Memoir – Page 7 – developing dad

Losing My Cool

‘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.

2013-02-05 10.40.55 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…

Kelly, Casey, Prince and Me

‘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.

What You Mean To Me

I write this blog to have a conversation with my kids that I need to have now. A conversation they can’t yet join. I write it to put moments in a capsule. I put in as many as I can in hopes that some will reach moving targets at some far off time and provide some value to whomever it is that is interested enough to investigate this curiosity they’ve stumbled upon. My kids are the primary target, but myself and their mother are also considered. We will likely be the first to come back to these words and pictures and visit our glorious past someday that’s not nearly as far away as it was.

It can all disappear. It can happen in an instant or it can happen over time. What’s certain, the only thing really, is that all of us will go away. Each and everyone of us is renting. A hundred years from now, give or take, their will be all new tenants, each one deeply connected to the past from which they sprung, but each one also tied to a future we can’t imagine. The slipperiness of it all is easy to understand and hard to truly fathom. What’s promised to me is this minute. As such it seems important for me to try to truly explain to you both how much you mean to me.

You guys are my life’s greatest achievement.

It’s an entirely selfish assessment to be sure, but I have achieved things in life, everyone does, and truthfully, without question, whatever conceivable and inconceivable things that may yet come you should know that I’ll never ever do anything that will have meant more to me than raising you. What’s silly is to think that theirs some list somewhere, even if it were to reside solely in my head, where their could possibly be something listed second. Nothing would deserve to be that close to you guys. Your mother feels the exact same way. From the second we met both of you we knew we had found our guiding stars, our purpose and our direction. I’m certainly still capable of making bad decisions, and sometimes I’ll do things that will have some small negative effect on you. It’s okay, we’re all human and I hope you’ll forgive me. What I know is my path is the one you’re walking on in front of me. At times you’ll drift and at times I will, but I know it will never be too far. I’ll always walk that path behind you, keeping watch and marveling at your journey. At the paths you blaze as you make your way. It’s been my life’s greatest pleasure walking the path you’ve cut for me.

I’m so incredibly proud of you both.

It’s insane to think that you’ll have no frame of reference for what I mean when I’m saying it. After all you’re 5 and 3 as I write this. You’ll understand down the road. Truth is there’s a little selfishness in this too. That’s okay. Family relationships, the best ones, all the best ones contain certain aspects that would be hugely dysfunctional in all other relationships. Make no mistake, we are tied tight to you two. You’ll wiggle free someday, even though we’ll keep cinching and tugging, you’ll break away. You should. Hell, I’ll be proud of that too. Even through tears I’ll be looking at your blurred silouhettes walking away as you must and I’ll be filled with pride. Fear and love and anxiety and pride. It’ll be right there with all the other feelings. Including lonely and perhaps a touch lost. But I’ll be so proud. I’ll also slip the rope through your belt loop and it will always be there ready for when you feel fully your own and want to come back and reminisce and learn what it was all about and who we were now that you’ve earned and learned a new perspective.

Language is insufficient to describe what you each mean to me.

I love you both to the ends of the earth. I love you past the ends of the earth. I love you across time and space and I love you in a way that the word love can’t sufficiently convey.

When I was a kid I was cursed with parents who loved me. As a disaffected suburban youth this did not fit the narrative I was constructing and at times I rejected the love that was so generously heaped on me. It wasn’t a jerk thing. I was just not aware of what my parents meant when they said they loved me. I didn’t get that they were saying it not only to me but of me. They were expressing a thing that is far beyond what we know of love until we meet our kids. Perhaps others find it elsewhere than with children, perhaps you will. For my life, for my parents lives it was becoming parents. I can no longer speak to any other experience than the one where I become a parent and I can tell you that I’m so very much in love with the life it’s given me. The life you’ve given me. Sure, there are no doubt times when the business of parenting could best be classified as my favorite frustration. What’s interesteing about that is that in retrospect it all turns into beauty, even the parts that might feel awful to live through.

I’m planning a long adventure that takes us all down the path as far as we can go together. I’m aware that we won’t all be on the path together forever. But I’m also aware that we will be on that path, together, forever. Because whatever else may be happening and whenever you may be reading this you should know, the minute you guys came along you removed all the boundaries that I had assigned to myself. You stretched that moment to the length of a lifetime and proceeded to teach me how to dance on it, free of the burdens I’d imagined weighed so heavy before you taught me to let them go. You are the magic that makes my life complexly beautiful and you brought with you all the joy and love to last a thousand lifetimes.

We’re not promised tomorrow, but we have today. I’m so happy to be here with you two.

Living Vicariously Through My Kids

When I was four years old I went to kindergarten. It didn’t work out all that well. From that point on I kind of hated school.

My first official act after registering for school was dropping out. I was, I am, a kindergarten dropout.

The relationship I have with the educational system is fraught with complicated emotional reactions met with juvenile responses from a cocky autodidact lacking confidence in his abilities. Added to that is the shame and embarrassment I carried with me from my early inability to adapt. I’d say I’m a bright guy. Meanwhile I failed as much as I could all throughout. I made it through my sophomore year without notebooks or a pen in 1990. I did just enough to make sure my 3rd ‘F’ was a ‘D’ so I could keep playing basketball. I’d stroll in around 11:55 so I could play or practice that day. The rule, and I can’t believe this was true, was that you couldn’t participate if you failed 3 courses in the same grading period. You could play or practice any day you showed up by noon. The day lasted until 2. I was given a lot of leeway and I availed myself of it.

Anyway, this isn’t about that. Not entirely, at least. A lot of people are accused of living vicariously through their kids. When you think of these people the image that comes to mind is the dad that pushes his kid to achieve at sports, hoping that all the wins and accomplishments his kid has will make up for all that he fell short of accomplishing. Or of the pushy stage mom signing her daughter up for pageants and auditions. In both stereotypical cases these are vainglorious attempt to fill a hole in their hearts that was either congenital or acquired. Either way it’s not the kids problem. Well, more to the point it absolutely is the kids problem, but it’s not their issue. Not at first at least.

These folks deserve some judgement. The self-awareness they lack is having potentially serious and harmful outcomes on their kids. We all get this. Even those of us engaged in such unhealthy endeavors when we recognize it in others.

What I didn’t understand until I had kids, however was that these folks also deserve sympathy. They deserve love and respect like everyone does. Their issue isn’t a lack of love but in most cases its just a matter of faulty calibration. Because all of us, to some degree, are living and reliving our lives through our kids. Hopefully there’s a point where we engage in the struggle and learn to let go of the false sense of control that parenthood so fills us with and we are freed to see our kids as fully realized individuals that are of us for sure, but separate from us in the end.

As I watch my kids grow up far too fast for their own good, I know that the fears I have for them come from somewhere specific. They come from me and my life story. They come from all the feelings and failings that have made me who and what I am. To try to divorce myself from those experiences and those feelings would be impossible, not to mention imprudent. To forcibly guide them to confront my issues, thatn would be the line for me. That is what I hope to avoid.

What I hope to do is to inform their lives through mine. I hope to send my smiling boy off to kindergarten and have him return excited about being there. There’s every reason to think he will do so. He’s had a different life than the one I did already. I had spent every day of my life home with my mom when I went to school that first time and burst into tears and didn’t stop for months. My son has had two parents that needed to work to put a roof over his head. He has been out and social and listening to teachers and getting in lines for as long as he’s been able. Yet still, my heart is heavy thinking about him in school.

This is just Kindergarten. It clearly failed me as much as I failed it. What about all the anger I carried for so long? What about the self destructive behaviors that fed and fostered my latent depressive and destructive nature as I got older? What of all those relationships I was so determined to undermine be they romantic or platonic in a foolish effort to be invulnerable? What about the constant battles I had with weight and food and alcohol? What about those years I was too afraid to even conceive of them, of me being their father and how close I came to letting that fear rule my life? The same fear that kept me from doing this, writing and being honest about who I am and what I think and how I feel?
I have endless hope and belief in my kids. They’ve given those things to me through their love and belief. I have true faith in them. I believe they are special. You would to if you knew them. But they are fragile too and I know they come from me and some of my stuff will inevitably be theirs too. I’m determined to stay out of the way of all the life they need, but it’s too much to ask to not bring my own experiences to the table as I try to beat back the demons on the path. Some of them will go around me and they will have to slay them on their own. But some of them I’ve seen before and I hope this second time around, with my knowledge and their strength, the fight won’t take nearly as long.

It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Crying

When I have to stand in front and ‘present’ I get shaky. It isn’t long before I’m on the verge of tears and my breathing is off. Happened tonight when I had to speak to our board about our programs for people with special needs. Happens all the time and people always tell me it was fine and it invariably it was. I get through it, but I know this very real and very vulnerable part of me comes through. Maybe that’s good for my soul. It’s embarrassing, that’s for sure.

I’ll tell anyone who will listen to me before I have to present that I’m terrified. I’m not. I’m not even nervous. I’ve thought through what I want to say or it’s fully prepared and just needs to be read. Either way, I’m prepared. It’s just that I know how I’ll feel when I get up there and it’s better if they’re prepared. If I had to guess I’d say it’s a control issue. If I can convince people I know in the room that I’m terrified at least they’ll know I was overcoming something. Perhaps they’ll have sympathy. I have high minded ideals and I live up to them, but in practical terms I have a politicians approach to reframing failure. I lower the bar for success as far down as I can push it when it comes to certain things.

A few weeks ago I read a story, an emotional one, at the Dad 2.0 Summit in D.C. It was a packed room and even there, to my exhaustion, I went about preparing the couple of people I’d met the night before with my mannered and perfunctory repetition of how terrible I was at speaking and how nervous I was and how scared it was all making me. It’s not that it wasn’t true, it was, but it was exhausting. I’m glad I did it, though, as despite my most sincere efforts to keep myself in check, I once again stepped into the moment and immediately began to crumble. I got through it, but barely.

I think I’m doing more than just prepping an easier landing. I think I’m preparing them for what they’re going to see when I get up there. I’m preparing myself too by prompting them to reassure me that it’s all gonna be fine. I’m filled to overflowing in those moments with the ‘me’ that I know gets to hide in the backs of rooms, who takes comfort in blending knowing no one will pick him to participate. We have to make the world safe for ourselves and this is how I do it. But on some level, the amping up of my anxiety is me preparing myself to be exposed, naked in front of the world, the real world, the world of people in a room with me. Not like here. I can’t get ‘naked’ enough here, writing to you. See all of me. Know that I’m more sensitive than you imagined me, a man to be. Know how fragile and strong I can be when it comes to my kids. Being naked here, frankly, is my talent. That and the ability to ocassionally stumble upon a clever turn of phrase. Take these two together and you have seen the entirety of my artistic arsenal. That’s it. It’s what I got. But put me in front of people, real people and make me talk about my kids, or even my work, and I can’t help but get emotional.

Everyone sees nerves. I’ve pointed them there. It’s what I want them to think. But it’s not nerves. In a situation like the one at the Summit, it’s evident. I cracked and froze on all the parts you would if it was your heart breaking in public for all to see. Breaking at the thought of pain affecting those you love, at the memories of regrets and missed opportunities. Naked fear for my kids and the common everyday tragedies they’ll endure even if there life is charmed. Those cracks in my voice and the tears that well up at those times are all my love being put in the hands of toddlers who trade me all of theirs and me wondering if I can carry the weight of all their tomorrow’s. Of seeing that they don’t yet know that the component parts of their love are joy and hope and belief and desire and me knowing it’s my job to care for that love when it gets battered, bruised and wounded. Burdened by the knowledge that love will disappoint them, dishearten them. I just hope I can manage the load long enough for them to learn that it doesn’t dessert them. That love can disappoint but that it will always be waiting to start anew and they will always be worthy of it. The love they’ve given me is bottomless and I’ll endure, always at the ready.

I should note, I’m also the proud son of the GREATEST dad ever.

I know this because I learned it from my mom. The same way I learned that loving my kids unabashedly and steadfastly, loudly and proudly was the only way to know they would eventually come to understand how deserving they were of all of it and more. Same way I learned from my mom that a life of helping others was the only kind that was worth living and it was the truest way to find contentment and happiness. Same way I learned that she loved me no matter how many times I was hurtful toward her, when I would yell as a teen or go weeks without calling as an adult, a thing I’m still prone to do. Her love’s constance was a wisdom I didn’t understand, couldn’t until I met my kids. They taught me how to see all my mom was and is and always will be.

When I get up there in front of people and I start to talk about my work or my kids and I start to get emotional it’s because of this. It’s because no matter how much I may have pushed, no matter how different we may be, everything about me that is of value is rooted in what I learned by being loved and it simply overwhelms me.

The Currency of Love

Smartest In the World. And Robert. Before I became a dad I had no understanding of the elasticity of time. I considered time a constant. It marched ceaselessly, never wavering, never stopping. These are attributes of time, to be sure, but it was a reductive understanding. Since having the kids I’ve traveled in time, seen it slow to a crawl, marched through years in the span of an afternoon, even traveled to a time so far off I could never live to see it. Time is not simple. Clocks are simple. Time is incredibly flexible and capable of transporting you if you let go, surrender your control over it. It’s okay. You can almost always recapture it.

Other times you surrender parts of yourself to stay forever in a moment.

Meeting my wife was one of those moments. The kids are part of that moment too. That they weren’t born yet is of little import in my new relationship to time. So many factors made this moment one capable of stretching years. Despite this the moment itself has not suffered from thinning or become weak as it stays tacked in place and stretches out to stay forever with me. Quite the contrary, actually. Parts of us will always be sitting on those bar stools, hearts jumping like live wires, trying our hardest to both conceal and reveal the excitement, not wanting to scare away the other but unable to control that which we’d harnessed within for so long.

When I became a father and when I became one again time proved as malleable as ever. If I were to leave it to the clocks and the calendars there would be some difference I’d have to assign to the experience, as if the experience were split in two and by virtue of separate arrivals I’d have to assign different values to each. But to use time that way would be unfair as the moment of becoming a father is one moment, one moment that hopped forward and backward through space and time, meeting itself with perfect symmetry.

In that moment when life was shown to us, when we learned all we truly needed to know about love, we experienced one of times most beguiling characteristics. We learned that all that had passed before had been of a nature we didn’t understand. We learned that the compiled joys and pains, fits and starts that we had so bemoaned were in fact time teaching us patience, perseverance and endurance. Time always knew that we would come to understand all it had done to us and understand our lives once we could see them in the light and perspective that time was so diligently showing us. Time was a patient teacher and we very impatient students.

Since our kids have come time has managed to speed up in the macro and slow down in the micro. Each day, hour and even minute can have the potential to be excruciatingly long. Thankfully for those moments which are of endless value to the kids who will never remember them and only be able to appreciate them when they endure them from our perspective, we are able to drop them and leave them where they lie until such a time when the waves of time moving in all directions so obscure them as to make those moments disappear into the ocean. Meanwhile in the macro time seems to be packing so much of itself into each and every day that we are finding ourselves wondering how so much of it has passed. Fretting away moments here and there with sorrow that we won’t have enough time to fully experience life.

Happy 2016!

I never thought much of the time when all my moments would be up. Until I had my kids the pile seemed so large as to be inexhaustible. Then the value of each and every one of those minutes became precious. The fact was I could see in the distance that my boys piles were considerably larger than mine. At least I hope that is what I see. Now I treasure my minutes, trying my hardest, though often failing, to turn as many of my minutes remaining into moments.

Moments are the only true legacy I can leave to them, leaving time from my life and adding time to theirs, as my parents have and do for me. I don’t know that I’d value any minutes if they were endless. So the smaller the pile gets the more invested I am in making as many of them a part of my legacy for my kids as I can. Because in the end time is not only endlessly morphing, it’s also the currency of love.

A Love Letter to My Home

2014-12-26 12.15.14 From the kitchen window in the house I grew up in you could see my lawn. It stretched out flat like a sheet of green for 70 feet to Clark St. It was a front lawn made to be the play place. When my parents moved there it was decided that the front yard would be the place to play. Their last home had a beautiful, big back yard, with swings and a garden and even a great tree for climbing. But without fail the boys always ended up in the front yard. It was where you wanted to be. You didn’t want to miss out on other kids coming and going. It was the late 70’s and that was what you did. You played with all the neighbor kids.

The lawn on Clark Street was lined by woods to the left and the driveway to the right. It’s a gravel driveway in my mind. Mostly chalky dust still painful to walk on but worn so thin by the constant comings and goings of so many. It’s probably been paved close to 20 years by now, but I’ve been gone for most of that.

It was the lawn where pictures were taken. In formal clothes or shoeless and ragged and smiling from joyful exertion and childhood exploring. It was the lawn we ignored from the porch while we ate breakfasts and read newspapers and chatted. The lawn we’d look out to on beautiful summer mornings, a thing not to be missed where I’m from, where snow is likely to cover the grass for 6 months solid, if not more, and laugh embarrassedly but lovingly as our parents would lie on the grass holding hands. Who knew what crazy things they were talking about, it wasn’t the point at the time. The point was how weird our amazing and beautiful parents were. I could write those conversations now and while I’d be hard pressed for accuracy, I suspect they would read those words and hear the conversations they had, enjoying the privacy of their tiny shangrila in the middle of so much youthful burbling and angst. They’d have been telling each other the funny thing one of the kids said that the other hadn’t heard. They’d be recounting the plans for the summer and making decisions while holding hands in the grass my mother liked to keep a little long and a little wild. They’d be living love the way you do when it surrounds you and consumes you and you find yourself awash in the logistics of simply maintaining such a healthy harvest. My father would have the chance to be funny. He was always funny. The quiet and opportunistic kind of funny. Observant and smart. The best funny, the kind that leads with the ear. But he’d get the chance to be funny for his lady. Funny in a way the kids wouldn’t get and she couldn’t resist. Before long, but not too quickly, life would remind them it’s time to get back at it and they would. But they’d be back.

Across the street, a slow, unlined simple village road, was the park. It was Corbett park but to us it was just the park. The park that watched us grow while it grew and changed over time. The park that had everything we ever needed, everything I ever needed. The park where we hid in order to explore being dangerous and being bad when we got older, where we could spend hours when we were little on now ancient seeming playground apparatus that our children will recoil at if they ever have kids of their own. Hardly believing that you could be spun so fast at 4 or 5 or 6 or older, depending on how big you were and how big the spinner was, so fast that you could hold on to the bars and with full extension spin endlessly. You’d fall and get up and try to swing so high that you’d be able to fully flip it. Never saw it, but I heard about it. We’d all heard about it.

When I got older the park became the basketball court for me. The parking lot for others. But during my prime people seemed to respect that the hoop on the Main Street side of the lot was mine and you parked on the far end. Or maybe it was just that way because for a good number of years I was out there, rain or shine, morning to night. When I was old enough I’d bring the car over and shoot in the lights with the radio on. It was my home court, always will be. I shoveled it to keep shooting. I would shoot in the middle of the night. Must have driven the neighbors crazy. All day every day. It was my first deep deep love. I always had basketball. Through ups and downs and joys and pains I always had that hoop.

When we wanted to test ourselves the park once again provided all we needed. At the back of the park, the horizon of that view from the small window at the kitchen sink, past the tennis courts was the pit. The pit was a giant hole dug at the back, between the park and the steep but small hill that led up to the towpath along the canal. It’s fair to say we grew up between the Erie Canal and Lake Ontario, but we could walk to the canal, which we could see from our porch, in perhaps as much as 3 minutes while the lake was some twenty miles behind our house, through at least two other municipalities. Still, they were parameters of sorts, at least in my mind. Nothing that pinned us in, just something that gave us our bearings.

The pit would grow green like all the other open area in the flatlands that is the Great Lakes area of the country. But to us boys it was dirt. One solid line of dirt maybe a foot wide that started at the patch of trees that signified the point where the canal slope, the park and the pit convened. You’d disappear behind on your BMX bike as you’d gathered all the speed your legs and the descent from the towpath would get you. When you emerged from that tiny patch of trees you’d make another, shallow descent into the pit where you’d churn your legs as hard as you could. Maybe not that first time, but even then you’d fake it. Then you’d hit the best playground BMX jump that suburbia ever created and you’d soar, sometimes as much as 20 feet when you got good at it. I swear. It was epic.

To this day my mother says she was at the window in the kitchen when we proved it was a bad idea to do this kind of thing on a motorcycle. I say we, but it was one guy. He made it, but he also crashed through a chainlink fence surrounding the tennis courts a good fifty feet from the lip of the jump. At least that’s how I remember it. That’s how we talk about it, which we do every couple of years now when it comes up.

At the end of the day you’d make your way home, walking up that long driveway and know how lucky you were. I can still sense it in every way just by closing my eyes. I can feel the gravel under my feet and smell the trees and the more subtle smell of long uncut grass. I can hear the birds making their nightly ascent from the woods we explored for thousand of hours. It’s going to be one of the places I sense most vividly on my death bed no matter how old I am or how much I’ve lost. I love that big blue house on the middle of our block in a town I’ll always love but I know I will see so rarely now that life is upon me and I’m busy trying to make a world half as magical for my kids to remember when they are out and finding what will be there home.

Leos.wedding.weekend It may no longer be our house. It was our house and that’s enough. Now there are other people making other memories and living the good life in the best place a kid could ever grow up. But in my heart and in my mind it will always be my house. The house I grew up in, the home I loved before all others. What a lucky kid I was.

We’ve Broken The Little One

Teddy isn’t Charlie. Not by a long shot.

Firstly, he’s second. Secondly, he’s last. Which is to say, he’s the baby. Charlie is a training model. We love him fiercely, but there’s no denying that his very station means he’s the one we make all the mistakes with. He is then tasked with training us on how it all should look. He teaches us that all these transitions, the ones he’s made at least, are not to be so fretted over. We stress with him because he is at the tip of the spear for us. His firsts are our firsts. While we are going through them we can see all the ways we’ve made it hard on ourselves and even hard on Charlie. Fortunately we also see how resilient Charlie is and we learn that our screw ups didn’t actually screw him up. Just screwed us up, really.

Teddy’s the baby. It’s different. We can feel wistfulness because we now know how fast it all goes. With the first you learn how long a day is, with the last you learn how short the years are. How much it’s all slipping away. How much we aren’t ready even if he is. I would never say we sabotage, but more often with Teddy our screw ups are acts of commission. We don’t ever sabotage, but we deliberately do some real real stupid s#it.

So now, for the past month, and for as long as I can see into the future, we’re going to pay the penance for our misdeeds. My penance takes place on the floor of the boys bedroom between roughly 8 o’clock each night and 11. We’ve broken our boy.

It started innocently enough. I’d hold him in the glider each night, he’d slowly drift off in my arms. It was really quite beautiful. Last words always the same.

‘Open your butt.’

I know. Seemed needlessly assaultive to me as well. Turned out it wasn’t what he meant. I don’t really know how he came to this phrasing. I mean he seems to know what a butt is. But he was really just asking me to arch my back for a second so he could slide his inside arm around me as he snuggled in.

But now it’s been weeks since I’ve heard those three, magic, disturbing words that always meant rest was just around the corner for everyone. Not anymore. The little monster, and this does coincide with him discovering his voice (which in many cases could be classified as a hate crime if toddlers were prosecutable and adults were an oppressed class) just lays there, eyes wide staring at the ceiling. For hours. I frankly don’t know how he does it. I mean, he’s exhausted. At least he should be

This is not going to happen tear free. Nope. I’ve begun to redraw lines and enforce borders to try to break him. Which in this case means I draw the line at holding him in the stupid hope that he’ll relearn to fall asleep in my arms for no more than an hour. Hour and a half tops. But that’s it! Then, off to bed for you mister!

Will I lie next to you and hold your hand? Of course, buddy. I’m not a monster. What? That keeps you awake too. Sheesh. Well, let me just get a pillow and puffy blanky and make it comfy. We both know I”m gonna be down here for a while. But last night it was 10:12! 10:12 and he was asleep. I could leave! Until I stood up to do so. Then he whimpered. Then he whined. Before I knew it he was standing, crying and through tears and heavy breath he said, ‘hug me up, daddy!’

So of course I hugged him up. I mean seriously, he was sitting there, all cheeks, tears, crankiness and lovely. What was I to do? Say no? That’s some first kid nonsense. Charlie could confirm this if he weren’t feet away sleeping through the whole thing. Besides upon ‘hugging him up’ he fell asleep almost instantly. And we get to add, ‘Hug me up’, to the book of standard toddler phrases! But still, 3 hours nightly is a lot.

If you’d given me infinite monkeys on infinite keyboards they would never have banged out the phrase. One I never could have conceived of. One once conceived I would never have thought I’d so long to hear. But for all that is right and decent, Teddy, will you please go back to falling gently to sleep in my arms and uttering with eyes half shut.. ‘Daddy. Open your butt.’

Handle with Care

I sometimes take a picture of you because you’re just so adorable and amazing and beautiful. And sometimes I catch a hint of fragility in what the camera catches. Other times I see huge heaping mounds of it. Giant reserves of delicate. Like you’re a crystal chandelier in the shape of my beautiful boy. And then, in my minds eye, I see all the thousand ways you’ll be disappointed by the realities of life you can’t even fathom at this point. Sculpted from this thing of beauty into another thing of beauty to be sure. But still, that journey is treacherous and full of potential. Potential harm. Potential fortune. Potential damage and grace.

Maybe it’s you. Maybe I’m not just a proud dad that’s just insanely obsessed with my kids. Maybe your specialness, your perfectness is not a function of my pride. Perhaps you are magical and I’m afraid of being at the helm and breaking you by some silly decision I make that seems necessary that I’ll grow to regret years from now.

I could stare at the pictures of you, the you you are now, on the precipice of independence and I dread the pain that growing up can be.

You’ll be fine. I know that. But you’ll be broken too. You have to be. Good, happy little boys can’t survive growing up. If they could they’d never grow up. Which sounds good until you realize that never growing up makes it hard to be a good man. That’s just the way it is. It’s okay. If you figure out what’s important from being a boy you can pull some of those parts out and take them with you. You may have to pack them away for a time, but they will be there when the time comes and you need them again.

A broken arm is one thing. I can handle that. Easy, actually. But the thought of you being teased or picked on or not knowing what to do in a school cafeteria and feeling sick and disoriented because you think everyone doesn’t like you, that thought ties me in knots. I got caught up in that process when I was a kid. I cried everyday for months when I was sent to school the first time. I was removed eventually and allowed to return the following year, but by then I knew to be cautious. I knew people didn’t like me. I knew they didn’t have to. What was wrong, though, was that I looked at the few that enjoyed making fun of me and thought ‘how can I do what they want me to do? How can I make them like me and stop picking on me?’. All along there was a world of kids who’d have been delighted to play and be my friends. But I just kept trying to impress the cool kids, even shunning kids I’d have gotten along with great who weren’t at the ‘right’ table.

Eventually I figured it out and sat safely where I didn’t want to be. It was mostly fine and it largely defined who I was to the world, or at least to my classmates who comprised the entirety of the world for me then. It took so long for me to be the me I liked and was comfortable being. I learned early on how to make them like me and I leaned on that all the way through school, which I hated because of how it all began. I spent so many years not liking me, internalizing the voices of all the wrong people.

All because I had some tough early days. The types of days grown ups like to say are ‘tough but you get through them’. Days we fool ourselves into thinking aren’t all that important because we were 5 and how much damage can really happen to a healthy and loved 5 year old. But we’re wrong. We can get hurt and scar up in tender places at very young ages. Even those of us that had enough of everything. I see your precious face and your beautiful and awesome expectation that nothing breaks and everyone will love you always and it scares the hell out of me. Because some day you’ll feel weird, alone and scared. And you won’t know why. And it will break you as it must. In the end I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about the ‘weird’ and the ‘scared’. You need to get through these things. We all do. But if we can help you with the alone part for as long as possible and stay present for the times you’ll need to explore being ‘away’ than maybe, just maybe, a small but invaluable piece of you, a piece of the you you are now might be able to make it through to the other side. If it does I hope that you are able to see all the things that I’m getting to see in you. If you do you’ll see what all that breaking was for. You’ll know once again what it feels like to be a fragile chandelier. To look at something you love so much that you can’t even imagine it ever not loving you back. The mere thought makes me break just a little.

A Circle Never Ending

My writing is strongly influenced by both of my parents. If I were to try to view my writing through my parents eyes, and if I were to remove the silly and the angry and the opinionated pieces and evaluate the heartfelt, meaningful writing I’ve done I believe each of my parents would see heavy influences from the other. This reflects an instinct to generosity and humility combined with a true admiration and fascination with each other that defines them as far as I can see. My father would point to the emotional presence and depth of humanity in them and throw credit to my mother. and my mother would point to the thoughtfulness and the ability to design the contours of my tales to emphasize a perspective, to land on that perspective in a more impactful way and credit my father. I would say it’s the only way I can be having been born of these two. And having been so makes me appreciate greatly that which is beyond ones control. The luck, the accident of birth and whom it is we are made of.

Developing Dad was consciously conceived of as a place to record this whole experience. A place set aside to dwell on what it is and who we are as we become the family we will have been. I hoped in inception that it would be a place we can come to as we get further and further away from this time of transformation and visit the selves we were. It is designed as thoughtful nostalgia and on that front I think I’m reaching my aim. Maybe not exactly as I conceived of it originally, but honestly and presently. What I didn’t think of initially was the unexpected audience I would have who would mean so much to me.

I have many moods and states of being and over time they are all on display here. Sometimes I feel like being funny. Turns out wanting to be funny is much more in line with angry than I’d ever imagined, but the more I write the more I learn about me. Other times I want to be clever or even intellectual. I’m a bit defensive about being smart. I don’t feel like I am, but I see it in the pieces I go back to. I’m not entirely sure of my intelligence. You can tell by how incredibly confident of it that I am. I mean, I never question my intelligence. There’s a reason for that.

Then there’s the times I’m naked. When I shed my many cloaks and reveal the thoughts and feelings I have that are genuine. The part of me that’s with me in each second. The ugly and the beautiful and the scared and the strong and the weak. Me. It turns out that I’m most excited to share this with my parents. It took having kids to understand what my parents were. I suppose I’ve had an ongoing relationship with ‘who’ they were, one that persists to this day and I suspect will live in me long after I’ve said my goodbye’s to them. The relationship I have with my parents lives within me. It’s too much to think of the days ahead when I won’t be able to hug and hold them, but these days are inevitable. But my ongoing relationship with my mom and dad is so ingrained within me that it will never disappear as long as I’m here. It will be small solace I’m sure, but true nonetheless. The great joy I feel that they have read my most intimate thoughts and seen vulnerabilities that they might never have been able to hold and reassure is amongst the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. I’m so heartened to know they’ve taken the time to know me in ways that frighten me to be known. To know that they are ever more loving and tender despite different outlooks or views on life. To know in my bones that they love me, the real me, the me I get to be here and can’t always present to the world, is a gift I will never take for granted.

We are all adrift in a sea of life, each of us can look to either direction and see the immutable and inevitable parameters of our existence. From the middle of what is a standard scale life, one not guaranteed for another second, but expected to last about as long as it already has, I find times when new life is the prevailing current. Other times the far shore leading to lands unknown, unexplored where we, if we are lucky, drift off to at the end of a long and adventurous journey is the overwhelming reality. Overwhelming because goodbyes and endings are far more painful then beginnings and hellos. More overwhelming because they compel us to make meaning. At first the task is to make meaning from the end itself. But ultimately we discover that despite the endings enormity and sadness, the meaning doesn’t live there. We all come to understand that while it is now in the past, the meaning of the tales we finish, the ones we see through the finish line are within us. Of us. In a sense this is the meaning of eternal life. All of it, bestowed upon me is the cumulative love and life of all those that have come before me. And now I get to garnish this feast of meaningfulness and hand it down to others who will pass it on. Whether to their own offspring or to the love of life that inspires those that simply see them, love them, admire them and are loved by them. It’s a circle never ending.

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