Gratitude is a practice. Many people think of it as an attribute or as a characteristic and I suppose that once the practice becomes ingrained it could become such a thing. But the truth is that the older you get, the more reason you have to give up the practice. Life is magical and it’s finite. So it stands to reason that one might lose sight of all that’s been given as the road ahead grows shorter and shorter and you pass quicker and quicker.
But it doesn’t take a lot of time to list 3 things you are thankful for. From there you can easily name ten more. After that you’ve learned that the silly rules you have for what you can put on such a list are meaningless and you can start to feel actual gratitude for water or air or grapes just as you do for your parents or your friends or your wife or your kids. Thankfully optimism born of gratitude, though harder to practice at times, has the same slippery slope effect as pessimism born of bitterness, but in reverse. The trick is to so ingrain the practice that it can’t disappear completely. So that you can go about listing all that is magical and worthy of gratitude even when your inclination is to sit in the dark. Darkness’ greatest tool is patience. You must provide equal tools to light. Even then, darkness can sneak in under the door.
My life is magically wonderful right now, but that didn’t stop a couple of blips over the weekend from knocking me down a bit. My gratitude muscles must be weakened at the moment. Thankfully the journey of writing here has provided me with a certain degree of fearlessness and has allowed me to be vulnerable in broad daylight. Turns out this amounts to something as it was this vulnerability that helped me regain my feet.
Yesterday I took to the internet the second I’d heard my exciting news I’d pretty much publicized to the world had fallen through. I’m not going to be in the book I was so proud to be in. It was going to be my first time being published. Turns out I fell short by one hurdle. I didn’t think I was bummed, I actually felt a bit of relief. It wasn’t my best work and it was not improved as much as I’d hoped through editing. But I found myself annoyed with the world. Frustrated and ungrateful.
Then I went back and read a post from a friend from my youth that she put up on facebook last night, presumably after reading my announcement. A person that was and apparently remains, always kind and thoughtful. She wrote this:
‘I’m really proud of you joey & love reading your work! Keep it up’
I should always be in good practice with gratitude. This time I wasn’t. Thankfully there was someone there to throw me a rope before I got to comfortable in the dark. Thank you!
Our Charlie is our first. With him we found our legs. When he came home from the hospital we were so over-awed by him, and so terrified of him stopping breathing, just randomly, because how could something so perfect KEEP breathing, that we took turns staying awake through the night just to watch his chest rise and fall as he slept. By the time Teddy came home we knew better. We just slept when he slept. Having two was new, but we knew a little better and we’d learned that the kid wasn’t going to stop breathing.
It’s so hard to describe how uninformed and how incompetent we felt with Charlie. We still do a lot of the time. Everything, every change he manifests or attacks is a new phase not just for him, but for us as well. I mean, he’s going to go to school some day, and while it won’t feel EXACTLY like it did when we felt like we were stealing a baby on our way out of the hospital that first time, it also won’t feel exactly unlike that either the first time we leave him there. He’s at the tip of the spear and as his journey proceeds he’s leading us to new places we’re often less comfortable in then he is. It’s quite a burden first kids have. Each of his firsts reminds us that we’ll be new parents until we die and we’ll never have direct experience to draw on with him. We look for guideposts and berate ourselves if we feel like we’ve failed him. With the second we are not at all fussed with the exact same guideposts. Sure, we bemoan that he still uses his binkie, but we know it’ll disappear sometime before or after college. Either one would be fine. Whereas with Charlie, we had strategies and planning and misguided attempts.
When Charlie confronts a new issue we worry and fret and do stupid things because it’s all new to us and we worry we are failing him if we don’t do these things. Turns out almost every time we’re not and in fact I’d be willing to bet that our fretting and planning and trying and failing do more harm then good. For example, right now he’s obsessed with his body, if you know what I mean, and has recently developed a fear of pooping. So we’re talking to teachers and talking to him and getting in power struggles and redirecting constantly and giving hour long baths in hopes of loosening bowels. We see something we don’t want to see or don’t know how to approach and we immediately develop a plan to ‘consciously uncouple’ him from a behavior. It fails. We try something new. Fails again. We repeat this for as long as it takes for him to stop doing it then we think we had some big role in it.
I’m starting to think we might be all wrong on this one. Perhaps our best move would be to simply allow things to ‘naturally uncouple, thoughtlessly’.
At the risk of sounding too folksy and ‘homespun’, is it all this thinking that’s getting in the way? Are they not designed to endure inept and incapable but very loving parents? Is it possible that the ‘information age’ has put too much knowledge in the hands of new parents and robbed them of the ability to acquire knowledge in a way that time has perfected?
Define that for me, will you? Not in the way of saying the act of being a parent. Flesh it out a bit. What follows is a short, top of my head list of duties I’m responsible for while ‘parenting’. I’m a chauffeur, a protector, a nurturer, a planner, a logistics expert, a ground level risk management consultant, an entertainer, a teacher, a shopper, a cooker, a soother, a first responder, a triage nurse, an entertainment director and judge, jury and punisher. I’m the creator of bad habits and the breaker of them. I’m a liquidity manager, decision maker, emotional support and an overnight on-call residential staff. I’m a cleaner and a problem solver. I explain the answer to every hard question that occurs in my presence. Thankfully I share all of these duties with an amazing coworker. I frankly find the concept of me being engaged in ‘parenting’ to be reductive. All of the roles I’ve listed and a thousand more are subsumed in my title. I’m a noun. I’m a parent. Specifically, in my case, I’m a dad.
My mother told me that one of her friends, a woman with children older then hers, told her that you can’t really know who your kids will be until they’re 40. Speaking as someone that’s 41, I find this measure to be both fair and accurate. As her son who’s only just recently crossed that threshold I should note that this doesn’t mean the job is over for her. Not by a long shot. For example, in the 30 or so years since my voice started to crack I’ve broken down in tears discussing hard topics with my mom only a handful of times. Maybe 3 times total. I’m an emotional and occasionally melancholy man, which would explain this exorbitant number. One of those times was in the last few months. While I was 41. Her job is clearly not done in my case, I’m what could be described as fairly highly functioning. By the way, what she did when I cried with her was counsel me with love and thoughtfulness. She was not at all engaged in something so dismissible as ‘parenting’. She was guiding and walking and ultimately crying with me so we could get to a place together.
That’s the danger of the verb-ing of the word parent. It gives the sense that it is an act that one can take in somehow. That there is a beginning (there is) a middle (sorta) and an end (no way). And even if you were to choose to construct it as such, a thing you could do reasonably, it is an act that is of a scale that defies perception. The only person that will have a reasonable perception of me as a parent is my wife. And even that will be colored by access and coincidence, schedules and circumstance. Not to mention opinion and bias. All the same issues will shade my perception of her experience as a parent. But the reality is that parent’s have bad moments. Thousands of them. They have to. They’re carrying a weight that’s too much and at times throughout the process they will get it wrong. I have already more times than I like to think, but I think as many times as anyone else working at it honestly. It’s okay, though. Because I’m not ‘parenting’. I’m not engaged in an act, with a start and a finish that are defined at the outset and that can result in success or failure. Well, I am, but it’s not today or tomorrow or next week. It’s a thing of a lifetime. Its the work of a lifetime.
Parenting also suggests a far more active role than I fear is prudent. Kids have far too much to do these days and are not left to their own devices nearly enough. (I dropped my career to go work where I could take them with me and have them in classes, so it’s possible that I’m not the best vehicle for this message. But that’s for another post.) The days of riding your bike aimlessly and endlessly around neighborhood streets, as I did when I was 10, for hours on end may be gone. That’s a shame . I suspect their is going to be an increased value to having the ability to self-direct in the future since so many parents are parenting so… vigorously. I’ve recently heard of some backlash to this trend and I’m delighted. I long for a time when dad is a passive presence for hours on end, oblivious as they chase their curiosities and explore the world around them, secure in the knowledge that if they really need me, I’m there to help.
I try to wear the title of dad like a shirt, but it’s creeped into my cellular makeup at this point. I don’t look to be validated. I’m a dad. I AM a dad. I’m not ‘dadding’. Dad is a fully absorbed part of my being and the part of it that is in flux, the portion that is ever learning and ever growing is also ever messing up. That’s okay. It’s part of the process. As is realizing that your kids are a bit more unbreakable then you fear.
Simply being a parent is a far more sane way for me to approach the task. A task in which ultimately I’m not the player that is to be reacted to. I’m the reactor. My kids are the ones actively involved in growing up. It’s a lot of damn work on my part, to be sure. But they’re the ones doing the work of discovering a world. I’m delighted to be dad, along for the ride for so much of it. I’m lighting the path and advising and hopefully keeping them looking in the right directions in order to get the best view of all this magic.
Kids break you. Convinced of your invincibility and imbued with the quiet confidence you have that all the voices saying it changes everything were just the subtle sounds of lesser mortals struggling through that which you will navigate better, you go forth and multiply. Then you are in bliss. Then all hell breaks loose. You are in the eye of the storm, and its destructive power only amplifies it’s epic beauty. You are broken. Like a wild stallion finally being ridden, you are completely under the control of your miniscule master. Before long he takes an apprentice. One whose natural tendencies to rule all that he surveys are even stronger. Before long you are melted and ready to be poured into the crucible that is designed by the needs of your overseers who act without care for your opinions or your druthers. If you are not yet ready to be poured into the mold of the life that you will lead that is no bother to them. They simply turn up the heat evermore until you are suitably pliable. They do this by nature, whose design they are bound to follow.
Some day you will wake up and discover a remnant from a former life. Perhaps it’s coins from a faraway land or a ticket stub to a Phish concert or that t-shirt you caught from the t-shirt gun at the ballgame. Or perhaps your high tops you bought because you’d always played basketball and always needed a pair, but they are still in perfect, fresh out of the box condition. Could be as simple as a lighter. Slowly you will realize that the memories these items bring to mind, if any, are of a person that looks a little like you and it definitely happened, but you can’t relate to that person anymore. The memories are fading at the edges and you suspect that each time they spring up from now til the end they will be slightly more fuzzy. Some will disappear. Some must have done so already.
These changes are certainly the evidence of the transformation you’ve gone through in the course of becoming a parent to someone. Much of the change is lamentable because life is wonderful and it ends and this is more evidence that you have traveled more of that road than you wish. But the other thing you notice is that you are happy on this stretch of road. You feel like this is the most meaningful and purposeful stretch you’ll travel. The defining portion of the journey and your grateful to be here. When you take stock of where you are you realize, at least I have, that I’m utterly thankful to my kids for forcing me to grow up. Forcing me to change. The changes they’ve prompted in me are all for the better.
These are the 5 aspects of me that have been formed by my kids that are most important to me at this moment, but don’t ever think this list is complete. Were you to ask me tomorrow I could come up with a different and equally impactful list. But for now, these are the things I’ve learned from raising my sons to this point that I’m eternally grateful for…
Failure isn’t final- My kids are growing from little bowls of jelly into fully functioning little people capable of everything from pooping on the potty to planning and executing plots of deviousness that put to shame that which I could ever pull off. In the course of doing so they are prone to encounter failure. Repeatedly. Yet, they never EVER give up. In doing this they have put me to the test as well, and it turns out I learn more from doing the wrong thing then I ever do when I get it right. Failure makes me better, a concept I lost sight of as a free floating adult. But now that I’m tethered to these little loves I’m bound to fail and persist for as long as I can imagine. It’s very exciting to know defeat is a starters gun and not a finish line.
Truly unconditional love- Its a romantic notion that we are taught to think is what we are looking for in a mate. And for it’s purpose of helping us understand love, its good. But it isn’t real. Also, it shouldn’t be. Unconditionally loving anyone other than your kids and your parents, if you are lucky as I am, is a myth or it’s a problem. I love my wife fully, romantically, practically and perpetually. She is the love of my life. But unconditionally is dangerous. But your kids, there’s no thought or deciphering needed. It’s truly a feeling, beyond the ability of words to explain, and it’s awesome.
How to Cry- It’s not a thing guys do all that much. Perhaps at funerals, but as a young man not even then. Then you get older and perhaps a movie might touch a nerve for you. For me it’s the movie ‘Glory’. Gets me literally every time. But now, with the kids (not to mention I’m an old dad and i suspect I have a vastly diminishing store of testosterone) I’m able to access depths of emotions, even if I still don’t really understand them, that I never could reach before. Now, I can cry just from feeling ’emotional’. It’s something I would have dreaded before. Turns out it makes me feel more connected. It feels great.
How to know my own parents more deeply- Are you kidding me!? My parents had six kids. SIX KIDS! I’m barely treading water with two. Two great ones I might add. How did I spend my twenties you ask? Whining and moaning about the lack of attention us middle kids got. I can’t believe how much I couldn’t see of all they did for me until I was in this position. Now I can’t find enough microphones to express to the world how amazing my life is because I was blessed with two such wonderful, generous, kind, warm, smart and funny parents as mine. Had I not had kids I’d have never understood this. At least not until it was too late.
How to stop worrying and live for the moment- People can get real crazy in the middle section of life. There’s pressure from all directions in regard to all things; family, finances, work. It can make you freeze up if you have a moment to think. But whenever it gets to be too much, all I have to do is have some time with the kiddos. They are magically able to remove all worries about all that isn’t right there in front of them, and this trait is remarkably contagious.
For these and many more reasons I find myself forever indebted to these tiny dictators that first went about breaking me only to build a better stronger version. Or maybe this is all a very simple version of the Stockholm Syndrome.
Interpreting the conversation between your head and your heart is often a futile task. At least in the moment. They often seem to speak different languages in order to plan covert operations. But don’t be fooled, while they may often be at cross purposes, these two aspects of your character are in cahoots. Any obfuscation they employ is done so with the bigger picture in mind. They each know that the other is powerful and know that for you to remain somewhat sane they have to stay in this pitched battle, each taking victories and losses in turn in order to retain any balance.
As a matter of course this means that if need be they will fight dirty. They will employ chemicals in puberty. They will engage your superego in adulthood. They will provide fuel for the id to motivate behavior. With no warning the heart will act rationally and the brain will start to crave risks it normally protects you from. They are at war but they are utterly codependent. A simple exploration of how life would be if ever the heart killed the head or if the head beat the heart into submission is horrifying.
Over the long haul you come to appreciate and respect the various strengths and weaknesses of each. Were it not for feelings of discomfort mixed evenly with ideas to relieve that discomfort nothing so much as going for a walk or lying down to sleep would ever happen. My boys are toddlers at the moment. Okay, the four year old may be a little boy rather than a toddler by now, but I’m letting my heart win this one for the moment and I’m keeping him firmly in the toddler camp. Anyway, they aren’t balanced at all. Their heads can figure stuff out in retrospect, but if their hearts want something their heads surrender immediately. They scream and cry and cast accusations at the first hint of disappointment. It’s not their fault. Their brains are yet to build up defenses and their hearts are enabled to be full actors in order to ensure that they are tended to and there needs met. The hearts are untamed, but fully functional nearly immediately. It’s a blunt tool at this point, but an effective one.
As they get older the balance of power will shift and they will exert more and more control. It’s a long way off, but I trust it will happen. And when it does, I hope they keep the heart active and strong as the older I get, the more important a role it has. I’ve heard woman worry about me and other men saying things like, ‘I worry about him. He just bottles everything up and it’s not good. I wish he’d just open up to me.’ The sentiment in these words is kind and helpful, but totally misguided.
I’ve been using the principles of Rick LaVoie, a thought leader in the world of Special Education, in my work for at least 12 years. One of the eye opening lessons I’ve learned from him was in regard to how we teach social skills to people that lack any facility in that area. More to the point, how we fail in teaching these skills. His point was that we, us parents and caregivers and educators, are often terrible teachers of social skills because our skills are SO advanced from those we are hoping to teach that we aren’t likely to break down the skills far enough for it to be useful for the student. He talks about walking in to a movie midday, when the theater is practically empty. You and I know not to sit near the 2 or 3 other people in the theater. It is so intuitive that we would never think to teach it. But for the individual struggling to understand the social environment this may be a much more important lesson to learn than teaching them to maintain eye contact, a skill that is actually much more complex then it sounds to a person with high level social skills, which is practically everyone not effected by certain disabilities that limit understanding of the social realm.
I think of this lesson often when I hear women who are befuddled by the men in their lives and how ‘closed off’ they are. Sometimes they are even hurt by this, thinking that this man is withholding something from them specifically. While what they’re seeing is true, how they understand it is way off. We are shut off. But this blockage is not located in brain and it certainly isn’t located in the mouth. Women are so skilled in the area of experiencing and expressing emotion that they can’t conceive of how different it is experienced by men. For one thing, we are less and less capable of transitioning between emotions with each shift. If I move from happy to mad as a result of something, and it almost always is the result of something and not just a shift without external input, it’s not going away anytime soon. Having a front row seat to the abilities many women have to cycle through emotions, say a number that might seem small to a woman, say 5 emotions from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed, it is equally befuddling to us that ANYONE can manage such a thing. This would possibly put me in the hospital, but it would DEFINITELY require me taking a day in bed. Most men are simply incapable of this type of emotional dexterity. The thing you experience as us being ‘closed off’ is experienced either as nothing at all to us, or we are sensing our emotions, other than anger and joy usually, as being ‘closed off’ from us as well. We’re rarely hiding anything, and if we are, it’s certainly not a ‘feeling’. The emotional pallet that women use is one that can paint a beautiful and nuanced landscape with details and colors that if men were to spend a lifetime trying they MIGHT be able to see and appreciate, but would never be able to imitate or replicate. Our pallet, if we are lucky, has the primary colors. We have no brush or canvas. We draw simple stark lines.
I was fortunate to be very close to my sisters. This afforded me the chance to do longitudinal studies from close range on the differences in how we took in and took on the world as it unfolded before us. They were and are the best friends I could ever have. If you asked them they might be shocked to hear that since I never give as much as I get. I feel bad about that, but I also know that while some of that is my fault, some of it’s just nature.
I have two sons and very little likelihood that the family will grow. I love our family unit, but wonder if they may miss out on a very important understanding of the world that I was given by having sisters.
I am engaged the quintessential experience of humanity. I am a parent. This leaves me fulfilled and happy. It also leaves me beaten, bedraggled, frequently befuddled and perpetually busy. Not to mention strung out like I’ve been on a amphetamine binge. But fatter.
Parenthood is a many splendored thing. It is in many ways the beginning of something magical that should and shall be heeded. I’d be missing out on the experience if I didn’t drop everything in order to allow for the transformation that the process compels. As part of that transformation, and like any beginning, becoming a parent also represents a certain finality. We are no longer who we were before and while we may resist, ultimately the change is inevitable.
Please note, dear reader, that there is not a single thing in the world that would ever make me wish I were not a parent. My sons are the miracle of my life and I hold them in esteem befitting such a designation. But as a human and as a man dammit, I feel its within my rights to blame them for a few things. That said, I had no idea before having kids how so many of the changes would be so easy. Allow to enumerate those things I feared I’d lose, lost and didn’t really care that much.
1. Money
Let’s not kid anyone here. I wasn’t rich before and I’m not rich now, so to some degree the money situation hasn’t changed too much. But there was this brief but magical time between getting married and having kids when the thought of a nice dinner out and a few drinks, even at NYC prices, was NEVER filtered through the question of ‘can we afford it.’ Now, we have gone out to dinner once a month for the past two months and it’s been magical as we have recently lucked into an amazing babysitter that we love. That said, these nights are plotted and budgeted weeks in advance. In addition, we’ve become guinea pigs for marketing companies just to get the $40 gift card so we can splurge on pub fare for our once a month, 3 hour date.
2. Pop Culture Knowledge
We were enthusiastic devotee’s of Downton Abbey, but then they steered the ship into dramatic turns that hurt characters we liked and we haven’t watched an episode since. Seriously. I’m okay with this one at all times other than when I’m proven culturally irrelevant by coworkers. Not friends or family, they have known of my irrelevance for some time by now. Just coworkers. I can’t be bothered with ‘dark’ or ‘gritty’ fare that so often makes up ‘important works.’ My beaten and sleep deprived brain, surviving on the high octane fuel of toddler tender moments, which are hard to come by, will not be handed over to sinister endeavors. I’ve taken to calling the TV, when it is in my control, the ‘Big Bang Box’. Life’s just simpler this way.
3. Reading Books
I have great memories of decades in which I was constantly reading. I’m done now. Maybe not forever, but at least until I’m rich and the kids are out of the house. Until then I’m either with the kids, cleaning, sleeping or getting a too quick buzz in order to wind down the coffee induced heart palpitations.
4. Technology
I’m an old Dad to begin with. I try, you know, to a degree. But the stuff where you understand and have some sense of making the smart decision in regard to techie stuff? Game over, I’m done. Gimme the technology when it’s simple, prepackaged, inefficient and designed for mass consumption. If I need to do any learning I’m frankly out of my depth.
5. Travel
HA! Okay, this is cheating. But I feel it’s my duty as an American adult to claim to love travel. I met my wife on Match.com. The process of dating intentionally and reading through copious ‘profile’s’ of single women in their 30’s made me realize that claiming to love to travel or wishing you could travel more was a required statement. Seriously. It was on 100% of the profiles. Which made me realize, when I really thought about it, that I hate to travel, at least in the way that people mean when they say they love to travel. It sounds terrible, admit it. But the truth is that I’d love to travel if time and money weren’t factors in my plans. If I could truly experience a culture, say for months at a time with the potential for actually working and living in a place, I’d be all for that. But certainly that’s out by now. Which is fine with me.Travel the way I’d have to do it, on the cheap and with a blindingly fast turnaround and head home time frame is little more than disorienting and stressful. The reality is I love travel that is in driving range. Oceans, mountains, capes, all of these are within my a reasonable drive from my home. This may change in time. I hope it does. But until then you can count me as your one friend who boldly and defiantly dislikes travel.
We occasionally find ourselves dissatisfied with life. Not unhappy, just, blah. Suddenly, without warning, we feel like we are failing. Our whole lives are on display and in the way all the time.
We have a small kitchen area that has been blocked by gates since moving in over two years ago. The dumping ground it has become makes us feel bad. As has the general disarray of our modest home tasked with holding the detritus of a life being lived by two toddlers and two parents that both work full time. The fridge is a mess. There is a general paper explosion starting in a basket on our counter that bursts forth slowly, perpetually until it occupies half our free counter space, at which point we just plow them back until they so overwhelm us that we take a day off to organize them, starting the process over. There’s been an empty bottle of olive oil on the counter for weeks, months perhaps. The bags that sit inside the gate reach out into the room and are scattered between the edge of the kitchen and the door leading to the garage (not to mention the disaster that is the garage) and are so permanent that any topographical map of our little kitchen would have to include them as permanent features. The TV’s on. The monitor’s on. Every godforsaken screen is covered in dirty, sticky toddler finger prints and I daren’t guess what lurks in the back of the cabinets. The top of the fridge. The top of the damned fridge.
Adding to this is the general unwellness of parenthood. It’s true. Your spirit soars with the magic of new life, new life designed to inspire your heart to give up on all self-care in order to bathe this child with love and affection and the endless hours of work it takes to present them clean and fed and rested to the world. Leaving you generally speaking about 36 hours from a shower in either direction at all times. This defies all logic, but is so. You’re left with back pain from the terrible posture required of you nearly constantly. You are fat from a diet of kids foods often, healthy grown up foods rarely and downing copious amounts of coffee just to live. The kind of coffee binging that leaves you so dehydrated that it hurts to pee and you say things like, ‘man, I really need to start drinking some water’, while you sip another coffee, pour the water, only to find it the following weekend in the very place you’ve been looking past it since you put it down. A week ago. Full.
Then there is the noise that keeps you a bit crazy these days. Exhaustion has a sound, and it sounds like whining to everyone in ways you find embarrassing way too late, about how tired you are. You are a cliche, and that hurts when you’re aware enough to notice it. But how could you when you are so distracted by your obsession with avoiding mirrors. I mean, you look grey. Their I said it. I’m fat and grey and I don’t know if I’ll ever bounce back. To cope with this I choose candy. Lots of it. So what. The only people I’m starring for are my kids these days. Well the lady of the house too, but she’s in this with me.
Then there’s the noise. My children’s voices and the things they say take my breath away dozens of times a day. They are magical, truly special creatures and I assume my honesty on this blog I write is about the only thing that can keep each of them from being re-elected as President of the United States. But I seriously wouldn’t be surprised if they overcame that too. They’re that amazing. But the reality of each day is that your toddler can be amazing 36-48 times a day and still leave you with hours upon hours of really challenging behavior. Challenging behavior that comes with tears and maniacal comic-book-villain laughs and screams just to scream, just to startle you into looking, only to find a giant ear to ear grin on this little boy that just screamed like he was being stretched by Prince Humperdinck’s henchman. All to the soothing sounds of the most infernal and dastardly aural creation the world has ever known: The Fresh Beat Band. Actually we haven’t really watched them in a couple years, but I still hear them. Everywhere.
The mess. The Exhaustion. The noise. The work. This hum that so annoys me each day. This hum that I can’t stand at times. This hum that causes my wife and I to lose patience with each other far more often then we’d care to admit. This hum that we so desperately wish to quiet will one day fully dissolve. Already the nights are longer, and the boys are bigger and if pressed I can become sentimental about 3 AM wake up calls for feeding and the tiny fingers that looked like a dolls.
The thing about this hum, this hum that I have a really hard time embracing and complain about far more than I ought to is that it will someday disappear. The corners will be clean, as will the counters and the floors. The TV will be on to entertain only us and the noise of a full house will dissipate and be replaced by more pleasant and welcome noises. We will be allowed to enjoy silence, sweet sweet silence. The exhaustion won’t ever fully go, but it will get more manageable. The hum will fade, like all other things, to history. When it does I suspect I will relish the clean and the quiet. It will allow me all the free time I’ll need to look back and appreciate all that was done here. To appreciate the times I couldn’t appreciate fully in the moment. To fully embrace and love the hum that I’ll never get the privilege to be enveloped in ever again.
We have two boys. Two separate but intertwined stories. I’m lucky to be here at the start of their tales. Amongst the first things that became evident was that I was not going to see the end of their story. I can’t even hope to see these stories through to their natural end. Nope, these tales are meant to extend beyond me.
My life has been anchored around stories. They have been a tether to the world and to the people in my life for as long as I can remember. I have loved movies and television my whole life, but in my heart I’m a reader. These days, with two very active little boys I’m often only a ‘reader’ as a description of who I was. That said the nights are getting quieter and longer, slowly but surely I can now begin to think of building a bedside tower of books to read for sheer pleasure.
I’ve had my nose in books since I was a kid. I used to sit on the landing at the top of the basement stairs, atop loosely stapled carpet, door to the “living’ part of our home closed, sequestered in my private little compartment, feet on the steps, bare bulb overhead atop the dangling string used to turn it on and off. There amidst the stored 2 litre bottles of Adirondack sodas I’d read through the scripts of the plays I’d seen my older brothers perform in middle school and high school productions. I’d read all the lines and all the stage directions and recreate Oklahoma! in my head. I’d devour the scripts to Cheaper by the Dozen and Sweetest Little Girl in Town for the hours between getting home and being beckoned from the kitchen just on the other side of the door beside me, to the dinner table.
On occasion we would go up to the Seymour Library and I’d look for scripts by Rogers and Hammerstein. I’d investigate the section filled with scripts until we were leaving and I was forced to pick. It was what friends of mine would do at the record shop, what I still do at book shops if I can steal a half hour in the afternoon. This was all before I was 10. I’d get a stocking stuffer book about Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabar of the quality you used to see at drugstore checkouts. Books with all the slapdash appeal and accuracy of neglected Wikipedia entries on singers of little note from bygone era’s. I’d read that biography time and again until it was incapable of maintaining its structural integrity. Then I’d read it ten more times, being sure to keep the many loose pages precisely where they should be. As a teen I would discover novels. I’d go through phases. A little Holden Caulfield here and some Phillip Pirrip (Pip) there. I’d take the Electric Cool Aid Acid Test in college, not a novel but so full of eclectic and eccentric characters that it read like one. This would spark my curiosity about Kesey and his perfect representation of how we all got it wrong. I’ve come to think of that type of outlook as misguided and stereotypical of my young manhood. To be fair though, he wasn’t altogether wrong, but as I went on my tools became more refined and I gave more credit to my specific history and I fell in love with John Irving. The early striving and reaching and failing of Water Method Man or the so-close, pre-brilliance of Garp, the tease that made you know that something great was to come. It did with A Prayer for Owen Meaney. A fairytale of the neighborhood sort. The story was so great I didn’t care about the clumsy attempts to make a statement of the moment in the midst of an allegory that was timeless. I followed Mr. Irving to India and to the prep schools of the fifties and sixties and the Hotel New Hampshire and felt like I was getting a private tour of a brilliant mind trying to understand the complexities of the human heart. It was thrilling and I relish visiting their still. I’ll skip alternate chapters in Owen Meaney now to avoid the now dated commentary on the political realities of the time it was written. I’ll read only the first half of A Widow for One Year. These are my stories and I can consume them however I like.
I moved on to Russell Banks. He is still the pat answer for the question, who is your favorite author. I didn’t have the patience or inclination for the early stuff. It was designed to spit at convention and in so far as it buttresses me when i know its right to spit at convention, it was helpful, even not reading it. But everything from the blended cultures and New York upState teen life of Bone to the Hardscrabble New Hampshire of Wade’s life were and are things of brilliance. Being in these books are some of the most wonderful times of my life, reading these books and discovering a tender hand at the helm of such hard stories of hard lives. The pure intellectual self satisfaction with which I read the account of Owen, the youngest son John Brown, as he told his tale like it were a gospel, and for him it was as John Brown in fact made himself a bit of a god while pushing us to confront our sins. He was as much a True Believer when it came to god and to abolition as ever there was. The book was a tome. And it was and is something I’ll carry with me forever.
I have had a very real and vibrant life in stories. They have provided me with a language to understand, organize, proclaim and make sense of the story of the life I’m living. What none of them have prepared me for is being a bit player on the outskirts who dies half way through. But to some degree this is where I found myself after Charlie was born.
At the moment, a phrase that is pretty much the entirety of my life since having kids, I don’t often think of the end of my story. In fact I rarely think of my story at all. Not that it’s not important, and their are certainly things that bring it to the fore now and again, but
Before I was a parent, I was the author of MY story. I was the maker of worlds and the decider of fates. Granted, on a small scale, but still. To some degree, to be the author of my tale was the ultimate power I could wish for. Since having the kids I’ve lost all that authority. Now my life and its schedules are determined by the needs, and frankly, often, by the wildly swinging vicissitudes of two toddlers, who with all the authorial power, but none of the awareness or judiciousness of a good storyteller, throw chaos like beads from a Bourbon Street Balcony on that which pleases them and threaten with tears and tantrums if they are displeased by something so slight as having to endure a moment’s boredom. I am completely out of the moment to moment control and authorship game when it comes to my life. My story is now one of messiness and disorder and to be honest, I never knew that I’d so appreciate losing the long view of next week or next month in favor of trying to manage and please minute to minute while always attempting to ensure safety and security measured now in years and decades.
Before kids I was having a great time steering the ship and living my story. But there was a terrible reality that started to creep in. The terrible reality that this is a story with an ending that is coming ever so slightly into focus. Looking 30, 40 or even 50 years out, there it was. The lines were blurry but I’d started to recognize the colors of that portrait. It was navigating, this knowledge that we all have at an early age, from my head to my heart and becoming more real for taking up residence in both.
Baby boy, Char
Thankfully, I’ve come to understand better the larger view. I’ve sacrificed my central role in the story to be sure, but I’m so much happier now. In this story. In their stories. Still a featured character, one with impact and one with an important role to play in the stories of our protagonists, but more to the side of the main characters. For my graciousness in ceding the lead role I’ve been given a new perspective. A new perch. I’m still headed to where I’m headed, but now it happens in the middle of the greatest story I could imagine, one designed to be of more interest and import to me then nearly anyone else on earth, rather than at the end of a story that was mine, but which never grew to live beyond me. I’m a part of a larger, more inclusive and connected story now. I’m a part of something bigger, better and far more enjoyable.
There was something nice about a world where we simply retreated to build a safe bubble for our kids to grow up in and ourselves to grow unselfconscious in. Where the world was not dominated by competitive parenting. Where we befriended other families at the park and on the street and they became our family friends. Where our only advice came from our own parents and siblings and not the ‘new parent industrial complex’ out to capitalize on our natural feelings of inadequacy, out to exacerbate and exploit them so we’d buy and buy again their book, their foods, their methods and anything else they can charge us for.
Parenting is isolating. Kids make you a recluse. Many of us find our way to Facebook. From what I’m told Facebook has gone the way of the dinosaur insofar as social media is concerned. Which is fine with me. Gets rid of all the youthful riff-raff and their unintelligible slang. Seriously. I’m far more comfortable with outdated technology as long as I’m rarely asked to change and can avoid being constantly reminded of my impending irrelevancy. Anyway, Facebook is where grown ups, people of a certain age can see and be seen. It’s a place to brag and to bitch. And to bitch and to bitch and to bitch. It’s a place where, if you construct your network right, you can find endless support and understanding from peers in the same boat not to mention a good deal of criticism and snark. Some warranted, mostly just the rantings of similarly frustrated people enjoying the most wonderful, treacherous days of their lives, looking to act out.
As one ages and creeps toward ultimate decrepitude one becomes wistful for times past. Times that our psyches have ably transformed from the real life reality they were into a magical utopia of proper thinking and moral rightness. I find myself judging things that are new (in this case meaning things my parents didn’t do or have, be they normative parenting expectations or technological doodads) to be lacking in a certain moral fiber that allows me to judge them righteously rather than responsibly. This is the ‘young whippersnapper’ maneuver, and I’m growing quite enamored of it.
We have lost something valuable by not ever losing touch with our peer groups. Their used to be a natural incubation period after having kids that we’ve lost due to constant interconnectedness. Someday we’ll evolve to intuitively know how to handle being in front of everyone we know and having a front row seat while they stand before us. We’ll know how to consume the media in an intelligent way that allows us to know the tricks that both our friends and our minds are playing on us. But that won’t be me. For now, for me, there’s something lost by not becoming a hermit for a decade or so after you have kids. It’s the way nature and my environment trained me to navigate such a traumatic and magical transformation.
In the past we all had kids. Over time the acceptable ages for this (attention-seeking) behavior has crept ever upward. Until now, when I’m engaged in the absurd task of caring for toddlers in my 40’s. Seriously. This is where I have failed nature. This isn’t the way this is supposed to be done. One by one, or occasionally two by two, we all split from our various friend/social groups. Facebook is a help this way as I can remain a voyeur on my former mates, but the truth is I don’t stay in touch. Its an aspect of my character. I used to think it a flaw, but its not. Just who I am. Having this window into my former lives is hugely valuable. It’s also somewhat detrimental. You see, I was meant to go into a bubble, hermetically sealed from the eyes of others, for years. I was meant to do so in order to fully allow me the time to transform into a standard issue dad, delighting in the originality of my bad puns and relishing the comfort of my ever diminishing fashionability. A sense that in my case was formed in the era of skater/grunge/B-Boy styles that has thankfully left my formerly clownishly oversized clothing nearly perfectly fitted now that I’ve ‘grown’ into manhood. Further more the bubble is a place populated by your parents and siblings and neighbors with similarly aged kids and it was here where you learned what you were supposed to be like. But not anymore. Now we hide from our neighbors, hang on desperately to our classmates and original peer groups and never allow ourselves the period where we are supposed to fully forget how we are viewed by anyone other than our kids and our spouses and our larger family. That blessed bubble has been burst.
In the bubble your non-parent friends took on the same feeling of irrelevancy to you as you did to them. You knew something they didn’t and you knew you couldn’t ‘tell’ them anything you’d learned. They had to find it for themselves. And you went about grocery shopping and eating dinners at home and raising kids and building a foundation and ensuring healthcare and playing chauffeur and doing laundry, good god the laundry, and midnight feedings and 4AM cuddles and reading books a thousand times and living like children yourselves eating recooled leftover chicken nuggets and half apple sauces 4 nights a week and turning every available floor into a play area and generally living in a home too messy, though thoroughly sterilized, to ever host friends and barely passable to host family. You know, doing the day to day stuff that would allow your kids to go out and one day have the same disregard for their friends once they had kids because its the circle of life.
In the process you grew to care less and less about what others thought and started to anchor your life around your couch, kitchen and your place of employment. You lost touch with culture and one day realized you hadn’t seen any of the movies nominated in five years, but you know every word to every Pixar or even Pixar-ish film that’s ever been made and you like it that way. Whole presidential campaigns and fashion trends would pass without your notice and you’d find yourself thinking of a night out to The Macaroni Grille as a treat. It would go like this. For years. Decades even.
You’d also get to navigate boyhood again, making many of the same mistakes, but fixing some and taking pride in the fact that those things you avoided the second time around were out of the lineage and wouldn’t even be issues for your grandkids. And in the process, the person you were helming this seemingly out of control ship with was that beautiful girl you couldn’t believe liked you all those years ago and you are now family with her, the only immediate family you’ll ever have who was totally chosen, picked out special, and you are in more than love with her. You’re in LIFE with her. With her alone. She’s the only one that gets it. Gets it the exact same way as you do. And you are in love again, but a better kind. A more complete kind. You’ve done all the work together and you’ve beaten out any of the doubt or concern and are fully yourself and made to feel great about yourself, your fatter, less relevant, but fully realized self.
There was something nice about a world where we simply retreated to build a safe bubble for our kids to grow up in and ourselves to grow unselfconscious in. Where the world was not dominated by competitive parenting. Where we befriended other families at the park and on the street and they became our family friends. Where our only advice came from our own parents and siblings and not the ‘new parent industrial complex’ out to capitalize on our natural feelings of inadequacy, out to exacerbate and exploit them so we’d buy and buy again their book, their foods, their methods and anything else they can charge us for. A place you could emerge from culturally irrelevant and personally powerful. Clad in polyester pants with a too high waist looking the embarrassment you are to your now prepubescent kids, proudly out of fashion and unfit. Providing them a model of the ‘truly cool’ person who cares not what the world wants them to be but rather places value on that which is truly important in seeking and finding lasting happiness. Forget having good self esteem. You were past that. You knew who you were and what that meant. You were a parent.
But you whippersnappers with your fancy ‘thinking machines’ and the facebook have gone and ruined it.
‘Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
…
… Hell no! And it ain’t over now!’
-John Blutarsky, Delta Tau Chi
I realize that the long term models are calling for a thousand year night and infinite coldness. I know there’s no end in sight to this permafrost. Who’s to say when this winter will end. Could be as soon as this spring. That’s just the optimists view though and I know from all your endless thermometers and ceaseless single digit and negative degree temperatures that we may not survive this thing. In fact the only data that speaks to our survival is the endless drumbeat of all history. So let us now talk about how it is we want the survivors to remember us when they come across our tools and remains and ruins. Do we want them to construct a civilization that chose to wave the white flag of surrender at this, our coldest hour, or do we want them to remember a brave if freezing people determined to to live while living and not folks that gave up at a time when we were faced with this, the greatest of challenges.
I am not stone hearted and I too bemoan our fate. But I have children and it is my duty to make sure that the number of days we have left in our lives is forever surpassed by the life we have left in our days.
I have taken to describing to them the feel of grass between their toes. To sharing with them the meaning of the word sunlight and developing simple experiments that can be created out of our household stores which, though dwindling, it remains imperative that we use them to foster their sense of discovery. For if my children are the lucky ones that survive this I want them to have some sense of what normal life was like before the ice age that has robbed them of so much that I took for granted.
The depression and the sense of general unwellness has been well documented. While it is not all defined as a response to the harsh reality we confront, if you look through the content being distributed by your network of friends you’ll notice a theme of darkness and depression. Of general defeatism. And I am here to say, STOP THIS.
I acknowledge that there is no great likelihood of this ending and us once again knowing the joys of warm sunshine on our skin. I shall likely forever long for the sounds, smells and visceral joys of a day at the ballpark and I weep that my children won’t know the same. While the stores of food for humanity will likely deplete rapidly it is now time for us to cultivate sustainable agriculture in this new landscape that is unforgiving and refuses to nurture and foster our historical crops that will become boutique items that can only be grown in green houses. Sure, we’ll develop these resources further, over time, but what will I do to teach my children of the joyous sensual delight of eating an apple off of a tree or picking wild blackberries that were once so prevalent just beneath the snow they will now know as there native landscape.
The reality that we will never again be truly warm and filled with the invigorating sunlight that once lasted late into an evening of a summers day challenges not only our minds and our bodies, but no less then our very souls. I say stand up and throw off the shackles of our former lives and learn to live anew. Fight the darkness with all you have and curse the night and do not allow it to hold sway over you. For we are the greatest animals to ever live and no threat to our existence has ever defeated us. For we have seen the stars and been so awed as to decide to visit them and have done so in less then a century since converting from whale blubber to oil. Less then a century since learning to light up our nights en masse. The challenges that will face us are not unlike those of many of our forefathers. It is time for us to consciously be aware of the burden we leave our children. If we don’t act to change all that we are doing in order to re-imagine humanity living in a permanent state of winter, we will have only ourselves to blame.
So damn your Seasonal Affective Disorder and Curse the devil. Stand upon the shoulders of the greatest generations which have come before us and gird yourself for the fight of a lifetime. For it is nothing less then the fight for life. We are human and there is no force in the universe that can outwit us if we determine we will not fail. We can’t fail.
Gratitude is a practice. Many people think of it as an attribute or as a characteristic and I suppose that once the practice becomes ingrained it could become such a thing. But the truth is that the older you get, the more reason you have to give up the practice. Life is magical and it’s finite. So it stands to reason that one might lose sight of all that’s been given as the road ahead grows shorter and shorter and you pass quicker and quicker.
developing dad 