Category: Parenting

I Don’t Want to Let Go

imageTeddy still babbles. He’ll sit with the Lego Duplo’s and play by himself and there is a stream of playful and emotive gibberish. He has started to use words and and pretend and play make believe with his creations and the figurines, but if I listen in the right way, if I’m able to listen loosely I can still hear the patter of the 2 year old he was.

Being a parent is a lot. Early on we weren’t up to the task. Seriously. We are excellent, loving parents. Any kid, and I mean any kid at all would be lucky to have us. But the truth is that as excellent as we are as parents, we just aren’t very good at it. We don’t revert naturally to routine. We don’t always provide excellent examples and we are just terrible at doing so many of the things that we are ‘supposed’ to do.

Our house is a mess and while it’s better than it was, it’s never gonna be an ordered and soothing environment. I like to think that has to do with our artistic bent, that our clutter and struggle to eliminate is an element of us that is strongly informed by our connectedness and the meaning we see all around us. Meaning that I turn into stories.

imageWe don’t sleep train. We shouldn’t have to at this point, frankly. Our kids are well past the age when that should not be a thing that needs doing. I’m afraid that if our kids are ever to get themselves to bed, it’s gonna happen on it’s own. For now we each take one and we snuggle and struggle and ultimately find them asleep sometime within a couple hours of getting them up the stairs and into their rooms. In my case, with the three year old it is sometimes in the chair after losing the fight of getting him to calm down in his bed. Other times it is both of us on the floor looking up at the green stars on the ceiling that emanate from Winnie’s honey pot when you press the bee. Sometimes we find the moon, other times we find the one constellation, an outline of Mickey Mouse’s head. Yep, Disney even invades their sleep. Still other times it’s on the ‘big boy bed’ the five year old will be moved to once I am able to solve this endlessly flummoxing Rubik’s Cube of a task that I am told should never have been allowed to get to this point. In my moments of confidence, a wonderful if fleeting thing when it comes to my life as a dad, I like to think that whatever we’re losing by not giving them normalized sleep routines is more than made up for by the love and feeling of security we’re giving them by never leaving.

imageWe are inconsistent practitioners of reward systems, a crime doubly indictable as I’ve been designing and implementing such programs for much of my 20+ year career. We don’t practice anything approaching appropriate self-care. The clothes are piled up, usually separated into piles that require sniff tests to determine whether they are clean or dirty. We take them into our bed and let them stay the night. Every time. We are wonderful parents to have as we never fail to give love. But we are just not very good at the component skills.

I’m not complaining. Well, not much. Now that our lives are this way I can honestly say there’s very little I would change. Perhaps I’d employ more consistent rewards or maybe I’d have a few more date nights. I’d certainly have a neater pile of clutter, that’s for sure. Okay, there’s a lot I’d change.

But I won’t, because at this point, this is who we are. We are fumbling through this thing together, imperfect as hell. I’m not saying we refuse to grow or we won’t change. We’re changing all the time, growing all the time. We’re just doing it together. At this point that means we’re messy, tired, together and happy.

imageI don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to hear through the coherent play and listen to the babbling that is working it’s way fully out of my son’s mouth. Truth is I might already have heard the last of it. That’s the thing. Nothing we do is going to stop them from growing up. Nothing I do will keep us from watching life slip ever past. The older they get and the older we get the more clear it becomes that none of it is forever. None of it lasts like I’d like it to.

It kills me to think that I’m ever going to step out, I’m ever going to be finished. With loving and watching and helping and messing up with my kids. That I’m ever going to walk away from my wife who I’ll never see again or that she’ll have to walk away from me. I don’t want any of this to change because for the first time since I was too young to understand the implications of it, I don’t want to ever die.

I want to live forever and never say goodbye. Never grow old. Never die. I want to live this life I have for a million lifetimes. Not some version of it, not some other life, but this one. Mine. With the same pains and the same joys. Now everyday that goes by where I don’t hear my boy babble, like the ones that came before he uttered a sound and relied on us for his every aspect of existence, every tiny change that moves some aspect of their lives to the past is a process. One of letting go. That is how we think of it.

I often think that parenthood is the first time it’s highlighted for you that so much of life is the process of constantly letting go. It is, but it also isn’t. It gives me some agency, some power, some sense that this is my choice. To let go. To slowly choose to hand away life one tiny handful at a time, knowing that at the end the last thing I’ll let go of will be life itself. It’s inevitable. It’ll be all I have left to hand over.

imageThat’s not how it is though, is it? I don’t want to let any of it pass. I want to live equally in the moments where I was three, sitting on my momma’s lap playing with her long hair that flowed out of her ’70’s style bandana, staring at the wooden cross hanging from a leather strap around her neck. I want to spend eternity smiling at the brown lunch bag my father drew pictures on just for me. I want to fall in love for the first time at 12 years old and play act what I thought it meant to lose it all. I want to feel lean and limber and strong and beautiful as I dance with a basketball unafraid of anyone who might wish to stop me. I want to be brash and cocky and altogether terrified on my first day of college and I want the world to open up to me at camp as I found what it was I’d do the rest of my life. I want to meet my wife, sit on those bar stools forever. Falling in love and diving into the unknown. I want to have my kids, meet them for the first time, and I want to watch them grow and marvel at the spectacle. I want all of this to be held. Why would I ever let go of this?

The answer is obvious. We ‘let go’ because we have no choice. Because we can’t choose to hold on. That being said, I want to get as much of this as I can. I want to watch my boy play on the floor with not a care in the world but what the little elephant on the back of his train that he built from Lego’s and imagination is going to do next. Forever.

 

 

Kindergarten Rotation

2016-05-08 13.56.34‘Don’t get too excited, Charlie’ said Miss K., his pre-school teacher.

‘I’m gonna be too excited. My heart is gonna burst out of my cage.’ He replied. He was beaming. I realize this could be read in such a way as to think he might be expressing something of great concern. He wasn’t. It was a rebuke. Think of it more like, ‘I’m gonna be super excited and you can’t stop me. I mean seriously, I can’t stand still. I’m bouncing out of my shoes. You don’t get too excited!’

Today was kindergarten orientation.

‘Where are you going with your daddy, Charlie?’ The daycare director asked, with a wink, prompting the response she loved and she knew I would as well.

‘Kindergarten rotation!’ Orientation, rotation… Close enough and I ain’t changing it.

I have mixed feelings about my boys entering the school system. On the one hand I hate it and on the other I dread it. So, you know, mixed.

My feelings come from a place, they aren’t just anti-everything, white male suspiciagression. I actually failed at school. A lot. It’s okay. I’ve overcome my shortcomings and had enough bursts of effort to actually attain a bachelors after about 10 years of mostly not trying. While I don’t have my first dream job, pro basketball player, I have a version of a dream job and I’m working on a second, writer.

When we got home to meet mom and head out to the school he started to wonder what was going to happen. Like, what actually was going to happen. I immediately tried to hide my fears and anxiety by over talking. It’s not something I have to work at, in fact I come to this tactic quite naturally!

‘You’re gonna love it. You’re gonna go into a classroom with all the other kids and play. I guess you’ll play. Honey, they’re gonna play in the room right? We’re gonna go in a different room and meet all the other mommy’s and daddy’s and the nurse.’ I said, anything but nonchalantly.

It came out all wrong because I didn’t believe it. I mean I believed the details but the enthusiasm wasn’t there. I was starting to think back to my first few months of kindergarten. All the tears and nonstop screaming I did. I mean it was a lot. I generated a river of tears that was remarkable for it’s persistence. I was my own little Lake Tear of the Clouds building the mighty Hudson of toddler sorrow that I rode to the principals office everyday for months. She tried everything a nun has in the quiver to get me to calm down but it didn’t work. Eventually she just started giving me lollipops to shut me up for a bit while she continued to work but it was of no use. I’d just blurt out again when I was sent back. Some days must have been worse than others as I was occasionally sent home with my mother who’d cuddle me and play with me the rest of the day, when she wasn’t tending to my little sister.

In retrospect having grown up and lived as an adult for some time now I actually think I was consistent, always tears all day everyday and some days the adults just had had enough or were having a bad day and decided today was a day I needed to go away. I’d have never been allowed to go these days. I wouldn’t be five until the week of Thanksgiving. Not that this understanding of why I’d handled it the way I did would ever make the older kids stop singing, or chanting actually, ‘kindergarten drop out’ as they skipped around me that summer.

Charlie was so excited to even be at the school. He’d been hearing us tell him, for years now, how one day he’d be one of the big kids who got to the ‘big kids’ school. Never mind that when he gets to the ‘big kids’ school it will be a shock to him to find a (half) school day lasts two and a half hours as opposed to the 9 hour ‘school’ day he’s had to this point at his daycare, this is the big time. When we got there, in the mass of moms and more dad’s than I’d assumed would be there, and overexcited 5ish year olds, it became a tad scary for Charlie and he clutched our hands.

‘I bet you can’t walk all the way around on the wood and not fall off.’ I said, pointing to the boarded border of the tree around which a group of kids were busy playing/slash burning off some of their excitement to be here, kindergarten, the destination so many were surely looking forward to in the same way that Charlie was, hearts bursting. He of course could and was excited to do so and even brushed up against some kids. Who knows, one of these kids might be the best friend he has through high school. Maybe his first love is in this crowd. Sworn enemies. Everyone needs a good, harmless nemesis and I had already spotted several that would fit the bill.

He was immediately back between us holding both hands asking if we could stay with him. Of course we can, I was thinking. And we will. We won’t throw you to the wolves, your our guy and we’ll never let these people kill your enthusiasm, destroy your curiosity and make you obsessed with GPA’s and other meaningless signs of conformity that surely spell your demise. Don’t you fret buddy.

We lined up, as is one’s natural inclination in the halls of a building designed in the classical American architectural tradition of grade schools, as a family. Hand in hand. With other families standing in the same familial posture both in front of and behind us. As I stood in the hall, a 42 year old man who could hardly be described as anything other than confident and self possessed in any normal setting, my heart raced.

The line moved swiftly and the parents in front of us were very cool. Far cooler than I in my standard issue button down and Khaki’s. It was a workday after all. I made the dad chuckle with one well placed punchline. Something about a prison that worked on the honor system. I don’t really remember what the setup was. In hindsight it had to be that I, holding Charlie’s hand and silent and ready to start sweating, was staying perfectly silent so as not to draw any attention, particularly the kind that felt palpable in the air of the school hallway, mocking attention, and had been listening intently to this obviously comfortable dad being cool and hoping I could say something that made him laugh. Thank god there was an opening and I had something.

Charlie meanwhile shouted, ‘It’s a classroom!’ That exclamation mark is not misplaced. He shouted it as if he’d found the final golden ticket. Immediately I grasped his hand a little tighter. God forbid we make a scene. I’m as disgusted as anyone else is at this behavior, stifling his natural and understandable excitement. Although I do believe I may have failed in my attempt to prepare him for this day if the thought of there being a classroom in a school was such a surprise. I judge myself horribly and constantly for my temperamental disdain for expressions of exuberance and excitement. Honestly I do. I’m like that scene in the birdcage where Robin Williams while choreographing implores his dancer to be flamboyant and expressive.. Fosse, Fosse, Fosse… Martha Graham, Martha Graham, Martha Graham.. but on the inside. On the outside, stay still. I’d have NAILED that part. And I’m not even a dancer!

2016-05-08 13.56.37Before too long we were at the front of the line, he had wiggled free and was gathering with all the other little boys around the box of Lego’s, ready to invent and build and make friends and laugh and play. Just like we wanted him to. I was faking it and thankfully he was making it.

 

 

What You Mean to Me, on Mamalode

I have a story on Mamalode today. It’s a note to my son’s trying to explain what they mean to me…

If you haven’t already, be sure to follow Mamalode on facebook and check out their site daily… They offer only the finest in writing on Motherhood, Parenthood, Family and kids

http://mamalode.com/story/detail/what-you-mean-to-me

 

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.

imagePlayground 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

IMG_0144I 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 10.40.55My 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.

IMG_0077I 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…

If You’re Gay…

  You two keep us delightfully, exhaustively, sometimes even maddeningly busy. In the future, a thing that when I was a kid we thought of as 20-30 -40 years hence, but a thing that appears to be forever a year away in this time of ever evolving technology, I hope to be able to keep up better with the details of the news. For now I get what I get through imperfect routes to be sure. It’s hard to filter through for what information is important for me to know. 

What’s coming through right now is that voices of hate that hope to marginalize and demonize those that are different seem to be growing bold with the increasing wind of public support. Fear not, there are countervailing winds that are stronger, winds that I hope you’ll join us in generating as you grow up and encounter a world of rich and beautiful diversity. I hope you’ll try to recognize all that you have and be appreciative. 

You have parents that likely won’t be able to send you wherever you want to go for college and won’t have you in a new car on your sixteenth birthday. We live knowing that the plenty we have is merely where we need to put our resources for now as what’s most important to us is you guys and your well being. We wish we could give you everything you ever wanted, but we know we will never be able to. We see value in that as well. 

What we can give you we give easily and freely and it’s us, all of us and all the love we contain. It’s our greatest pleasure giving it to you and these are our golden years as you have not ever thought of witholding it from us. Any contentiousness that might rise between us at your young ages is gone before it could ever settle in and turn into a thing that might feel permanent. 

Truth is it’s normal, at least to some degree, to have tense times with your parents as you grow up. You are duty bound to become independent and as much as we want that for you we are equally compelled to hold on to you for as long as possible. The love we feel for you is overwhelming and we can’t let go. There’s perhaps a fear of mortality thing involved here as well, I’m starting to sense. Whatever it is, you’ll be ready to get out in the world and make your mistakes and learn how to regroup and make them again, as many times as you need to, well before we’ll feel comfortable letting you. I bring it up now because from here, driving toward the fire, I have my wits about me. It seems a lot harder to maintain such perspective, seeing the fire as a controlled burn, one that makes the land it decimates capable of sustaining new life as it comes closer. I’m pretty sure it won’t feel that way when I’m standing in the fire trying to keep you from running in, where all the action is, where all the pain and excitement are that I’m projecting onto you, er, the fire. 

I’m losing the analogy. Suffice it to say that the teen and young adult years can be hard on everyone. You are all better for getting through them, but it’s possible for us to lose one another there for a bit. 

And what a bit it is. Your teen years are amazing. If they’re anything like mine they will contain Odyssey’s that you will look back on with great fondness, experienced with comrades taking similar though specifically different journeys all of which I’m happy to have behind me and don’t want to go back to. 

There is a fear that I have that I can’t shake and I want to make sure, just in case this is a place where you ever find me, to address it. 

I love you. I want you to find and feel loved. I want you to know that love is what I want for you most. I want you to know that you deserve to feel loved and to love. What I don’t care about is who you find it with, not the demographics of them at least. I certainly want that person to respect you. I will be over the moon if they make you laugh. They should definitely inspire your curiosity. I want you to find love with someone that challenges you to grow and takes unexpected journeys with you. I want you to be that person that sparks a fire for someone else. 

Who’s to say what they future holds. I didn’t find that person, your mom, until much later than many others do. You’re five and three and today I saw pictures of my prom dates kids going to prom. It took me a while, but I’m glad I didn’t stop looking. That said, if your love becomes your work or your family or your boundless thirst for experience and adventure or if you find it in stacks of books or making music or walking in the woods, I don’t care, as long as it makes you happy.

And if you find love with a wife and you have a life that looks like ours, with kids and a yard and walking to school and it’s filled with love, I’ll be delighted. 

And if you fall in love with a man and you spark and you make a life filled with love, and laughter and experiences that make you feel the world was made just for you, just like this life feels for me, you will find no one in the world more delighted and happy for you than me. 

I need you to know because it all emerges at a time, the teen years,  when we feel most alone and despite a world, a country that still insists on retracting the progress that is so hardly won for tolerance and acceptance and love please know that I’m for you and will be so proudly and loudly. Whoever you are, whoever you love. 

The Real Joe

IMG_0040

Let’s face it. You guys reading this, those of you not related to me by marriage, if you know what I mean, you know my agent, not me. You know the guy teasing out bits that, while true and genuine, are also curated. I edit out the nose picky parts of me. Of course I do.

Many of you say very nice things to me in comments that I LOVE, please keep doing this. However, I feel it only fair to share with you the, well, um, challenges one might find sharing a life with me. My wife is far too kind and wouldn’t ever write this list, so allow me…

  1. I can only commit one ear to my family – My wife is amazing and endlessly patient with this issue. I can absolutely hear out of both ears, but I can only hear the people in the room, talking to me, with one of them. This is due to the earbud that is permanently present in my right ear. It’s normalized now, this ever present distraction. I’ve had serious conversations, regarding very serious topics, eaten dinner (most nights) and gone to bed (every night) with them in. It’s bad form and it will never change. My wife has accepted this shortcoming because she is a saint. My kids have yet to see the issue, though I’m quite certain it will come up as early as when they are asked to draw a picture of their family and will remain through the years of therapy they will doubtlessly require later in life.
  2. I’ve got some real physical limitation due to my strained neck, injured from repeated eye rolling –  I am one seriously judgmental dude. I play the results and then I act as if I’d have never gotten myself into the trouble I’ve nudged others into. It’s terrible. I’ll say things like, ‘Don’t ever ask a 3 year old what he wants.’ Only to meet my crying 3 year old and ask endlessly loving wife, ‘Well, did you give him options?’ Yep. I’m that dude! Don’t all jump at once, ladies. I’m taken. Lucky girl.
  3. I’m moody  – I can’t speak for all writers, but for me it’s pretty bad. I can be all up in her business, asking all about her day, listening thoughtfully (even with one ear listening to baseball or a podcast) asking questions, connecting. Then out of the blue I find myself thinking about something. An idea. Perhaps a list of my personal flaws made funny so as to ‘apologize’ to my wife for my shortcomings without having to speak them, take ownership of them or ever really having to say I’m sorry and like that, I’m somewhere else. Aloof is accurate but to anyone outside my brain it can look dismissive at the least and hostile at its worst. I don’t deserve her. Don’t tell her I said that.
  4. I’m a yeller – It’s terrible. I am not at all one that feels like yelling is good role modeling. Particularly for a dad to two boys. I don’t like it. But they are 3 and 5 and there are times when it’s necessary, which is fine. But I can come to rely on it too much. It’s effective in the short term. To be clear, in general this is a trait that is only used with the boys and often when they are in imminent danger of things such as getting yelled at. Still, it’s a small house and it’s not pleasant.
  5. I have an iPhone and an addictive personality  – Seriously.

I think I’ll stop here for now. As my shortcomings continue to determine my future I’ll try to check back in from time to time to update and add (and delete?) from this list from time to time.

Until then I’d like to say thank you to the greatest gifts of my life, my family, for seeing past all the rough edges and loving me anyways… I love you…

What? What did you say? I can’t hear you, the Mets are on.

Riding the Wave

IMG_5889Put aside your beliefs of what is possible and imagine opening your eyes and seeing God. Not the back lit, arms outstretched, hovering in the air with flowing robes God. Imagine if he were just there. Maybe watching TV or sweeping or doing the dishes. A laundry folding God. There to protect you and keep you warm. Saving you from every imaginable danger. Feeding you three times daily and singing you beautiful songs until you fell asleep. A god that would put the sun away when you were tired and one that was there no matter when you cried out for her. A god that knew he was the biggest creature you’d ever seen and spent her time reassuring you that he was always there to protect you.

Now, imagine this god growing old before your eyes. Imagine this god making a handful of mistakes that feel like the end of the world when they happen. God doesn’t make mistakes. One day you realize that it was all a trick. God wasn’t god. She was just a person. Just like you. One that makes mistakes. Not many, but after years of being god it doesn’t take many before you lose faith. How could you have made me so foolish, thinking you were not only special but all powerful? Forget benevolent. A benevolent god wouldn’t have made me so fallible, wouldn’t have been so fallible.

I once watched a NOVA episode on fractals. On the endlessly recurring structural similarities of things. About the Tree whose limbs mimic the parent tree, whose branches mimic the limbs, whose twigs, whose leaves. It was fascinating. It pointed to waves in the ocean being made up of endlessly cresting miniature versions of waves, those made up of even smaller versions of the same. This principle is seemingly isomorphic. Perhaps social science is already settled on this and I’m following a road to an inevitable dead end, I don’t know, I don’t research. To me it looks like their is a good deal of this type of growth in the ever cresting beat of the human story, all of us repeating and taking the rough shape of those that have come before and passing it forward so often to those that come after.

2015-06-13 21.40.59I don’t think there’s any avoiding the fact that someday I will have to apologize to my kids for the mistakes I made. In the midst of all the struggle to be a good parent, of all the effort put in making the best life we know how to make for our kids the truth is that at some point I’ll be held to account for some arbitrary reason and that will build on itself until the ultimate apology might never satisfy someone who is upset that I’m not the reason the sun comes up, I’m not able to assure all the safety I promised, I will make unfair decisions and many wrong ones. I will not live forever and I will not always be there, at least not in the way I promise them I will be. The disappointment is real. I imagine there was a time when my anger left my parents in true pain. Of course it did, they loved me and I was in pain.

This is a point in time in the life cycle of the wave and it to passes.

If you are able to stay around long enough they forgive. Usually long after the time they stop holding you to account for all that they felt broken by. They come to learn that despite not being all knowing, you were incredibly good to them. You were kind and tried your best. You were human, just like they are. Sometimes, as has happened to me only after having kids, they come to marvel at the job their parents did. At the amount of love that was passed on every day in an effort to make sure that you were safe and loved and able to swim. They watched you sink, first in the pool then at the school then with a girl and then with life and all it’s responsibilities they had made invisible to you. They did it all so you could learn to swim, to navigate the lunchroom, to talk to the girl and to pay the bills.

Somewhere in the course of standing up to all those fears, slaying some monsters and climbing those mountains it occurs to you that you aren’t doing it alone. It feels that way at first, but every time you look back they are their cheering. Every time you fail they are their, dusting you off and encouraging you to keep on going. Every step of the way they are holding the back of that bike seat, even after their hand has come off and we do it ‘alone.’ We scream, ‘I did it’ and they cheer, ‘you did it!’ Your win is their win and they share it alone, in their room at night where they take their victories now, quietly so as not to wake you. You need your rest. For there will be mountains to climb in the morning.

As I sit here, atop the peak of the bell curve that is my life I now see the journey of my own parents and I have returned to a place of looking on them with wonder. I’m in awe of the life they’ve lead and feel endlessly thankful for all they did and continue to do for me. I’m more aware and not harboring any illusions about who and what they are and that makes it all the greater. They gave their lives to me and my brothers and sisters and did so graciously and with endless effort to ensure that we would be able to make it.

I look back and see the hills the boys will climb and I gird myself for the journey. It comes with all the unexpected glories and unpredictable pain you can imagine. It’s all of life they will face. I marvel at the journey in front of them, the one I’m only halfway through now. I feel endless empathy for them. I worry for them and am excited for them. I’ll jump every time I see danger coming. A few times too many I’m sure as it will take me longest to learn that they are able. It won’t be a lack of confidence, merely the memory of the boys they were when I was the giant that told them everything would be okay. The one who chased the monsters around the mountains, told them they couldn’t hurt them as long as I was here.

They might never understand. These times, these times that are happening now, they are the most important and indelible moments of my life. They are the parts I suspect will flood me in my last moment on earth. All of it occurring at a time when time is too young to have such importance to them. A time they will forget as they fill their heads with the adventures they need to take to find the life of meaning that their simple existence has provided to me.

 

Rantings of a Middle Aged Dad

IMG_1478I get it. It’s a different time. We aren’t as connected and our lives intersect virtually rather than physically. No longer is the fabric weaved tightly enough to allow for our children to roam safely upon it.

Lately there’s a certain level of mental and perhaps spiritual health and well being that I can only achieve by waving a clenched fist in the air and flapping my gums about whatever it is that bugs me. I’m entering the ‘get off my lawn’ stage of life. These are my greying and grumpy years. In an effort to get through this quite annoying phase I am attempting to yell my displeasure into the void that once was a neighborhood as I stand on my porch in my slippered feet and ever expanding belly, fueled by fear and confusion just as eons of men have done before me. I’m not afraid to be a stereotype.

What the hell is wrong with people?

Why is everyone so damn angry? Why is everyone in love with those of us most boldly expressing free floating rage with the least responsibility and the greatest amount of hostility? When did we adults become so fragile, kicking and screaming when things don’t go exactly as we want them to? I feel like my grandparents generation rolled with the punches so much better . They understood that your vote was your voice and when more people voted for the other guy you had to accept it. Nowadays, disguised in tough guy individualism, everyone’s a bunch of ninnies outraged that the world is not there to serve them solely, exactly meeting the very specific needs of precisely one person. 300 million ‘one person’s’, all dissatisfied and lashing out. Grown ups ain’t what they used to be.

Superheroes are for kids!

Grow up!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not impugning the quality of those films that get it right. Good films are good films, regardless of genre. You can tell a good story about anything. But superheroes now are terrifying, angry, violent and often vile. They live in a world that looks like ours if you did nothing but look at it via cable news and clickbait terrors all day. Then they are marketed to 2 and 3 year old’s who suddenly want even their stuffed Elmo’s and Winnie the Pooh’s to ‘battle’! Call me crazy, but hidden documents will emerge that show the companies that underpin the military-industrial complex were huge supporters of this simple way to desensitize humanity to constant ‘battle’ or war as us old timers used to call it. Honestly, had I known I’d have treated superheroes like alcohol. Not until you are of legal age and your hormones have settled a bit.

College is a vitally important scam that I have to participate in to better the odds that my children can earn enough to barely get by.

Seriously. What a crock.

My parents generation was the last to not leave college in massive debt. State schools are running in the tens of thousands per year now. What the actual bleep is that? More and more it feels like the systems are established to make sure that only those that can find a way to pay the toll are allowed to get through the eye of the needle that will allow them to get a job that will overwork and underpay them to keep them on the treadmill as long as possible. And these, these are the lucky ones! I left college with a worthless degree and 25K in debt, which is a DREAM scenario for my own kids at this point.

Fix it! This is unsustainable, unethical and unbelievable.

We have legalized drug dealing and it’s taking over your television.

Have you seen the lines at the pharmacy in the last 15 years? Of course you have. You have stood in them, just like I have. We are over served. Somebody needs to start giving us sugar pills and sending us home to sober up.

There are a ton of reasons why I can’t watch commercial TV with my kids. The lewd lasciviousness of the content is tame next to the practically pornographic nature of those commercials that aren’t verging on actual depictions of evil. But for god’s sake, don’t make me have to sit there watching you push drugs for everything imaginable. Recently I’ve started seeing commercials for drugs that help offset the side effects of OTHER DRUGS! What the hell!

Have some shame people. Racism, sexism and xenophobia is reprehensible not electable.

Donald Trump. Donald freaking Trump. You did this to yourselves. I’ve had enough of the lot of you.

GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!

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.