Category: Parenting

Bidet to Day Marriage

There is nothing more exposed in me by our marriage than my pridefulness stubbornness vanity  my unending need to be right. This was a surprise to me. Before marriage I could delude myself into thinking myself nearly always validated. If not by actual confirmation of my rightness than by a complete and utter lack of having to own my wrongs. I could always just take my conviction with me, fully intact and unharmed by anything approaching a fair adjudication. This is the great privilege of being single; a deep and unloveable self righteousness that I miss. Sincerely. That’s the good shit right there. But marriage, with all its pleasures, brings with it a heavy dose of reality. Which in my case reveals the aforementioned, strickened attributes. Comeuppance for short.
Still, sometimes, backstage, my old self comes out. Unafraid of conflict and unmoved by evidence and I will stand my ground no matter how wrong I am. I should note that in what is to follow I’m not even certain I was wrong. She very well could have been. Most likely it wasn’t even a disagreement based on disagreement. 

Marriage sometimes requires subtle parries around simply who we are. We were likely just in need of some generalized disagreeableness. It’s okay. It might sound awful to one considering marriage. That’s okay. I’d have spent a good deal of time judging that when I was not married too. For sport I now realize. But at the time it was serious and important. Just know that your feelings are more important and I’m considering your reasoned scorn and doing some good hard thinking about myself, buttercup. And to my married friends, I think you know what I mean. Some good old fashioned, no blood, no foul, standard issue, Sunday morning silent sneering. It passes with some minor pointed statements, some purposeful planned ignoring and a good 15 minutes of alone time, usually under the guise of a trip to the bathroom on one or the others part. In this instance it was me who scrammed.

The last angry thought I had that particular Sunday morning was likely some 10-15 minutes later. I sat there largely cooled off before thinking, ‘Why the hell don’t we always have a spare roll on the back of the GD toilet like every other f****n’ bathroom in all of suburbia!’ Yes. There I sat, praying there was a hidden bidet we’d never noticed at purchase. This would be the PERFECT time to test out a bidet. I mean, I’ve never tried one, but god, it sounds luxurious. Besides, when better to take that private leap than when you are in desperate need of assistance but your personal shortcomings as an actualized person keep you from doing the only logical, only sanitary thing and calling down, in the age old tradition, and asking your spouse to come up and get you some TP. Well, needless to say I wasn’t doing that. I considered calling the kids, but that was too suspicious. Besides, they would sell me out somehow faster than I’d be caught out if I did call her for the help. 

Nope. I ‘prideful manned’ it out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, all the way to the linen closet and duck walked all the way back to my proper perch. It was the act of a desperate man. Immediately upon my return I realized how very, very stupid I am. It made me laugh. Than I meme’d it. Because I’m 44 and desperate for likes and smiley faces. This further de-escalated me and like that the disagreeableness was over. I came down, after washing my hands thoroughly of course, showed my wife and we were once again right back in to the lifelong laugh we are sharing. No worse and probably a little better for having asserted a little thoughtless ego preservation. 

  

Parenthood Changes

Life has me ponderous at a time when there is precious little time to do anything but ride the current. 

All of us are so full every day. Full of stuff. Stuff that needs to be done, eaten, taken, dropped off, completed, returned, thrown out, retrieved, fixed, cleaned, washed, folded, put away, picked up and put to bed. We are doing all the things. At least all the things we know to do. All we can do. All we can find time to do. 

I miss the focus having tiny kids gave me. It is a very centering thing, having kids. At least at first. The world gets so small for you that it’s hard not to be centered. Your world collapses to your living space and a small collection of points. Your workplace. The ridiculously expensive but super convenient grocery store you only go to if you HAVE TO, which is every other day, and the other three stores you trek to on the weekend because one has the cheap milk, the other has the reasonable produce and the other because there’s always a sale on yogurt drops or pouches of the puréed carrots the kid decided was the only food worthy of him some time ago. The pizza shop. The gas station. And home. The living room kitchen bathroom bedroom which has morphed into one space, each formerly distinct zone possessing all the traits of all the rest. It’s not somewhere I can say I want to ever go back to, that crazy, sleep deprived, questionable hygiene and nutrition time when emotions were spattered about like the half eaten cheese sticks we no longer ‘find’ all over the place. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. I found a new me there. The new me.

Now that new me is back at it, trying hard to make it work. Don’t mistake me, I can barely remember and hardly recognize the me that lived before becoming dad, but I’m not so insistently and consistently engaged in the constant crisis and joy of newborn parenthood like I was back then. 

Tonight was a nice night. We watched a short video after showers and pajamas. It was as far as I can tell a couple of young or not so young men talking to one another as they tried to raise dragons in Minecraft. The me before having a 5 and a 7 year old wouldn’t have uttered, let alone understood such a sentence before, but I’m getting it now. 

  Today was the first day that T went to school after his very best friend for the past 3 years up and left to Germany. He’s cool with it, me and his mother, not so much. I drove him to school this morning. It’s a funny life we’ve made our way to. I work about a 2-3 minute drive from our home, but I drive him a half hour away and have to leave early to be to work on time. Normally mom will drive, but a time or two a week it’s me. He is the king of the place by now. Super sweet and happy but a bit of a celebrity as well. At least all the love that’s in the eyes of his former teachers (well, all but one, but there’s always one) makes him seem like one as he leads me down the hall, not getting two feet into the building before tossing off his coat, ready to get at it. He loves his dance class and he is going to be in the recital this spring. We are all super looking forward to it. 

Momma took the big boy out to his swim lesson today which is at the same place as T goes to school. It runs just before T is to be picked up, so I could stay at work a few minutes late. Charlie is becoming a real swimmer. He is the only one in his class that swims the deep end with no assistance. 

 It was my turn to be on bed duty. We still lay with them. Judge if you like. That’s your business. It’s how we do it. I read a good long chapter book to the younger one while Charlie started plowing through library books. He even kept reading past lights out by the combination of dim lighting of a nightlight and the green stars that are projected from Winney’s pot of honey that rests on the dresser. He just loves reading, loves books. He’ll take them to bed with him he loves them so much. I let it go for some time. But eventually I told him it was time to go to sleep. It was a really good bedtime. We’re busy and scattered but we’re doing our best. It’s not intense and it is. Its just a lot. It’s like its all of life, every aspect of it, coming at us all the time. I can get very down thinking about all that isn’t happening, all the writing I’m not doing, all the fun we could be having. But what’s the point. This is life and we’re doing things as best we can, getting better every day. 

Well most days anyway.

Thanksgivings

I’ve come full circle on sentimentality. It’s not that to some degree I haven’t always had the predisposition, I have, it’s just that it’s become something I embrace, even seek out now that I’ve got some road behind me.

Life is moving as fast as it ever has. Faster in many ways. But for some reason I’m less and less moved by it. I’m underwhelmed by momentous change. I’m not as easily energized by my own morphing and evolutions. I’m simply living it. I’m running full speed to keep up and I’m barely processing it’s going so fast. Who can make sense of this stage with the solid oak I grew from growing ever wiser and the seeds I’ve planted requiring constant tending. Not to mention the intentions I had for myself before the realities I never considered became the droning and pressing necessity of each day as I try to make a life I’ll be proud of.

I’m tired and busy and energetic and overwhelmed at all times. I’m looking at a life that is zooming past and trying to find any and all rest stops and exits that look like I can afford to take them. I’m trying to get as much of this finite life as I am able and it feels impossible to catch up to it.

So I find myself on days like today, Thanksgiving 2017, in a sentimental place where I can experience the benefits of compounding interest as I feel the past in the present. It’s easy to do as Thanksgiving has been a huge part of the magic of life for me.

The early ones were at home and had the tables, all that we could move, fold, setup and tear down, stretching against the grain and crossing transoms to stretch far enough to fit all the family who could be there. I was a kids table holdout who ventured rarely and always regretfully to the grown up table at least once before I was ready. As a result I was always more than happy to give up my seat with the big people to spend another year at the fun table. The food was warm, the air was steamy, small rooms filled with big people and warmed by a kitchen that never stopped.

Later, when we were a tad older, but still young it became Florida! We went every year to visit our grandparents in Vero Beach. It was there my dad pointed out the connection that it might not be pure coincidence that Nana and Papa moved to where his beloved (Brooklyn) Dodgers had there spring training facilities. There I saw the shuttle from the driveway and looked up with my dad who marvelled that his dad, staying warm on the enclosed deck had been around when horse drawn carriages and Model T’s were filling the streets and now we were here in his driveway watching the space shuttle. It was there where we snowy natives spent hours learning how to body surf and seeing my dad in shorts, something rarely seen, but always when there was an ocean to swim in. He liked to bob in the waves, floating with his toes popping out of the water, riding the tide in peace. It was there that I saw the dance between my mom and her husbands wonderful, but decidedly commanding mother play out with a remarkable amount of good humor, understanding and grace on all sides. It was there where the adults I’d know later were the kids I remember now. When we see each other I like to think they see that young vibrant me as well. Time has taken its toll and it always wins, but its nice to know their are cousins who’ve seen you all the way through and know you. The real you. And it was their that I learned I may be the funniest in a room now and again and that may be a very useful thing, but I should never forget that theres a family tree of funny that has deep roots and long and surprising branches. I come from funny stock. Thanksgivings with the Wershing/Medler’s were the funniest.

College came and the family tradition couldn’t last forever. We quickly redeployed and had the usual guests and local family holidays that are the norm. Soon I took to heading up to the mountains where some friends had established roots. Saranac Lake and environs. It might have been just three or four times, but those Thanksgivings were amazing. They were like a vast, tribal, artisanal, low culture-high culture blend you can really only achieve in your twenties. Full capacity, zero responsibility, unmatchable sociability and comraderie and a determination to be adult. To this day, no offense to anyone else ever those meals were the most succulent and delicious I’ve ever had. It was a 3 day party and there were late night shenanigans, beer fridges and high times indeed. It was a joy of being alive kind of feeling that I’ll always love.

Then we had the family gathering at my brother’s house in Poughkeepsie. It was like a perfect little blessing that for those years, with me in the city and my sister in the area as well. We would inevitably show up the night before, until there were kids. Mom and dad would show up at night, mom having cooked a meal for twenty and packed it all in the trunk and we would unload into the just gorgeous home he was always so generous with. We would each offer dish and be welcomed to bring it and make it. My mother always liked us to be involved, but it was her production for sure and it was perfect. Food on the piano for serving, table set to Rockwell like perfection and new family as funny as the rest in on the conversations and bringing new humosrs and smiles to our faces. I don’t know what was said, I may have even had a part in the sequence leading to the laughter, but a memory that sticks out for me is my mom removing her glasses and wiping tears, in full all out laughter, only at catch her breath to say, ‘I haven’t laughed this hard since last night.’, only to kick off another round of table wide guffaws. We were all a little grayer at these gatherings, but we still through the football around and stayed up late enough for our turkey sandwiches and movies. Resisting every urge we might feel to get going home if that was in our plans. This was our first real thanksgiving after the kids. The one where we could bring a baby and begin our families traditions in earnest.

Circumstance changed and kids continued to grow and we began to have our traditional Turkey days at Karen’s parents house. It was such a treat. They live on beautiful land outside Saratoga county. Youhonestly couldn’t paint a more beautiful picture of holiday land. The house was always full of all our favorite treats and every meal was a chance to sit and visit between indoor and outdoor adventures in a landscape carved carefully by nature and man over decades of tending and refining. There were sled rides in snow, treasure hunts, long adventures in the basement workshop and treats to fill the hearts of toddlers and middle aged men. These were magical visits that always started with Grandma and Koba greeting us at the car, as excited to see us as we were to be there. Travel is hard at that early stage, but they always understood and went so far out of their way to make sure the memories were of the wonderous variety.

Now, today, the tradition turned again as we went to a new gathering place in Maplewood. We’ve been passive observers of Karen’s sister and brother in law as they’ve put in countless hours making a warm and welcoming home, a dream home really since moving in years ago. Now once again the tables were laid out against the grain, traveling through the home from back to front, seating and feeding generations of family with more than a delicious meal. It was a magical day. The kids sat at the big table and did mostly great, when they weren’t crawling underneath. Hectic moments when all arrived and too many hands went on instinct to the kitchen, chaos slowly turning to perfection as the food was pulled together by my brother in law, the magician, casual conversations happening everywhere you looked between people who loved being with each other and can so rarely be due to the simple and never ending logistics of life. Good laughs and good food, great stories and long and luxuriant pickingat desserts that fed and fueled the days journey into night. Hugs and goodbyes and smiles and warmth. The tradition is beginning for these guys, the little ones. For me it’s settling into the pace where, seeing it starting again for the kids and watching it evolve once more for all of us grown ups, I can finally catch up to the sentiment. I can feel the nostalgia and the beauty of it all in real time.

It all leaves me so grateful to be sharing this journey with these fellow travelers, every one of them from each iteration.

I Hope You Know… 

I sure do spend a lot of time yelling. I spend a lot of time hugging and reading and cooking and cleaning. I spend a good amount of time playing, though not as much as I should. I spend a lot of time laughing and talking and a lot of time listening. But the yelling. 

It’s losing it’s effectiveness. When I do it in response to inappropriately timed or overly exciteable silliness, you have taken to smirking. I hate it, but sometimes at that point I get super serious and scary. It’s not real scary. At least that’s what I tell myself. I mean, I know for a fact I’d never ever hurt you. But that’s a justification. A true enough one, but one that intentionally uses a very narrow definition of the word, ‘hurt’. 

You’re our first ever 6 year old. I worry every day about what I’m getting wrong. I worry about how I’m going to handle all that I’ve yet to see. What is it gonna be like when you are 7 or 12 or 17. How am I going to protect you from a world you don’t fear enough and I fear too much. What kind of protecting is enough. What kind is too much. What does that look like. I don’t know. You know even less. You see, we’re breaking new ground, in some ways, with every new step you take. I want you to know, I’m scared too. 

I don’t yell as much as I used to. You’ve become a remarkably good little boy and a quite unique and kind and sensitive big boy. But it still happens, more than it should. 

On the flip side I don’t really share with you all that you mean to me. I’m so thankful to know you. As I’ve told you before, you are the person, the only one who will ever live, who made me a dad. Your dad. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me and I will never, could never thank you enough. I am so incredibly proud of you. When I was your age I was on my second year of kindergarten. It was an advanced kindergarten that required two years due to the incredibly high IQ’s of the special people selected for it. Okay, that’s not true. When I was first in kindergarten I cried all day every day for months. I was not 5 until Thanksgiving time and i wasn’t ready. I don’t fully believe that even now. To some degree it just felt like failure to me. Failure by me. It was, technically speaking. I’ve actually spent a lot of my life getting over that. I never recovered in relation to school. 

When you so bravely took on the challenge I died a little. I have always despised those parents who lived vicariously through their kids, but apparently I couldn’t avoid it. I said I was scared for you. I was. But I was scared because of me. You were a rock star. A rock star is what we called kids who opened toys on youtube when we were little. Except they weren’t kids and they were in bands. Still, think Evan. You were all kinds of EvantubeHD about the whole thing. 

You are so honest about your feelings and aware of them. You are brave. I struggle with that now. But you are the most sincere and loving hugger of goodbye’s I’ve ever seen. You’ll get silly with your brother when we are leaving, but when Mommy or I are heading out you are so so insistent on making sure you wish us a good day and hug us as many times as you can. We’ve trained some of that out of you by accident, but there’s some that lives in you that we’ll never be able to get to in order to save a few minutes in the morning. Evidence that sometimes wisdom is inate and not a thing that requires age and experience. 

I’m so proud of how thoughtful you are. How much you worry about others. How diligently you go about showing kindness to others. How you try to be creative about making others feel happier. You talk about it. You ask questions about it. You show up, day after day, brave, loving, kind and determined to make others feel how much you love them. 

I hope you know how much I love you. Because sometimes I yell. Sometimes I must look like a truly crazy person. Sometimes I’m imperfect and sometimes I’m scared and I’ll fail a lot. Thankfully I have time. But the years slip by fast and I’d be crushed if you didn’t know how proud I am of you. How much I love you. 

One Summer and Water Gun Dolphins

One particular summer arrival sticks out. We were in the Carolin Drive house so I couldn’t have been more than five. It was summer so I was definitely four. I could have been three, I suppose, but it would be odd to remember it at all. It was sunny and to my memory we were waiting for my dad to get home. Derrell would be with him. My memory always has it as after work for my dad but it could easily have been Saturday morning. Who’s to say. So it was a terrible realization that we were seeing what we were seeing. No one batted an eye that dad parked in the street. This was suburbia and we had a perfectly good and perfectly empty driveway. Regardless, the trauma blocked this oddity from notice. You see, there he was, dad, just strolling across the lawn practically overflowing with aloofness as we all thought how terrible it was. Derrell would be wandering the airport all alone! Looking for Dad! How could he have forgotten! It’s all the bigger boys talked about for days!

Of course, D was in the back seat, lying on the bench, cool as a fan. Dad and D, well, they got us good.

This would have been in the heart of the years when D spent summers with us as a kid. He’d get on a plane, or maybe a bus, I have no idea, somewhere in New York City. He lived in the South Bronx, but to us Western New Yorker’s, far more familiar with Toronto than NYC, it was a behemoth not at all disassembled to the boroughs. D was from New York City.

I think I like best the thought of my dad and Derrell, perhaps 12 years old at the time, rolling down the road and hatching this plan. Derrell was already a skilled clinician of holding a room with funny. My dad was his perfect comedy partner, a classic straight man. Dry humor and perfect for the role he was cast in in this sketch. Everything is in that conversation that got them there. It’s the late 70’s so they didn’t pull over. There were no seat belts restricting movement and I’m sure D popped over the passenger seat to the back bench to test it as a hiding spot while they soared out 531 to Union in Spencerport. It would be a long time until it extended all the way to Brockport. Just a skinny, bearded, cool Dad looking like a hipster Abe Lincoln and the lean, long limbed black kid with fabulous and fabulously big and round specs plotting a prank on the way home.

img_4883Derrell was almost certainly a curiosity the first time he arrived on Carolin. I mean, how could he avoid being one. But I am equally certain that would have lasted all of 2 mins. He is, was and will forever be touched with an undeniable charisma that shrinks distance, bridges difference and effortly seizes the attention of those in his light. I’m sure that by his first morning waking up and pouring sugar on his cereal he was the brother we’ve all known him as, as I’ve only known him as.

‘That’s not a water gun.’ D said.

‘Yeah it is. Watch.’ And if the 40 or so years between now and then have been in anyway instructive as to who would respond by shooting a stream of water in his face, running away and laughing, it was my older brother Mike. It’s a tiny moment, so neither would remember it. But I do. I don’t know why what sticks out sticks out. When you’re a kid you notice at weird times and implant memories for no reason at all. I remember this tiny exchange followed by screaming (the fun kind), chasing, laughing, a sprinkler.

‘It’s a dolphin. It can’t be a water gun if it’s a dolphin.’

 We had water ‘guns’ shaped like sea creatures and in hindsight I’m glad we did. A dolphin spitting at you is funny, the bazooka like shooters that mimicked real guns from my youth, they were not as fun. At the time I wanted the water gun. The real one.

It was a disappointment. Like the length of wear for my sneakers or the irregular stamps on the tags of the Levi’s we got at Marshall’s. Silly, stupid kid insecurities that are now mildly amusing memories of things I wish I hadn’t been so hard on my parents about. Like when they got me the one speaker ‘box’ because the salesman explained it was higher quality than the two speaker cool ‘box’ I really wanted. 12 year old boys can be hard to please.

But other things were not done for necessity or by simple misunderstanding. Like the assorted wildlife shaped squirter’s whose triggers we pulled and had just as much fun as any of the kids playing with handgun looking cousins of our spitting animals. It was subtly communicated, explained when asked and a lesson I took.

D took to the dolphin. In the end, chasing one another with squirting sea life was just as fun.

The Madness of Prince Teddy

‘Ew, no Charlie! Wahhhhhh!’

The above is shouted. Sharply and insistently. It is my four year old son’s response to his brother eating yogurt. Or  an apple. Or drinking milk. Teddy is not one for subtleties. He cares not for the feelings of those who offend his olfactory senses and he will not be dissuaded from his opinion that the vileness of these things are rightly and roundly rebuked. No sir, he will simply prefer to spoon his ketchup into his mouth in a different room, thankyouverymuch.

Okay. He’s 4, it’s not like he’s great at thinking of others feelings, but you’d think there’d be some recognition that registering his disgust so broadly, and by that I mean in the ‘broad comedy of Jerry Lewis’ (May he RIP) sense of the word, might be hurtful. But no.

Just today we were in the car and he starts.

‘Drink it! Charlie, Drink it.’ The first sentence was shouted. This is white noise to all of us by now. It is ignored and as much registered as a first, ‘morning’ one says prior to coffee, still half asleep. But the second was screeched in the manner of the classic Hollywood scream queens. This is by no means reason for alarm though it does wake the rest of us up.

‘What?! What is happening! Why are you screaming! Is everyone okay! WHAT’S WRONG!!’ This situation clearly needs a bumbling, distracted, middle aged man to thunder in with volume and stress. It’s just the recipe to really get everyone calm quickly and I’m just the man to do it.

‘Charlie won’t drink his drink.’ Teddy says.

‘Teddy, that’s too far. You are not in control of when Charlie drinks his drink. Come on, buddy?’

Appeals to reason, I should know by now, are only passingly accepted and ONLY when they suit his need for utter and total control of all that he purveys. This statement, I should note, could easily be applied to myself or T so, you know, art is in the eye of the beholder, so whichever you prefer.

‘Charlie’s drink is empty.’ Says Developing Mom (a name I hasten to add is only employed in the most sophomoric of tongue in cheek fashions as she is a fully formed and wonderful mom) in a manner that is dismissing the dramatic nature of the 4 year olds clearly false claim, for which he has clearly been busted for his over dramatic ways. This is done so nonchalantly as it is de rigueur by now.

‘No!’ screams T, ‘The drink in his mouth!’

Come to think of it, Charlie has been suspiciously quiet. Good for him, don’t let him take you down, dude.

‘Teddy. He can swallow whenever he wants. You don’t get to control everything. But I will let you know something. The mare you ask and cry the less likely he is to swallow it. Just be quiet for a minute and I’m sure he’ll swallow it down. Besides Chocolate milk slowly turns into rotten chocolate milk if it stays in your mouth too long. Surely he knows that.’ Okay, I’m making up the last bit, about the rotting in your mouth. But I wish I said it.

‘Teddy, it’s gone now.’ said Charlie, finally entering the script from his pivotal though silent role as unwitting, though I suspect fully witting, agitant.

And like that we’re off, to our next dramatic flourish which is surely no more than a mile or two down the road. Teddy is like me in many ways. One is that he can be ‘over peopled’. Today we were at the Adventure Aquarium, one of his favorite places on earth. He loved it and behaved. He was all you could ever want from an excited and engaged four year old. His big brother was at his best as well. But, you know, now back in the car, away from the maddening crowd, he had to let some of that stress out. It was a huge relief to be home after periodic meltdowns all the way home. We said no to screens all the way home as well, so it was a bit.

But it was good to be home. Everyone reverting to their creature comforts. I with my whiskey (okay, that’s only happening now as I write in a quiet house at 1:14 in the morning), Teddy with his cheese stick to wash down his pizza (I can’t wait until I offer a menu item with mozzarella and he insists he hates the stuff) and Charlie with his apple and a yogurt. Yep. I was over done and I brought out two parts of T’s unholy trinity just like that and put it down right there, right where he could smell it (his claim to how it offends) and see it (the obvious actual trigger to his claims of fear and loathing).

I braced myself. But nothing came.

‘I eat apples like that at school.’ He said. School is daycare.

‘What?’ I said, incredulous.

‘I Like them at school.’ He said. Just like that. No biggie.

‘He said he likes yogurt there, too.’ Said Charlie.

When the hell were you gonna tell me! I didn’t say it, but come on!

‘Did you hear this, honey? Teddy eats apples at school. He likes them!’ I said as Developed Mom walked by.

‘I know.’ She said.

‘Did you know he likes YOGURT there too!’ Come on, share some outrage at this travesty I screamed with my eyes.

‘No, I know. He drinks milk there, too.’

What the hell.

Teddy’s Cheeks

Perhaps its just my nature to be wistful. That very well could be it. I could easily make the argument that wistfulness is my strongest suit as a writer. But wistful for me these days is honest. Because while parenthood is very very good at making you spend a good deal of your day living in the moment, it is also a role that is forever slipping through your fingers. 

There’s a lot that surprises you that first second. I became a dad in an instant. One second I’m a husband and about to be dad and the next I’m a dad. Full blown, card carrying dad. The card in this case was a Visa card and not some license to be a dad, though were there one my merely being a dad would not entitle me to the card. Nope. That comes later. I’m certified now, but still a newb. Becoming a dad is merely the starters pistol in your sprint to learn to be a dad. 

What I learned first, after the new brand of love, the overarching, in your bones kind of love that you learn in that first instant, what I learned was that life is fragile and mine will end. Hopefully some day decades and decades down the road when the loss will be real for my kids, but when it will be manageable. Still, this little boy had a story and it was starting right there, smack in the middle of the story I’d been only just getting accustomed to sharing with his mom. If everything goes right, if it goes as right as it can go I’ll get a few decades to overlap, 30 or 40 or 50 years to be in his story. Then, inevitably, I’d be leaving. Wrapping up my tale with tentacles lingering on the fringes of the stories they will be living. It’s the best outcome one can hope for and it is unavoidably imbued with melancholy. Sad is the wrong word. Melancholic. A sustained low level presence of unavoidable sorrow, that recedes to the background when joy is present and it is so so present so much, along with exhaustion and frustration and confusion and exhaustion. Did I say exhaustion twice? I did? Well, clearly I’m not as tired as I was a few years back. Then the entire list would have consisted of exhaustion and the list would hav been 7-12 items long. All of them exhaustion. 

My first son made me a dad. He came into the world and boom, I’m a dad. He cried, I messed up, I learned my error and I became more of a dad. This is a seemingly infinite loop. I mess up, I recognize it by something going wrong with him, I see that I messed up and I try something new and it gets a little better  and we do that all day every day forever. Which is true, but not true. It’s not forever. Time is very viscous and slides faster than I can keep up. You do eventually give the swing to sisters and brothers who will need it. You throw out the car seat that is beyond beaten and smelly and you recycle the last bottle you’ll ever have. Things disappear into the far back memories and then they go from there. Some of them go invisibly and without regret or a second thought. I’ll never change my kids disaster diaper ever again. The kind where you resort to cutting the clothing off to save everyone the terror of it coming off any other way. That piece of history is happily behind me, though I actually think I appreciated it for what it was at the time. Your mind and memory play little tricks like that. I know better. Just happy that’s in the past. Other things, well, I can’t let go of so cavalierly. Like Teddy’s cheeks. 

Teddy’s cheeks aren’t going anywhere. I trust he’ll have them for the rest of my story. But they are changing. He has epic cheeks. Anyone and everyone who has known him will tell you. They are squat and round and adorable. They are a feast for the eyes and they are so connected to the little misspeakings of an adorable toddler with the childlike voice that I’ll never fully have anymore. He is our last and when those cheeks go, they’re gone. Forever. And this time forever means forever. 

My Teddy’s cheeks won’t come back. So I am wistful. Nostalgic. Sentimental in the extreme because my life, my consciousness has a timeline and the horizon, though distant, is firmly in view and when I lose Teddy’s cheeks that horizon will draw ever so slightly nearer.  

 

Finding My Center

What is passing for ‘what I know’ today is that it’s pretty easy for small, practically imperceptible doubts that reside in the far reaches of my memory and dark corners of my conscience, upon finding one another, to amplify their small voices to such a degree that they can drown out all that confidence and self assuredness I’ve been gathering over the years. Doubt gathers in the dark and waits. It plans and attacks under the cover of propulsion, hidden by my aloof optimism and neverending schedule. But it can pounce.

There’s nothing in particular to note. Nothing I’ll signify here, and what my specific doubts are misses the point. Which for me is that more than anything I’m so grateful to my kids because they center me like nothing else. Like I guess my parents did when I was 5. In a way that is so massive and consequential in my life it’s a very good thing that they don’t have any clue that they carry this weight for me. They carry in them the ability for me to continue, never folding and never quitting. They are inspiration and reward. They are the end all and be all for me in a way no other people on earth could ever be. When they go to therapy to deal with the issues I’ll surely give them it will be something I hope they will be  able to take into consideration, how direly important they were and are and will always be to me. 

Really, I get a ton wrong. I yell like an angry, over the line drill seargent and immediately return to calm and measured. It’s effective and terrifying and surely I’m doing it wrong. Like the thousand other things I’m doing wrong. But they forgive and love me and let me stay here, in the middle of their universe. They give me everything by simply orbiting me. I won’t always be the sun and when it fades it will be my watching them venture off orbit that will center and sooth me. I don’t think I deserve it frankly, but it will happen that way and I’m forever greateful for it. 

I don’t know that I’ll be writing about them so much going forward. They are after all growing up  and the last thing I’d want is to hurt them in some inadvertent way. I’m not saying it won’t happen, but I’m likely to continue to shift the focus more to me and the forever becoming part of fatherhood that keeps me growing and moving forward. Still, I’ll be watching them and loving them every stop of the way. Worry is just starting to creep in. That’s a lie. Anyone who’s read my work knows I’m a worrier. But the fears of things that are unknown are becoming more serious. Why shouldn’t they be more serious. After all, the older they get the more tools they have. I will continue to write about my love for them. 

Amongst my greatest fears, and this likely says far more about me than it could possibly say about them, is that they will grow up and wonder if I loved them. If I thought of each one of them as individuals and was enamored and enthralled with them in the way that I should be. So I’ll tell them, in awkward and uncomfortable moments. I’ll relish the squirming of their tightly wound teen psyche’s recoiling from the embarrassing dad laying the ‘I love you’s’ on thick and frequently. At drop offs and pick ups and in front of friends. I’ll put it here so they’ll know I thought it before they ever knew it was a thing they’d wonder. But I’ll refrain from sharing them too much with the world. It is called Developing Dad, after all. It’s clearly a place where I should be sharing too much of me with the world. 

I wonder sometimes whether the dark visions that are making their way into my brain are a result of my aging. Am I’m simply going down the path I’ve so long been highlighting in my mind of old men who have become blind to the light, unable to train their focus away from the subtle dying of the light in order to see the abundance of good so clearly evident in the world. Am i simply a stereotype, a grumpy old man who sees a world growing ever more harsh and unforgiving. A world that doesn’t properly value love, empathy, responsibility or decency. A world devolving. It’s a world that’s easy to see these days, be it because I’m aging and falling in the trap I’ve so long focused on avoiding or because of a world that isn’t living up to the promises I thought it had made. Regardless, when I see my kids, when I’m with them or thinking of them I’m instantly back. Purpose returns. Love returns. Undeniable, unavoidable empathy and faith. It’s all in them. And to think, they think I’m the one they need. They couldn’t have it more wrong. 

Taken for Granted

More than anything in the world I’m grateful that we will have pizza this week. And vegetables. Fresh and frozen, canned. Whatever. I’m grateful that we know with near certainty that we won’t spend a minute thinking about whether or not we can eat.

I don’t always appreciate how safe I am. I lie in the dark and wonder if I left a lock unturned. I wonder if that was someone downstairs. I think about what is nearby that i could use to club a potential burglar or worse. Then I wait and wait and I forget about it and I go back to distracting myself with pictures of family and tales of struggle and memes that make me laugh. I watch highlights and listen to comedians interview each other on podcasts that I hear on my phone which can access, essentially, all human knowledge. I do all of it knowing I am not likely to have war greet me at the door. My children are not likely to learn the worst of life until they are ‘ready’ and then they will do so through books and movies and lessons and not life. I know the further out I project the less sure I can be of these things, but I’m confident.

I see pictures of children who are being greeted by a world that is roiling with chaos and violence the likes of which I can’t even truly imagine without a sheen of Hollywood staging and two dimensional falsehoods that are stored in my brain as images of war. Then a picture will turn up in the news of a child, a toddler, old enough to process but not enough to understand, if there is such an age, why the men are killing everyone, why these bombs are coming for them and I fall to pieces. I question everything. I wonder why I’m not doing more.

I didn’t know the gut punch of these pictures, these images until I had my boys. Until I had the identity of a parent. I could Identify tragedy, yes, but I feel it so very viscerally now. I see the confusion and fear and courage and bravery on the faces of children enduring war and I shutter at what they know. No 4 or 5 year old should know what these children know. I fall to pieces.

I don’t appreciate how good I have it and I never will. But at times it becomes starkly real when I see the world I’m protected from. The world I continue to place safely out of view. One I care about, want to change but am determined to not see. I don’t think this makes me a bad person, relatively speaking. Relatively speaking I’m fine. But I’m also selfishly and honestly and determinedly invested in keeping my boys out of those pictures. Out of harms way. Safe in this place where even the greatest tragedies, thus far are little more than inconveniences and mild disappointments when seen in the grand scheme of things.

I wish I was better than I am. I wish you were. I wish anyone who could would walk into hell and walk these children and their families out. I’d be so incredibly happy to help them, from here.

The Boys on the Trampoline

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I can’t begin to express how much I love this picture. I love that the tips of the pine are a lighter green, early spring and new. I love the underbrush, rich, lush and untamed. I love the slide you so long ago conquered now used solely as a ladder to a bigger kids toy. I love the soccer ball alone under the slide. Mostly I love the two of you, sitting with your backs to the house, both looking out and talking without us there.

I know that you’re saying things of no immediate import. Maybe Teddy is asking a question of you, Charlie, something he’s curious about. Maybe Charlie is imagining your boundryless stories that you offer in real time, words barely outpacing your synapses as you get yourself excited by the places your brain can take you, Teddy. Maybe you’re just taking a breather. 

Part of what I feel when I see this is a certain loneliness. It’s mine. It’s the kind many men feel as far as I can tell. Many people I should say. It’s a little scary to me because I’m seeing the seeds of future states these days in ways where I can’t help but project onto you my experience. The truth is I look at this and the first feeling is hope. Hope that you both will know how much you are loved. Hope that you will love each other. Hope that you will endure whatever is out there that we can’t see, that you will have to figure out. Hope that you’ll have empathy for each other and for yourselves. 

It’s easy these days to lose sight of what’s important. We live in an area and I daresay a time when parents are a bit too involved in the process of raising kids. It’s not a criticism, it just seems that way. There is so much being emphasized on the important things that aren’t all that important. Homework in kindergarten seems a harbinger of a severely out of whack system. I want you to learn that love and kindness and empathy are the best protection you have. I want you to know how to be loved and how to love. I don’t really care if you aren’t hitting milestones or excelling in the way you should be. I want you to learn to look inside for validation. I want you alone to determine what makes you happy. I want you to have extraordinary lives, not necesarrily over or overtly successful one’s. I want you to know how much is enough and to be grateful that you have it.

As you sit there side by side I want you to know that that is home. When you are 18 and 16 and one is going to college and one is staying I want you to feel the pain of loss but know you won’t be alone. When hearts are broken in minor and major ways I want you to sit on a bench like you are in this trampoline and just be brothers. I want you to be better at family than I am and I think you already are. 

You are our little boys and we will be here to protect you for what feels like forever to those two little boys in the trampoline. But watching you there together I can’t help but yearn for a snow globe to descend from above, covering you and us and our home and our yard and stopping it all from moving forward. 

I remember fifteen years ago like it was yesterday and time is only slipping faster from this particular vantage point. in a blink you’ll both be in your 20’s and I’ll be nearing 60. I’ll give you all the wisdom I can mine within me and I’ll keep searching and scraping for more, but when it fails, and it will one way or another, always remember that you have each other. 

None of life is guaranteed except for yesterdays. Collect as many as you can and hold them as long as you can. For me I’ll add this sight of you two figuring out life together from the comfort of your backyard and I will feel very lucky that I get to know you. 

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