible as she knew how much the work meant to me and she herself found it to be one of my best qualities. But then you have kids. You have midnight feedings and ever evolving sleep schedules and work schedules to coordinate and dr’s appointments… It all got to be crazy. Then when a severe anaphylactic reaction happened sending us to the hospital with a barely breathing boy I knew it was time to start looking. It was still a good while but I found something that worked. I had to take a step back in my career, but I could be with Charlie, and now his little brother who had arrived in the mix, at the Y where I still could work with people with special needs and their families. I was right there in case anything came. Also, while it can be trying at times I can’t tell you how much fun it’s been driving them to and fro everyday. Having them see me at work and me being able to come upon them in the halls or sneak out and see them in their swim lessons. It’s nothing short of amazing.
We used to eat at so many cool and progressive restaurants. Now we are fairly restricted, not just by the food allergies, but also by budget and the fact that wrangling two boys under 5 (at least until Thursday!) in a public place is little different than doing it in the privacy of our home. Where we are not very good at it. In fact we are not the parents we ever thought we would be. Far from it. No screens, no candy. Seemed good advice. Was good advice. Now we will holler to get their attention and distract them with candy to get the IPad away so we can give it to the brother who’s scream crying because he is no longer satisfied getting candy in lieu of the IPad. It can go like this for whole winter breaks.
Our drinking is now a pleasure because it happens about one shared beer or perhaps as much as half a bottle of wine (one glass each) at a time. Its a lovely nightcap after the dishes are done, the floors clean enough and the kids are somewhat reliably asleep for the evening and it’s accompanied not by the most recent art house film that challenges our sensibilities, but rather the wonderful worlds of Orange Is The New Black or The Big Bang Theory. BBT is a tad embarrassing, even in the room, but we like it. Parenthood dumbs you up just enough to find you truly liking the merits of a show so straightforwardly crowd pleasing. Seriously, like the booze, in small doses it’s great. OITNB is just great. Would have been before too. Just wouldn’t have seen it. Wouldn’t have fit in our social calendar
Now the fights move faster and so does the forgiveness. Truth is we are much quicker to lose a fight, either of us then we ever were in the past. We’d both be fine going down with the bad idea rather than acknowledging the other person might be right. Now, we get over it because none of it’s so serious, so necesarry now that we have two little boys that brought so much perspective with them.
Yesterday morning we woke up as we often do these days, with all of us in the bed. The boys go to sleep in their beds, or at least get there at some point in the evening. Every night the 3 year old makes his way over and more times than not the big boy follows shortly thereafter. The little one has become the alpha and he has determined that he wants him and his big bro to share mommy’s pillow so momma shifts and climbs and keeps everyone fully covered as she does. Thank god we got a king sized bed. Before you knew it we had inadvertantly found ourselves snuggled in the bed, with the light emerging through the windows with as much as a half hour left before the sun would rise. Our about to be five year old would do this, maybe for a few more years. Maybe. But than that would be gone. And it will be fine and we’ll find new ways to appreciate our love and our family. But for now, laying here under the covers, warm and content next to our little boys, well, there’s not really anything better. The old me could never have known that.
The love I have now both for my family and for my wife makes all the pain and wrong turns I took magically transform into the right ones. Had you checked in with me 15 years ago when I was ‘destroying relationships’ and drinking like a fish and feeling like a failure every minute I was away from camp or sober I’d have told you as objectively as I could be, I was screwing it all up. I was screwing up my life and there was very little chance of me ever recovering. But you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and then all of a sudden one day you realize, holy crap, all of that brought me here. Thank god I ruined those relationships. I’d have failed them and they’d have failed me. I didn’t fail, the relationships did. I learned. Thank God I stayed so drunk I couldn’t get to another place where I wouldn’t have found exactly the life I have. Because I love it. I love my life now more than I ever have. It’s hard, I fail and I keep going and I love it.
It was early morning and the rising suns rays streamed through the windows. I sat upon the floor playing with toys at the foot of the old man. As long as the old man was there I was safe. I was happy.
I pretended that he was the king of the whole world and that it was because of him that the sun came up. That it was merely a decision of his as to whether there would be clouds, how many they would be and how white. He sat benevolently above me reading the newspaper, grunting and groaning but never wavering or leaving. He was my own personal deity after all and while it was certainly my responsibility to obey him and to revere him, it was also his duty to keep watch over me.
Ever since I can remember I’ve pretended. When I was little it was virtually all I did. I pretended everything. I pretended to know everything. I pretended that my explainations, almost all initially at least, completely conjured and of a remarkably unbelievable nature as I had no information from which to reasonably surmise my attestations, were in fact correct. Accurate and made so by my imagining. I made up the world around me and went about testing it. In time it would come to pass that all of my presumptions, ones that were as preposterous as they were inconsistent, would be debunked through observation and experience.
While in this bubble though, playing with the others around the feet of my parents something terrible would get through. Perhaps a baby in a well or a superhero in a pinch on a Saturday morning with little more than minutes to free themselves of the seemingly insurmountable bind they found themselves in. I’d pretend the danger was mine and it was me that needed to resolve it. I’d pretend so convincingly that I’d express my concern, with great sincerity, about what would come to pass in this wholly conjured reality that was as real as anything inside my head.
‘Hey, Buddy. You know this is all pretend, right? There’s nothing bad that can happen to pretend people. This is nothing to worry about.’ the old man would tell me.
‘I know.’ I’d say, as defensive as I was relieved to know there was still order. There was still someone helming this ship.
‘It’s all…’ He’d prompt me any time my anxiety piqued, from his seat at the table presiding over all he or anyone could see.
‘Pretend.’ I’d say, relieved to be reminded.
By midday the light would have ceased being a nuisance and we would be rearranged by the passing of the sun, all of us moving throughout the morning to keep the painful power of unshrouded sunlight from blinding us with it’s insistent stare. By now I found myself in the chair that the great one had once been in. It would never occur to me to think myself on his plane simply because I was in his chair. I was a placeholder and it was merely my job to pretend. To think about what he might have done were he faced with a dilemma, to strain to remember what he’d done when I was the child on the floor who needed him in order to know I was safe, to know there was order.
I had to pretend I knew the answers. Had to pretend that I’d made the world so orderly and surmountable as he had for me. I had to as there were now kids at my feet. Kids making up worlds of their own. Conjuring from places of pure fantasy that which had reason, imbuing it instead with pure whimsy. Playing with ideas as banal and powerful as darkness and light, good and evil, meaningfulness and meaninglessness. At times I could see there minds working, believing the folly that all of this is whimsy, all of it nonsensical and all of us prone to fortunes good and wicked. At times like this I’d see there fragile worlds sucumbing to playful dreams that had gone past the point of purpose and I knew they needed me. So I’d remind them there was order and they weren’t in danger. That the world made sense and I was there to make it work for them. It was my own act of pretending, my own form of necessary and fanciful creativity put to good use, to guide them through the terrifying imaginings they had no idea needed to be reigned in from time to time if they ever wanted to feel at home in the world. I fixed it and it was easy.
‘Hey, Buddy. You know that this is all pretend, don’t you.’ I’d say to each as they needed to hear it.
‘Yes, I know.’ They’d answer a tad too defensively, betraying their own attempts at obscuring how genuinely scared they were and how genuinely relieved I could make them. They needed to feel independent and safe and this was the balance.
I imagined that I had things under control. I imagined that there was some way to guarantee safe passage for those I loved. I imagined that I had reached some level of mastery that allowed me to control certain outcomes. More outcomes then I’d ever thought possible. I built my life around this belief. I had to believe it after all, otherwise how would I be able to do all that needed doing if I thought that I had no control, that it was often out of my hands and could all go away in an instant. That awareness would cripple me. So I pretended I had dominion over it. And I did.
Until I didn’t. Until the gods I knew, the god’s from when the world was new, young, crawling on the flor and conjuring from whole cloth, began to fade. Were I to have been as good to them as they’d been to me I’d have been more present. Were I not to have the full burden of a new, young world strapped to me. Had I had any imagination at all I’d come up with a reason, a pretend one if necesarry as to why I needed to be away as much as I was. But when my gods passed I knew the world I’d known, the blueprint for the one I was imagining for the next generation, had crumbled with them.
What was left of the world they’d made for me was in my minds eye, imagined almost completely. The sadness would never leave me, but what sadness there was had been stolen from the past and left in its place, in the life I knew when I was young, was only the beautiful and ordered and wonderful world that made sense so much more now that it was a place that needed nothing but time and a clear mind to come back to existence fully behind my closed eyes.
I kept up the charade for my kids, knowing that to them there was something real in the world I’d made with them. The one I worked with them to imagine and create. I did so becuase what alternative was there. But I knew. I knew the real world was the one that I’d imagined with the gods that were the real residents of the realm that had the power to truly make a world worth having.
As I grew tired and my own children now greying and grown came to me I marvelled at the worlds they were creating. I couldn’t help but recognize that they were the rightful heirs and I just a vessel for them as the greatness I’d known as a young man from the gods that came before was present again in the world and I was just glad to have seen them through their youth so they could grab the reigns and put the world in order. I was overwhelmed by their capacity to do so and baffled by the means they used.
As the sun now set and the time was running thin I sat in my chair as my children came to me again looking for a meaning to it all and all I could think to tell them was all I’d learned.
‘It’s all pretend. You know that, right? I mean, life, death, joy and pain. All of it, it’s an act of creation. We all get this one chance to have a hand in our fate. We get to create the world our life will play out in. Don’tever forget, it’s all an act of imagination. You guys are the best I’ve ever seen. You have no idea how much that means as I was born of the best. As the light fades I can’t tell you how happy I am to have had the opportunity to watch you making the world anew. I’m going to leave soon and when I do I’ll do so knowing the world is in good hands. Trust your imagination, it’s the only thing that will ever change the world the way it needs to change.’
With that I passed and the darkness sat heavy for a short time.
Then the sun came up anew.
There’s a good many reasons I write. Most of them have evolved since I started Developing Dad. Initially it was motivated by my desire to make this thing for my kids. A record of who their parents were along the way. A place where they could go back and hopefully see how much they were loved. So they could learn from me while some of what I had to teach was still fresh in my mind. This is one of those posts.
My father is not always prone to giving advice. He’s actively involved in helping us chew over a problem, but I think he takes a designers approach to most things having been a designer since far before he even had the degree to prove it. Or the career full of successes. He’s a designer by nature before he was one by training. As such, and as a man that will often speak of how fascinated he is with his children and their perceptions and approaches, he revels in seeing us solve problems. Designers know that there are potentially innumerable ways in which to approach and resolve a problem and he loves seeing how others do it.
‘I’m really very happy that you’ve chosen this life.’ He said to me on the back porch of my brothers house the afternoon before our big day. ‘It’s a good life.’
It’s a thought that’s resonated with me. It got my attention in the moment and has held that attention now for going on 8 years. ‘I’m really happy that you’ve chosen this life.’
It’s not passive, I chose it. I chose to give love. I chose to accept it. I chose to look past fear and doubt and aimed at something beyond the immediate. I chose to commit to it. A thing I’m not sure I understood at the time, but a thing he knew far better than I, was something I’d grow into.
I’d come close before this. A couple of times. In each of those earlier instances I walked away from the afair swimming in remorse over my shortcomings and failures. I wallowed in pity over the weight I didn’t afford the relationships until it was too late. Until I’d messed up. In resolving these emotions, past years of recriminations and loud and repeated listenings to Rick Danko bleating out the lyrics to ‘It Makes No Difference’ or Dave Matthews singing sincerely about something I was trying to feel though I wasn’t, I resolved and learned that I was going to have to accept that she wasn’t the one. It was an important realization for me. To know that in the end while the pain was real when it was real and it was honestly desired when it was feined the reality was that it was the fates and I had to learn everything I could from these painful experiences. In the end it wasn’t meant to be.
Which is a total and utter cop out.
In the end of relationships you divvy up. The reality was, to a greater or lesser degree, or just in different ways for each situation, I was at fault. And the fault that was mine to own was that I wasn’t the one. Not because I wasn’t ‘the one’ per se, but because I didn’t choose to become so. Not until the day after the day before my wedding when my father imparted wisdom he didn’t even know he posessed.
He had made the choice, the committment in his mid twenties. He was on the accelerated plan of becoming a good man and becoming the one for the girl he’d marry. I drifted a bit longer. At least when it came to relationships and my ability to be who I thought I was.
‘The one’ barely existed on my wedding day. It also existed absolutely as much as it could. We were getting married after all. She was absolutely the one for me and I look back on that day often with the greatest of memories as it was the day when we set in motion the series of events that would bring about our unending happiness at becoming ‘the one’ for someone who was taking the same leap for us. The truth is that the love that brought us to that place, through a remarkable set of ups and downs was a precursor to a life we are now well on the way to completing the foundations of now that you are both here with us. But I was no more a pre-determined perfect fit for your mother than she was for me. What I was and am is madly in love with her. Which, yes, means I’m enamored of her. But more importantly it means I’m committed to her and she to me. Through the past seven-plus years of our marriage, through several challenging and seriously imperfect times where we have both failed each other and failed ourselves, we always rebound to that committment and each time we do there is more trust, more love and more reason why we alone, specifically are the only partner that could ever be the one for the other. The ways multiply with each passing milestone of a life spent together figuring out what is meaningful to us and to each other. I’m infinitely more capable of being the one for your mother today as she is for me because of how imperfect life is and because we keep showing up for each other each day no matter how hard a day it might be. We’ll continue to do so through fights and disagreements, through joys and celebrations, through the workaday drudgery that life can sometimes be, through laughs that become the special language we’ll only be able to speak with each other that will give us endless capacity to carry one another when life strikes it’s most painful blows. I could never have been the one for her in the way I am now when we were just starting out.
The concept of ‘the one’ is much maligned by the cynical and those lacking imagination. We all have times when we question it’s rightness and that’s a part of figuring it out, but don’t be fooled, ‘the one’ definitely exists. But like the rest of life it requres two things. First you have to be responsible for being the one and don’t expect life to present to you ‘the one.’ That’s not how it works. All you can control is you and if you want to find the one, go about being the one. That’s the only way to know if you can in fact become the one for another. Second, go about being the one by showing up, every day, for that person you love. Apologize for your wrongs, celebrate the one you love and show up especially when it’s hard to do so. If you don’t you have absolutely no right to expect them to do so for you.
My father is a designer by nature and as such he has gone about accounting for a structure’s integrity from inception. When he told me that he was happy that I chose this life, whether he knew it or not, that’s what he was happiest for. He saw that I loved my bride fully and was happy that I chose this structure which hewed to the design he favored, built and tested in the life that he’d lead and was still leading, both beautiful in conception and structurally sound.
I was never so fool hardy as to think that there was one and only one meant for me. But I did seem to think that there were many ones and I just had to find one of them. I imagined that having that someone who loved me for me would make life easier somehow. And that I would do the same for her. I imagined that this would happen smoothly and easily as I simply had to find a person where this was true and I’d know they were one of ‘the one’s’ for me. I wouldn’t commit until then.
It was a fundamental misunderstanding of what love is, what ‘the one’ means. The one is not the solution. They don’t arrive fit to your life. They don’t come through the door and morph to some ridiculous, uninformed and frankly selfish version of what you think would be perfect. Instead they come through and you fall for them. That’s it. The rest is up to you, up to you both, to make that moment mean something by committing and recommitting everyday. Do that and you’ll find you found the one. The one and only one for you, fitting ever more perfectly together as you grow.
To be fair, you really should do this more often.
It’s your semi-annual date night with people similarly afflicted with children in the ‘rugrat’ stage of development. You will only go out with couples in the same stage as you as there’s just a hair more acceptance of your general dishevelment and lack of understanding of anything that has happened in the past 3 years that took place outside of your own home.
You start the night having properly timed everything, painstakingly, to be as together as you can be at the moment you are to arrive. And it’s wonderful. You are 0nce again putting your best foot forward and demonstrating at least a modicum of pride in your appearance. It’s such a foreign feeling that it gets you a little heady. Your hosts are in the same boat and the laughs and understanding of a person who gets what you’re going through is intoxicating. You aren’t crazy. Or you are, but it turns out you are supposed to be.
Before long you are on your second glass of wine and you are now well on your way to drinking like a college freshman again, ready to get sloppy and emotional and ready to call a taxi later to get you home. You’re getting your drink on tonight. Having put more effort into this night than has been put into anything you’ve done for yourself in forever you determine that you just have to get going to that new ‘high end’ pizza joint downtown. There’s no way you’re getting this dressed up and not getting out, no matter how much fun you are having here.
Once there you see the line. Are you kidding me? You have a vague memory of a time when a line was a small challenge, a mere hiccup. A good one. One that spoke to something desirable at the end of it. This is purely a memory. There is not even a tiny residue of that feeling left, but none of you want to let the others down by being a drag on what’s so clearly going to be an…
‘To be honest, I don’t even think there pizza’s that good. I had it with some guys from work. It’s not that much better than the place around the corner. No wait there.’ you all dance around the idea for a minute before the ‘thank god someone said something’ moment happens and you all walk gloriously down the street.
You ask for the bar menu after being seated and noticing a disturbingly high number of families with kids there. It’s alright. They ain’t yours. You do miss them though and make a note that someday, when bathrooms aren’t as urgent a need as they can be with little ones that seem not to understand the feeling of something coming, only recognizing it’s arrival, it might be a nice place to come for lunch with the kids.
No. Bar. You can bring your own though. The men head out and find a store and return wine in hand. Rather, wine in box in hand.
You’re such a jackass.
Don’t be silly. It’s not the giant fridge box. We can put it on the floor. There’s three bottles in here!
Turns out it’s okay. You even see some presently-parenting-parents looking longingly. You offer, they demure. These are your people and lines are for suckers.
By the time you’ve sufficiently made it impossible to shove any more carbs in you realize you should be getting home. The kids are going to be up early and you need to get some Gatorade and aspirin down before getting to bed. These little ones make no distinction between weekday and weekend and six in the morning is extra early for a morning after.
So you all agree that you are tempting fate and should get home. You hug and shake and do the manly combo thing and tell each other you’ll definitely do this again next week. Well, not next week, but certainly in the next month. If not certainly sometime around the holidays. Or maybe just after, once all the travel is done. It’s the kind of on the fly planning you do with friends when you are drunk. You are totally drunk, but you’re a grown up now and that just means you have to hold it together.
Your cab comes and you give them your address and you laugh and flirt in the back and it’s awesome. You’re totally gonna have sex when you get home. But first you have to be dropped on the corner so you can chew some gum and eat some old Altoids so as not to smell like vagrants for the babysitter. You see them through the window, all adorable and in their jammies so you decide to hang out for a little. But they don’t go down. Looks like they’re waiting for you. You promise that once they are down you can meet up in the bedroom and ‘finish’ your date. You mean it this time. Seriously.
Your arrival is greeted with such excitement that you decide at least one half of a Curious George is probably a good idea. One or two. Before long you are bringing slightly calmed kids to their rooms and laying with them for a bit looking at the ceiling of green stars shone from the timed light on the dresser. You eventually notice that your eyes are closed and you haven’t heard anything in minutes. You open and see the stars have timed out and he didn’t even notice. His back is to you so you wait and listen. Breaths aren’t deep enough yet to risk it. So you close your eyes and wait.
Finally you drift to sleep. It’s okay. Same thing happened in the other room. It’s not how you’d have scripted the date ending, but you’ll take it. Every time.
We really should do this more often.
developing dad 