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Our Kindergarten Dilemma

I’m stressed. We’re stressed. It’s mid January and I’m stressing about how we’ll handle things come September.

I have a fairly Idyllic situation. I drive both my sons, Charlie and Teddy, five and three respectively, to and from daycare every day. I’m able to do this because I work where the best daycare we have ever seen happens to be. Every day has challenges, some have really big challenges, but in all it’s a pretty great trade off. 

For every time I snap and growl aggressively at one of them for not listening to me about opening the garbage can full of salt for melting the yet non-existent snow or have to carry a kid into the building who isn’t yet ready for the ride to be over, squirming and fighting to run back to the car I get ten chances most dads don’t. Most parents don’t for that matter. 

I get to see them throughout the day as I bump into their class heading here or there. I get to poke my head around corners when I know they’re going to be somewhere and watch them making friends and being three or five and breathtaking. I have a relationship with the people that take care of them all day that is just a tad more than it would be if I were to drop them off and leave for the day. Hell, I get to relax my shoulders all day knowing that they are right around the corner and I can see them whenever I want. 

Still, I’m stressed. Tense. 

It’s time for us to sign Charlie up for Kindergarten next year and we don’t know how we are going to do it. While we live literally across the street from where he’ll be going to school, we both work a half hour from there. On top of that the kindergarten that’s offered is of the half-day variety. Meaning we’d have to come get him by 11:30. So this kid, who’s thought of ‘school’, which is how we refer to the daycare, as something that runs about 8 hours a day every day for several years now has to go to ‘real’ school, where its serious. And where it lasts a couple of hours. 

Logistically this causes a good many problems. How are we supposed to get him from there, again a half hour away, back to where I work, which will give him free aftercare, five days a week. I can’t take that much time every day. For Karen it would be twice as much time as she works about a half hour away from me. 

We’re investigating everything but nothing seems simple. The local place that could do aftercare costs $900 a month for 2 days a week. There’s another program that is held where we took him for a few months  for daycare before I took this job a couple years ago where they might be able to take him and we might be able to remain solvent, emphasis on ‘might’ for that last part. But he cried literally all day every day there. He’s so comfortable in his school now and the thought of that is traumatizing to us. We could and will if we have to, try to pick him up everyday. It will be a very stressful year but of course we could figure it out. The consideration at the top of our list is to move out to where I work. This is for kindergarten. Public school, half day , no wait list or crazy application process kindergarten. 

I’m tense without a solution. I’m the ‘don’t worry, we’ll figure it out spouse’ in my marriage and even I’m fretting this one from here, 8 months out. Who knows what we’ll end up choosing and who knows if it’ll work. 

Truthfully these are wonderful stresses to have. He’s a lucky kid (at times) for having parents this concerned. The stress is endurable and the solution will be whatever it is we choose. We’ll see how it goes and if we need to change course midstream it wouldn’t be the first time. Woudn’t even be the fiftieth time. We’re actually getting better and better and switching saddles whilst wading in low waters.

I’m not bothered by it, even if I am a bit annoyed from time to time. Because I remember ten years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday. I can tell you what was on TV and what it was I was doing on Tuesday nights at that time. It was a flash. All of it. It was a blink of an eye. Ten years from now I’ll be starting the conversations with him about college. If that’s the direction he goes. If not I’ll be talking to him about a thousand other things and I’ll be looking back on all the time we spent driving back and forth from wherever he may end up in September and back to work with me. I’ll be remembering it with a full heart and so much wistful nostalgia for a time that was the fullest of my life. A time I thought was stressful but was actually the most joy filled days I’ll ever know. None of it lasts forever anywhere else but in my mind and I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to be stocking my memories so generously.

Five Years a Dad

imageOur first, our not so little Charlie, is turning 5 this week. It’s not going too fast for me. Not today at least. I may feel differently at his sixth, but for now things are moving along nicely. It’ll also be my fifth anniversary of being a dad but do you think he’ll remember? Nope. So rude.

From time to time life provides a moment for you and your lingering sense of loss that inevitably accompanies all the changes you go through. When it does it’s a good idea to look back and take stock.

The only constant in life is change.

It’s a theory that holds up. At least to my way of approaching it. It being both life and its nature as ever changing.

First a primer on who I was. I was a summer camp guy for 18 years until 2013. It wasn’t a job. It was a passion, love and career. It was a fine way to spend the rest of my life if life had proceeded that way. I worked with populations of kids and adults with differing needs and helping, being a cog in a wheel that provided such a wonderful opportunity to folks that often didn’t have such opportunities was the proudest accomplishment of my life. I was wedded to the work. I would disappear for months at a time to enter a new life and be fully present in it. I love that world only slightly less than the world of my family. And far more than any other potential life. It’s where I’d be forever were my kids not to come along. It’s where I hope to return in my golden years and it’s where I’d run to if my world came crashing down around me.
I was also a largely functional alcoholic. The serious kind of functioning alcoholic. The several hundred dollars a week, perhaps a bottle of vodka or scotch  and a 12-pack of chasers in a night type of drunk. I drunk myself to sleep for years. More than a decade, easy. Even after settling down with my wife. I don’t think she understood that what I was doing was moderating while we were dating as she was trying to keep up and it was an epic binge for her. I was a bad influence.

That said, we really loved having drinks together. Loved it. Did it really well. It was so much fun to be decent earning adults in NYC. We ate out all the time and had drinks in and out and endless laughs and nights that were so epically wonderful that we still reference and revere them years later. The nights of wine and roses as we wandered through the festively lit streets of Astoria, lightly lit ourselves and finding romance while blizzards drove all the revelers out to the streets to feel the palpable Christmas in the freezing air, wandering from restaurant to bar to wine bar to dollar store to home to decorate and continue the party with just the two of us in a fourth floor walk up overlooking the white roofs and urban backyards of our new world ancient neighborhood are some of the giddiest most endorphin inspiring memories I can conjure.

We had endless time to contemplate and consider. Our feelings, our finances, our vacations and our careers. We would ponder and consider like pros. We could make a good six months out of debating the relative merits of buying a car. This was when our future was so crisply and cleanly defined as a life spent together, making each other laugh and smile. Infuriating each other over things so silly now I can’t even remember them. Making up over whole weekends we’d spend seeking bliss and washing it down with cold beers in gardens and world cuisine served to us by intriguing people with decorous accents. We had stronger convictions then. Why wouldn’t we. It’s much easier to make the world fit your will when you have nothing bigger than yourself to consider.

Now it’s funny to remember how serious our conversations were about whether or not we should try to have kids, try to become a family. We stated our concerns so sincerely and so naively. It’s hard not to see the funny in that combination.
What we had right was how much things would change.

I tried to keep my camp life after we had kids. I’d seen so many of my colloeagues, people that started as I had, as counsellors in  our teens and early twenties, be able to manage it. But I didn’t find love at camp, oddly enough and the worlds don’t always mesh that way. Besides, all the others had managed to get those jobs that came with a house year round and I hadn’t gotten there yet. Might never have, who knows. For me the job required me driving 125 miles each way 2-3 times a week and staying over night a couple of times a week. This was the compromise I could manage when the first came along. Prior to that I was gone 6 days a week and likely to leave on day 7.   This lasted for 8-10 weeks every summer. It was better than my first camp where I’d pack up and move in mid-May and return in mid to late Sept.  My utterly understanding wife, and new mom I might add, had more patience than seems humanly possible as she knew how much the work meant to me and she herself found it to be one of my best qualities. But then you have kids. You have midnight feedings and ever evolving sleep schedules and work schedules to coordinate and dr’s appointments… It all got to be crazy. Then when a severe anaphylactic reaction happened  sending us to the hospital with a barely breathing boy I knew it was time to start looking. It was still a good while but I found something that worked. I had to take a step back in my career, but I could be with Charlie, and now his little brother who had arrived in the mix, at the Y where I still could work with people with special needs and their families. I was right there in case anything came. Also, while it can be trying at times I can’t tell you how much fun it’s been driving them to and fro everyday. Having them see me at work and me being able to come upon them in the halls or sneak out and see them in their swim lessons. It’s nothing short of amazing.

We used to eat at so many cool and progressive restaurants. Now we are fairly restricted, not just by the food allergies, but also by budget and the fact that wrangling two boys under 5 (at least until Thursday!) in a public place is little different than doing it in the privacy of our home. Where we are not very good at it. In fact we are not the parents we ever thought we would be. Far from it.  No screens, no candy. Seemed good advice. Was good advice. Now we will holler to get their attention and distract them with candy to get the IPad away so we can give it to the brother who’s scream crying because he is no longer satisfied getting candy in lieu of the IPad. It can go like this for whole winter breaks.

Our drinking is now a pleasure because it happens about one shared beer or perhaps as much as half a bottle of wine (one glass each) at a time.  Its a lovely nightcap after the dishes are done, the floors clean enough and the kids are somewhat reliably asleep for the evening and it’s accompanied not by the most recent art house film that challenges our sensibilities, but rather the wonderful worlds of Orange Is The New Black or The Big Bang Theory. BBT is a tad embarrassing, even in the room, but we like it. Parenthood dumbs you up just enough to find you truly liking the merits of a show so straightforwardly crowd pleasing. Seriously, like the booze, in small doses it’s great. OITNB is just great. Would have been before too. Just wouldn’t have seen it. Wouldn’t have fit in our social calendar

Now the fights move faster and so does the forgiveness. Truth is we are much quicker to lose a fight, either of us then we ever were in the past. We’d both be fine going down with the bad idea rather than acknowledging the other person might be right. Now, we get over it because none of it’s so serious, so necesarry now that we have two little boys that brought so much perspective with them.

Yesterday morning we woke up as we often do these days, with all of us in the bed. The boys go to sleep in their beds, or at least get there at some point in the evening. Every night the 3 year old makes his way over and more times than not the big boy follows shortly thereafter. The little one has become the alpha and he has determined that he wants him and his big bro to share mommy’s pillow so momma shifts and climbs and keeps everyone fully covered as she does. Thank god we got a king sized bed. Before you knew it we had inadvertantly found ourselves snuggled in the bed, with the light emerging through the windows with as much as a half hour left before the sun would rise. Our about to be five year old would do this, maybe for a few more years. Maybe. But than that would be gone. And it will be fine and we’ll find new ways to appreciate our love and our family. But for now, laying here under the covers, warm and content next to our little boys, well, there’s not really anything better. The old me could never have known that.

The love I have now both for my family and for my wife makes all the pain and wrong turns I took magically transform into the right ones. Had you checked in with me 15 years ago when I was ‘destroying relationships’ and drinking like a fish and feeling like a failure every minute I was away from camp or sober I’d have told you as objectively as I could be, I was screwing it all up. I was screwing up my life and there was very little chance of me ever recovering. But you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and then all of a sudden one day you realize, holy crap, all of that brought me here. Thank god I ruined those relationships. I’d have failed them and they’d have failed me. I didn’t fail, the relationships did. I learned. Thank God I stayed so drunk I couldn’t get to another place where I wouldn’t have found exactly the life I have. Because I love it. I love my life now more than I ever have. It’s hard, I fail and I keep going and I love it.

The Pretender

It was early morning and the rising suns rays streamed through the windows. I sat upon the floor playing with toys at the foot of the old man. As long as the old man was there I was safe. I was happy.

I pretended that he was the king of the whole world and that it was because of him that the sun came up. That it was merely a decision of his as to whether there would be clouds, how many they would be and how white. He sat benevolently above me reading the newspaper, grunting and groaning but never wavering or leaving. He was my own personal deity after all and while it was certainly my responsibility to obey him and to revere him, it was also his duty to keep watch over me.

Ever since I can remember I’ve pretended. When I was little it was virtually all I did. I pretended everything. I pretended to know everything. I pretended that my explainations, almost all initially at least, completely conjured and of a remarkably unbelievable nature as I had no information from which to reasonably surmise my attestations, were in fact correct. Accurate and made so by my imagining. I made up the world around me and went about testing it. In time it would come to pass that all of my presumptions, ones that were as preposterous as they were inconsistent, would be debunked through observation and experience.

While in this bubble though, playing with the others around the feet of my parents something terrible would get through. Perhaps a baby in a well or a superhero in a pinch on a Saturday morning with little more than minutes to free themselves of the seemingly insurmountable bind they found themselves in. I’d pretend the danger was mine and it was me that needed to resolve it. I’d pretend so convincingly that I’d express my concern, with great sincerity, about what would come to pass in this wholly conjured reality that was as real as anything inside my head.

‘Hey, Buddy. You know this is all pretend, right? There’s nothing bad that can happen to pretend people. This is nothing to worry about.’ the old man would tell me.

‘I know.’ I’d say, as defensive as I was relieved to know there was still order. There was still someone helming this ship.

‘It’s all…’ He’d prompt me any time my anxiety piqued, from his seat at the table presiding over all he or anyone could see.

‘Pretend.’ I’d say, relieved to be reminded.

By midday the light would have ceased being a nuisance and we would be rearranged by the passing of the sun, all of us moving throughout the morning to keep the painful power of unshrouded sunlight from blinding us with it’s insistent stare. By now I found myself in the chair that the great one had once been in. It would never occur to me to think myself on his plane simply because I was in his chair. I was a placeholder and it was merely my job to pretend. To think about what he might have done were he faced with a dilemma, to strain to remember what he’d done when I was the child on the floor who needed him in order to know I was safe, to know there was order.

I had to pretend I knew the answers. Had to pretend that I’d made the world so orderly and surmountable as he had for me. I had to as there were now kids at my feet. Kids making up worlds of their own. Conjuring from places of pure fantasy that which had reason, imbuing it instead with pure whimsy. Playing with ideas as banal and powerful as darkness and light, good and evil, meaningfulness and meaninglessness. At times I could see there minds working, believing the folly that all of this is whimsy, all of it nonsensical and all of us prone to fortunes good and wicked. At times like this I’d see there fragile worlds sucumbing to playful dreams that had gone past the point of purpose and I knew they needed me. So I’d remind them there was order and they weren’t in danger. That the world made sense and I was there to make it work for them. It was my own act of pretending, my own form of necessary and fanciful creativity put to good use, to guide them through the terrifying imaginings they had no idea needed to be reigned in from time to time if they ever wanted to feel at home in the world. I fixed it and it was easy.

‘Hey, Buddy. You know that this is all pretend, don’t you.’ I’d say to each as they needed to hear it.

‘Yes, I know.’ They’d answer a tad too defensively, betraying their own attempts at obscuring how genuinely scared they were and how genuinely relieved I could make them. They needed to feel independent and safe and this was the balance.

I imagined that I had things under control. I imagined that there was some way to guarantee safe passage for those I loved. I imagined that I had reached some level of mastery that allowed me to control certain outcomes. More outcomes then I’d ever thought possible. I built my life around this belief. I had to believe it after all, otherwise how would I be able to do all that needed doing if I thought that I had no control, that it was often out of my hands and could all go away in an instant. That awareness would cripple me. So I pretended I had dominion over it. And I did.

Until I didn’t. Until the gods I knew, the god’s from when the world was new, young, crawling on the flor and conjuring from whole cloth, began to fade. Were I to have been as good to them as they’d been to me I’d have been more present. Were I not to have the full burden of a new, young world strapped to me. Had I had any imagination at all I’d come up with a reason, a pretend one if necesarry as to why I needed to be away as much as I was. But when my gods passed I knew the world I’d known, the blueprint for the one I was imagining for the next generation, had crumbled with them.

What was left of the world they’d made for me was in my minds eye, imagined almost completely. The sadness would never leave me, but what sadness there was had been stolen from the past and left in its place, in the life I knew when I was young, was only the beautiful and ordered and wonderful world that made sense so much more now that it was a place that needed nothing but time and a clear mind to come back to existence fully behind my closed eyes.

I kept up the charade for my kids, knowing that to them there was something real in the world I’d made with them. The one I worked with them to imagine and create. I did so becuase what alternative was there. But I knew. I knew the real world was the one that I’d imagined with the gods that were the real residents of the realm that had the power to truly make a world worth having.

As I grew tired and my own children now greying and grown came to me I marvelled at the worlds they were creating. I couldn’t help but recognize that they were the rightful heirs and I just a vessel for them as the greatness I’d known as a young man from the gods that came before was present again in the world and I was just glad to have seen them through their youth so they could grab the reigns and put the world in order. I was overwhelmed by their capacity to do so and baffled by the means they used.

As the sun now set and the time was running thin I sat in my chair as my children came to me again looking for a meaning to it all and all I could think to tell them was all I’d learned.

‘It’s all pretend. You know that, right? I mean, life, death, joy and pain. All of it, it’s an act of creation. We all get this one chance to have a hand in our fate. We get to create the world our life will play out in. Don’tever forget, it’s all an act of imagination. You guys are the best I’ve ever seen. You have no idea how much that means as I was born of the best. As the light fades I can’t tell you how happy I am to have had the opportunity to watch you making the world anew. I’m going to leave soon and when I do I’ll do so knowing the world is in good hands. Trust your imagination, it’s the only thing that will ever change the world the way it needs to change.’

With that I passed and the darkness sat heavy for a short time.

Then the sun came up anew.

The Couple Date, Toddler Edition

To be fair, you really should do this more often.

It’s your semi-annual date night with people similarly afflicted with children in the ‘rugrat’ stage of development. You will only go out with couples in the same stage as you as there’s just a hair more acceptance of your general dishevelment and lack of understanding of anything that has happened in the past 3 years that took place outside of your own home.

You start the night having properly timed everything, painstakingly, to be as together as you can be at the moment you are to arrive. And it’s wonderful. You are 0nce again putting your best foot forward and demonstrating at least a modicum of pride in your appearance. It’s such a foreign feeling that it gets you a little heady. Your hosts are in the same boat and the laughs and understanding of a person who gets what you’re going through is intoxicating. You aren’t crazy. Or you are, but it turns out you are supposed to be.

Before long you are on your second glass of wine and you are now well on your way to drinking like a college freshman again, ready to get sloppy and emotional and ready to call a taxi later to get you home. You’re getting your drink on tonight. Having put more effort into this night than has been put into anything you’ve done for yourself in forever you determine that you just have to get going to that new ‘high end’ pizza joint downtown. There’s no way you’re getting this dressed up and not getting out, no matter how much fun you are having here.

Once there you see the line. Are you kidding me? You have a vague memory of a time when a line was a small challenge, a mere hiccup. A good one. One that spoke to something desirable at the end of it. This is purely a memory. There is not even a tiny residue of that feeling left, but none of you want to let the others down by being a drag on what’s so clearly going to be an…

‘To be honest, I don’t even think there pizza’s that good. I had it with some guys from work. It’s not that much better than the place around the corner. No wait there.’ you all dance around the idea for a minute before the ‘thank god someone said something’ moment happens and you all walk gloriously down the street.

You ask for the bar menu after being seated and noticing a disturbingly high number of families with kids there. It’s alright. They ain’t yours. You do miss them though and make a note that someday, when bathrooms aren’t as urgent a need as they can be with little ones that seem not to understand the feeling of something coming, only recognizing it’s arrival, it might be a nice place to come for lunch with the kids.

No. Bar. You can bring your own though. The men head out and find a store and return wine in hand. Rather, wine in box in hand.

You’re such a jackass.

Don’t be silly. It’s not the giant fridge box. We can put it on the floor. There’s three bottles in here!

Turns out it’s okay. You even see some presently-parenting-parents looking longingly. You offer, they demure. These are your people and lines are for suckers.

By the time you’ve sufficiently made it impossible to shove any more carbs in you realize you should be getting home. The kids are going to be up early and you need to get some Gatorade and aspirin down before getting to bed. These little ones make no distinction between weekday and weekend and six in the morning is extra early for a morning after.

So you all agree that you are tempting fate and should get home. You hug and shake and do the manly combo thing and tell each other you’ll definitely do this again next week. Well, not next week, but certainly in the next month. If not certainly sometime around the holidays. Or maybe just after, once all the travel is done. It’s the kind of on the fly planning you do with friends when you are drunk. You are totally drunk, but you’re a grown up now and that just means you have to hold it together.

Your cab comes and you give them your address and you laugh and flirt in the back and it’s awesome. You’re totally gonna have sex when you get home. But first you have to be dropped on the corner so you can chew some gum and eat some old Altoids so as not to smell like vagrants for the babysitter. You see them through the window, all adorable and in their jammies so you decide to hang out for a little. But they don’t go down. Looks like they’re waiting for you. You promise that once they are down you can meet up in the bedroom and ‘finish’ your date. You mean it this time. Seriously.

Your arrival is greeted with such excitement that you decide at least one half of a Curious George is probably a good idea. One or two. Before long you are bringing slightly calmed kids to their rooms and laying with them for a bit looking at the ceiling of green stars shone from the timed light on the dresser. You eventually notice that your eyes are closed and you haven’t heard anything in minutes. You open and see the stars have timed out and he didn’t even notice. His back is to you so you wait and listen. Breaths aren’t deep enough yet to risk it. So you close your eyes and wait.

Finally you drift to sleep. It’s okay. Same thing happened in the other room. It’s not how you’d have scripted the date ending, but you’ll take it. Every time.

We really should do this more often.

 

 

 

Hate is Not an Answer. It’s Surrender.

I grew up in a small town on the banks of the Erie Canal in Western New York. There I was afforded everything, absolutely everything a boy could want while growing up. Great schools, tons of kids, beautiful downtown with movie theaters and pizza joints and Ice cream shops and many other businesses that kids wouldn’t notice on their way to those other destinations. The people were outstanding. Many of my best friends and guiding role models are still residents there and it will always be my home.

Simple demographics would indicate a largely, though not wholly homogeneous environment with mostly white people. It was in New York but to be honest it was Midwestern in almost every way. Lake Ontario right up the road and low, flat, arable land in all direction.

Being from a multicultural family, not to mention a very large one, made my life somewhat unique, but I was just one of the kids in town. There was an underlying strain of racism that occasionally reared its head as it does in nearly all places if you are ingrained enough in the community to see it. Being highly attuned to it by sharing a home with my large family that included a couple of older brothers that were African American and an older sister that was Vietnamese it shocked me whenever it came up. The word, the one that rhymes with bigger, was one that hit my ears as purely evil. I was shocked it was still used. I wish I could go back to that level of innocence. In some ways I have as people aren’t as free with their casual hate when you are a grown up. But some grown ups felt real comfortable letting it fly around when I was a kid. It was a tiny small portion of the otherwise wonderful community and it was reprehensible.

But it gave me a sense of how it happens. I saw kids who would never have dreamed of using or thinking such things about classmates grow into teenagers that had awful and shameful ways of viewing the world. How could they avoid it when it’s put into them by their elders. I had the benefit of not having such things put in my head.

With that awareness I’d try to honestly assess if I was a person that would go along with popular opinion or if I’d have had the insight to see the flaws in the system if I were, say, a young man in the south in the early 1800’s. Would I have been appalled by slavery, an opinion I obviously had now, a hundred plus years later. If I did recognize the evil as evil would I have said anything? Would I have expressed my unpopular opinion in front of my elders and community leaders that would greet these opinions with scorn? Would I have had the courage to act on my beliefs?

The truth is I knew the answer I wanted to believe. I also knew that it was unlikely to be the one that was true. I believe fully I’d have recognized the evil as evil. I believe I’d have said so in front of like minded people. I believe I would have not been perfect in terms of confronting the reality in front of people who were powerful and disagreed. I believe I would have fully supported the north in the war, but I probably wouldn’t have done much to try to tear down the system that was evil until that point. It’s not perfect but it’s as objectively accurate as I can be.

The same game with similar questions I’d ask myself about what I would have done were I a German in the 1930’s. Or if I were a member of any aristocracy. If I were a land owning gentleman in times of feudalism. It was an interesting game and one I’d play because I had to. You see, we were past those times. To a kid those black and white pictures of police officers brutally attacking protesters with darker skin than theirs in the south or the military needing to be called in to combat the virulent hate spewed at a little girl walking in to a school were ancient history. Might as well have been civil war era as far as I was concerned. There was some racism, but it was going away. It was really a pathetic thing, I thought, to see grown ups being so stupid. I played the game not to practice for when it was my turn to find out what or who I’d be. I played the game because those things were behind us. I’d never have to confront these things. That’s what I thought.

I see now that it was naive. I saw that when I started to express consistently that of course gay  people should have all the same rights as me. I was disgusted by the hate that others classified as something else. I should also note that early in my life, not really knowing how hateful I was being, being a cog in a wheel of hate, I used wildly offensive terms, well, one term, a bunch as an insult. I knew better. I didn’t know how harmful my use of it was. But when I gained any sense at all, certainly by the time I left my teens, I never ever used it again and was firm in my belief in equality. It’s not a heroic stance just a conscientious and responsible one. But at least I knew that I’d be willing to say what I believed. To anyone. Anywhere.

All of a sudden I feel like I’m in those times I thought were left behind. I feel like there’s something I should be doing to denounce the fear mongering being propagated by our supposed ‘leaders’. By the blame being thrown in all directions by a society that seems to be suffering from a collective sense of victimhood. By people in the most powerful country in the world.

To reply to targeted acts of evil by generalizing hatred is akin to throwing up the white flag in place of the one that has always stood for the place one could train there eyes regardless of their place of origin if they wanted to make their life better. Of course that was always a myth of sorts but it was always one that we defended. But now there seems to be no amount of our national character and identity we aren’t willing to throw away in response to fear. You can call it anger, but you’re lying only to yourself. It’s fear. This place was never meant to be the safe haven for cowardice and hate. It was supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

 

The Deep Dark Wood

Police Line Do Not Cross

Fear is powerful emotion. It is a motivator and a regulator to our more dangerous instincts and does a good job keeping us out of harms way. Their certainly are fears that need to be stood up to and conquered as well. Those are the fears we keep listed in our head throughout our lifetime. It’s a to do list of sorts and you have an ever dimninishing, but mostly unkowable clock keeping score.

But for those fears that are necessary, those fears that provide insight into what’s safe and unsafe and suggest the best path forward we’ve developed systems to ensure that our children are provided at least a base level of fear for things that should be feared. Our tools are blunt and we can instill too much fear for sure. Perhaps this abundance, this collateral fear is there for a reason. Perhaps it provides a measure of insurance that helps keep as many of us inside the curve as possible, ensuring the greatest number survive the day.

A lot of children’s storytelling, be it in books or movies is of this variety. After a while you realize that we adults are pretty savvy and can see danger in everyday interactions or in subtle signs throughout a story, that we are perhaps to be more attuned and aware as tension driven by our communal standards of common decency are breached. But kids, they need it drawn big and bold. The bad guys look evil and intend to do evil and are open to announcing as much. We tell these stories and we make these stories because they can introduce the concept of ‘people who do bad things’ into the conversation in a stark and scary way. It needs to be blunt at the stage where my kids are at right now, which is pre-school aged, 3 and 4. If it were subtle and Mr. Joker were merely trying to fashion his evil doing by way of insuring that the riff raff, the common folk, perhaps even people of backgrounds more diverse than the  predominant ones in the neighborhood aren’t shown these houses for fear of upsetting some invisible social order, it would be completely lost on my kids. As it seems to be on most of that ‘predominant’ class as well. Their villains are in makeup, have evil gadgets and intend to do harm for no other reason than evil. It’s not just in superhero movies either. Children’s literature has been this way forever. Checkout some Brother’s Grimm if you doubt me.

Tonight we watched ‘The Gruffalo’s Child’ on Netflix. It’s not as good as the first in the series, ‘The Gruffalo’ but it continues on the theme. It’s a story of how myths are made in order to protect children by instilling appropriate fears. In each the ‘deep dark wood’ represents the world, and the Gruffalo, and in turn the ‘Big Bad Mouse’, are the representation of danger if not exactly evil. Each story goes about showing how the myth came to be and how the resulting terror was put to effective use by concerned parents effectively instilling fear in their children. The stories worked to both pique their curiosity and put them on guard. They’re brilliant stories that get it right.

The fears that you conquer while growing up come to rest in a place in your brain that you don’t tend to. You know when to be fearful and you know how to behave to avoid most dangers. For those you can’t avoid you either conquer them or they conquer you and you go on with life.

Then you have kids. Then you go about learning anew all that the world has to offer in terms of danger. And you go about the delicate dance of protecting your kids from the information and exposing them to it and trying to make them understand something that defies understanding. Evil doing is just a reality. You accept that it exists at some point, but even then you don’t understand it. You might think you do but then you forget to turn off the news and they hear about murder and at first they call it bad and you say yes it is and you turn the channel. They are FOUR. They don’t need to learn about or start trying to accept murder is a thing we do to each other from time to time tonight. It can wait.

So we keep teaching them about the deep dark wood and we hope that the message seeps in. But on days like today I myself don’t know where the ‘deep dark wood’ ends and the circle of safety that wasn’t breeched when I was a kid begins. Is it at my front door. Anyone can obviously break in and do harm if they were so inclined but the news doesn’t make me register that as a real threat as of yet. Is it school? I always knew it to be a safe place to be scared. Scared of the kids at the other table. Scared of the girls you’d eventually befriend and look forward to seeing at the bar the night before Thanksgiving in your 20’s. Fear of teachers. Fear of punishment. All the fears you don’t enjoy but you want your kid to have. To learn from. What the hell is the deep dark wood now. Is it everywhere.

The day we moved into our new home with a one year old and a newborn in tow classrooms full of 5 and 6 year olds were murdered. I was enraged. I was gutted, devastated and mad. Since then countless examples of this new reality have flooded my brain and I’ve stated clearly why I think guns and our culture around them need to change. I haven’t moved an inch from my perspective nor have the others who sit on the other side. This is not an argument. I believe by now it’s intractable. Nothing I say can make me or anyone else think differenly about our thoughts about what the solution is to this epedemic of mass shootings leaving so many innocent lives in shambles.

For me, the adult with the more nuanced ability to see and react to danger, the experience to know that not all danger looks dangerous, the part that really scares me is what is happening in my reaction. I’m still mad. I’m still devastated for those poor families trying to understand that which can not be thoroughly explained. I’m still just as upset as I’ve ever been. But there’s something else there, something to be truly afraid of. I’m starting to sense an exhaustion with banging my head against the wall. I’m starting to lose hope that a solution can be found. I’m starting to feel a tiny little piece of accepting this as evil and putting the topic away in the space in my brain where I store the remnants and scarring from the battles lost. When I recognize this the fear comes back.

Don’t go out that door, guys. On the other side is the deep dark wood and the Big Bad Mouse will get ya.

The Dumb Dad’s Guide to Holiday Travel

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Yep, it’s ‘The Holiday’s’ once again…

This season will be our fourth traveling with small children. This year we’d classify them as a toddler and a pre-schooler. but the parameters are fuzzy. In any case there are a few mistakes we consistently make as evidenced by our recent holiday travels. Be smart and don’t do the doo-doo that we do so well!

  1. Start Early – Get those motors running early. We like to start talking about Christmas and all it’s excitement as we are eating Halloween candy. That way they can perseverate on it’s arrival for nearly 2 full months. It is a sure fire way to induce at least one if not several moments of disappointment a day for nearly 60 days! Talk about efficiency!
  2. Make Promises – Especially if they depend on several things working out a particular way. Like cousins who are also toddlers being receptive to playing with them and sharing their toys. Or hotels being ready for you to swim in pools. Promise these things even before checking if they have a pool or if it will be open Christmas eve. I mean, I’m sure everything, including health, will break in your favor.
  3. Pack a Weeks Worth for Every Day of Travel-This will ensure that you can’t find anything you need when you need it. But it’ll be there. Somewhere. Unless you forgot.
  4. Separate but Equal – Sure, it hasn’t worked historically, but you know, I’m sure your tired, overstimulated, constantly competing for attention toddlers will understand that you’re doing your best. If you have one of anything make sure you give it to one child in view of the others. A bag of M&M’s, one bag of Pirate Booty, any toy that beeps and flashes lights.
  5. Be a Sweetie – That is to say replace all calories with candy and treats. This is the most effective tool for compliance known to man for exactly one usage. Once spent, usually getting them into the car to leave your home, you are now contractually obligated yourself to provide junk for any and all compliance. Pack sweets generously.
  6. Get The Most Out of Every Minute – For us this means be sure to arrive at the end of your long journey right at the times when your children who nap might naturally go to sleep. This will ensure that they do so upon arrival. Or it will ensure that they don’t nap and are sure to have epic, sugar-crash-fueled melt downs in front of the entire family.
  7. Cat Naps are Just as Good – Catch some Z’s on that trip to the store to grab some milk (and more M&M’s, who’s kidding who) to make sure they are overtired come bedtime. Surely this 20 minutes rest will allow their bodies to calm naturally for an early bedtime. That or they will miraculously turn this 20 minutes of rest into 4-6 hours of fuel that will kick in right at the moment you begin the treacherous march to sleep in a new place.

I hope these hints are helpful and that you and yours have a truly wonderful trip!

 

The Destination Justifies the Journey

I’m a Herb.

A Herb is a standard issue, dime a dozen, khaki wearing guy who tucks in his shirts and is always presentable but never stylish. ‘Nerdy’ has taken on a different connotation since I used the term with any regularity back when I was in college in the mid-nineties, but back then this would have been a part of the definition.

Back then I would have blanched had I heard I’d been called a Herb, but it was always my destiny. I merely had the freedom to wear jeans and t-shirts constantly back then. Were I to have a job, to have had kids, thus making me sincerely value said job, I’d have been a Herb already at that point, I suppose. Such is the arrogance of youth that I presumed my destiny to be endlessly casual.

Now I rely on my uniform. Blue button-down shirts in various though similar shades, khaki’s, black or tan and a belt. A brown belt. I’ve had it for 20 years, worn it most days and spent eras in each of it’s eight varying sizes based on which hole I could cinch to as determined by my ever expanding gut. I am so frequently in this uniform that when I came down in a white button down shirt yesterday (laundry day and I had to break into my formal wear) Teddy looked at me and with 100% sincerity asked, ‘Are you a Doctor?’

‘No, Buddy. Just wearing a white shirt.’ I replied.

‘You wear blue.’ he said. Correcting my obvious mistake.

I am a Herb, it’s true. Any kid would look at me and recognize the standard, basic, middle aged white guy who no longer cares. They’d be right and wrong. I don’t care about many things anymore. If I’m walking down the street and someone is passing and I really need to let one fly, just to relieve the discomfort, I will. I’m okay with whatever tittering it brings. Really. I am.

On the flip side I’ve truly come into my own as a unique individual who is not afraid of who I am. I’m a person capable of remarkable creativity. I’m learning that I have the ability to truly make a difference by being sincere about my vulnerabilities and I’m happy to share them wide and far. It’s scary at first but it’s also freeing. I’ve come to really enjoy my moments of melancholy. I have come to truly like most of the characteristics I possess that I formerly thought of as flaws and I’ve lost a whole ton of hangups I had about my personality that I used to think of as my failings. They aren’t failings they are who I am and now that I acknowledge these aspects of me as just part of who I am they have no ability to hurt me. I’m a snowflake dammit. Even if this snowflakes closet is a string of blue shirts and khaki pants. That doesn’t define me. I’m a free thinker and boring dresser. I’m the proverbial book of infinite interest behind a cover of bland button down blue shirts.

It’s becoming clear to me that it’s going to be my life’s work coming to and maintaining a level of self-acceptance. It’s good. I like doing it. But it was quite a journey, filled with missteps and mistakes all of which got me to this place I’m so fulfilled in. It’s a destination that was arrived at more swiftly, I’m certain, for all the wrong roads I went down. Those roads taught me who I was, who I could be. They were seen as mistakes or bad choices at the time, but they weren’t. They were the classrooms and laboratories where I worked tirelessly in earning my Doctorate in me.

I needed to take all the journeys to get here to the destination I so value. It’s important for me to remember this. It’ll be my job to act as resistance during my kids rebellions and wrong turns. But I hope I am able, when I know they are out of mortal danger, to tolerate the challenges I see them facing and to get out of the way so they can learn all they can learn about how remarkable they truly are.

 

Dear Daycare, I’m Afraid You’re Mistaken!

Dear Daycare. Angel. NOTEver get notes from daycare about some miracle angel child who they claim is your child, but you know it can’t be? I have.

Read about it in Dear Daycare… on Sammiches & Psych Meds!!

The Things We Carry

It’s not impossible to project from here. The boys are only 3 and 4 and already I can see a light in the fog. Nothing crystal clear, nothing close.  But it’s reasonable as they approach an age that I can not quite reach back to, but from my furthest memories I can hear faint whispers. They are coming from a me of their age.

IMG_0078Growing up is exciting and fun and challenging and confusing. It’s the stuff of life and it’s great. As parents I can already see how much I’ll marvel as they progress to their ultimate destination of independence from us. I’m embarrassed at how much I often hurt when letting them go and grow even a little, but we must. We want to. Truly we do. But the unbelievable feeling of being so needed, so wanted, so loved and looked up to.. it’s a mighty powerful drug. It really is. One you are encouraged to indulge in fully, to give you the intoxication of pure love that fills your tank at a rate roughly equivalent to the rate that the job requires you to spend your fuel. Its a frantic pace and one that challenges your collective ability to stay standing, keep your balance and continue to progress.

Kids have no idea, at least I didn’t, that my parents were people. I mean I knew they were humans, so they met at least one definition, but they weren’t feeling people, ones constantly balancing their emotions and their thoughts. Endlessly interpreting life and its meanings. They told me they loved me constantly. Still do. I understand what it means now that I’m a dad, but for so much of my life I had no clue all that it entailed.

A parents love is both joyous and sad. It’s remarkably proud and endlessly fascinated. It’s scared. Really scared at times and garden variety worried a lot of the time. It’s fun to love your kids, endless fun. It’s a love that can wake you up and push you past fears, motivate you when the fumes are all you have left and think you can’t go on. It’s also terribly dissembling.

20150114-010501-3901911.jpgWhen you arrive on the scene, those first few years, the ones that will hide so far back in time you’ll never retrieve them, never even conceive of them until you are faced with passing this strange and hyper-real time yourself someday, if you’re lucky enough to do so, you become the operating and inciting entity in our lives. For a time we feel we are the sun to your planetary revolutions, but the truth reveals itself over time. You are in fact the sun and you power and light what life we have to give. And we give so much of it to you. So much we can lose sight of each other from time to time.

When you arrive you are all need and as you emerge you pay us in love and hugs and smiles and conversation. At first we talk about the things around us, things we can touch and feel. Things like toys, shapes, colors and love. But as you grow older and need to discover the things that lie behind the horizon of mom and dad you start to push past us. It’s wonderful. It really really is. But we remember we are human when you do it. We aren’t the all giving all knowing force of the universe that your needs have perhaps allowed us to think we were.

But we follow your lead now. Being brave because you are. Pushing past comfort because you are. We try to stay out front. We have to for a time in order to ensure safe passage to the other side. To where you will live in the world. Apart from us but from us. And this becomes our new identity. The path-clearers. The independence enablers. We relish your accomplishments and feel, feel deeply your struggles. But all the time knowing you are safe because we are here walking with you.

Until we aren’t. Not in the way we’ve become accustomed to. Because you need to walk alone. Need to prove to the world and in turn to yourself that you will be able to handle what life throws at you. Because someday you’ll be tasked with being the safety net for yourself. We know this, but it hurts to lose that to. To lose that job that has defined us.

20150114-010414-3854144.jpgIn the happy stories you learn to rely on yourself. To navigate the world and all of its challenges. You build networks of support in a thousand ways and you find comfort in the high wire act of being a person among people trying your best to get through. You even learn that you are so capable that you can give love to others that you see that need it. If you are lucky. You’ve stored all the love that’s been given from your prehistory in those early, never to be recalled days up til now and you realize you are who you are because of you and all those who’ve loved you and you find your way back to us through understanding.

Understanding that we were giants at one time because of you, that the journey we’ve taken, just like yours, was hard and left scarring. You learn to have empathy for the people you thought of as gods who made the moon come out to lightly illuminate your slumber and would keep it there as long as you needed it. Who made life livable and who seemed to stand in your way when you couldn’t understand why they were frightened to let you go.

IMG_0076We weren’t frightened to let you go. Well we were, sure, but it was compounded by the fact that we knew it meant letting the us we became when we met you go to. It was a fear of what we would find in the space you’d leave behind in the middle of our hearts and our homes. You, the purpose of our lives, the ones we so happily surrendered ourselves to the second we met. What will we be without you.

It’s a silly fear I’m sure, but I don’t know how I’ll get past it. I’m sure you’ll be able to see me acting on fear before I recognize it. That’s the job of loving families. We hold on too long and you, benevolently live up to your obligation by walking away. You’ll have to. And you’ll have to forgive us all those times we couldn’t let go when we should have. You’ll come to know that while we walked behind you as you shed those things that children must leave, we were picking up those things we couldn’t let go of to take with us. They are the reminders of our most purposeful, love filled, meaningful times in our lives and we would rather be weighed down with them than let them drift into history. They are the artifacts of the story of our lives and we’ll carry them to the end.