developing dad

The Pursuit

I’m not entirely opposed to participatory trophies. I don’t love them, but I get it. But there are times that I think we adults are making decisions that avoid headaches for us and rob kids of a chance to grow for expedience sake. To get them in the car without hassle. In terms of their experience of life as youngsters we are certainly raising the floor but in doing so we are lowering the ceiling. Which is fine, I guess, as long as we do it knowing this is the result. I’m not worried about kids getting a sense of entitlement to a trophy, I worry they are starting to get a sense of entitlement to happiness when happiness doesn’t work that way.

I was amongst the earliest generation of kids who were handed self-esteem. This too doesn’t work this way. The tsunami that came shortly after was a flooding of positive reinforcement heaped on children that was perhaps reflective of a truth, but connected to nothing. It was positive reinforcement for breathing and being. Now it’s far better than it’s opposite and there might be a need for remediation for children raised in brutal environs. But surely us bike riding, middle class suburban kids didn’t at all need to be rewarded for being. But we were. As a result many of us had no idea of who or what we were until we took ourselves out into the world and were made aware pretty quickly that we weren’t perfect. It’s a lesson that might be better learned before embarking on adulthood.

The disappointment of real adult life, with all it’s challenges and hard work and unfairness is jarring to some and I see people using the magic of technology to broadcast how unhappy they are. To lament the state of life. They aren’t wrong. It’s hard. Where they miss the point is that it’s supposed to be. If it didn’t seem impossible and too hard to do at times it wouldn’t have any meaning. Happiness is found, achieved most of the time. Sure, it can be sprung on us and we can rent it for a time with money, but ultimately its not to be possessed. Its to be experienced. Remembered fondly. To be pursued.

Assessing one’s own ‘happiness’ in real time is a futile exercise indulged in by privileged people. I know. I’m one of them.

The reality is though that I’m never happier then when I’m working. Not at my job, though often there as well. What I mean by working is that my curiosity is piqued and I want to explore. Playing would be a more accurate way of looking at it. It may be physical, hiking a mountain in the Adirondacks or it may be a stack of books staring me down begging me to add my imagination to the half finished story the author offers requiring my brain, my imagination for it to become complete, to enter the world. It’s an idea that has congealed into an intriguing thought, transformed into a sentence that is telling me to write it down so it can have a chance at life. Too often these thoughts feel so compelling that I wrongly assume I will never lose them but I always do if I don’t write them down. Still, sometimes I don’t. I’m unhappy to have lost an idea. On the whole, though, that ability to be moved, even negatively, to care about something just because it intrigued and inspired me is something, an ability that makes me very happy.

Happiness is very often bought. I love that kind of happiness to. I just respect it’s fleeting nature. It’s here but a second and leaves little to no residue of it’s existence. The lasting type is the type that comes with effort. Effort that has risk inherent. You might find happiness and you might find disappointment. You might put down the pursuit for a time when it’s defeating you only to find renewed motivation and vigor upon jumping once more into the breech. That kind of happiness, the kind that comes from full engagement and commitment, from the excitement of the chase, that is born of curiosity or desire or inspiration, is happiness you can access and should access whenever you can. Even if the frequency of achieving it is low.

Happiness is not an entitlement. It’s not a pot of gold that once found can provide endless, unceasing joy. Happiness is a relative state of being that depends completely on the presence of a full spectrum of feelings. The founding fathers were wise in not focusing on happiness. It’s ethereal and gelatinous. What isn’t is the pursuit thereof. I have sons who are small right now and I have to say, like all parents, it hurts me to see them upset. I tolerate it. I even cause it when I must. But there happiness is incredibly important to me. It truly is. But a true sense of well being must incorporate disappointment, frustration, loneliness as well as excitement, purposefulness and connection. For my children to experience it all they should aim at happy, they should pursue it. But I hope they come to understand the nature of happiness to be more than that which is so often presented to them. True happiness requires engagement and effort and is never guaranteed. That’s why it feels so good.

After 20 Years, Summer Camp Still Breaks Me

I think camp is good for me for so many reasons.

It motivates me to do my best. It constantly confronts me with failure and insists I rise to the challenge no matter how many times I fail, and boy do I fail. It’s persistent, occupying each moment for a limited time. It makes me look at things through others eyes. My campers have extra needs for support and I’m constantly trying new approaches, tweaking attempts that end up solving only portions of problems. It makes me listen to so many voices and makes me value each one. Over time some become more reliable and others can only be relied on for misdirection. The nice thing about that is how regularly my expectations are turned upside down. By the ‘kid’ Jr. Counselor at 16 who has solutions and creativity that even he or she didn’t know was so helpful and even wise. By the parent that knows there child like no one else who comes through like the Kool-Aid man busting down brick walls to ensure we hear them, only to learn insights from people, kids, they’d never have thought to ever even consider listening to. By the teachers who choose to spend this precious free time continuing to work with the kids they love, who seem more like distant family then students in class. By the campers themselves, given a chance to have a fresh start with someone that might be able to help, might just be the right person at the right time to unlock something that campers been struggling with for some time. And by myself, surprised I was able to get up and at it once again, 20 years after heading to camp for the first time as a 21 year old with no idea I was jumping directly into my life’s work.

All of these things delight me and keep me coming back. They are the rewards so many of us continue to seek as we try to add value to the world while having an adventure and accomplishing small acts of greatness day to day. It’s always a concentrated course in self-improvement. Even this year, coming off an epic fail last year, one I didn’t think I was even capable of at this stage of the game. It was a good thing. It’s why I’m here at the office on the Saturday between sessions planning and communicating in order to avoid all the potential fails I now know, was reminded of last year, that still threaten to derail what was a largely successful first week.

Many of my friends in camp, all of them, really, are from the sleep away camp world. It’s where I’m from. I spent 19 summers working ‘away’ at camp. Moving up in the spring, commuting between the mountains and the office life in the city for the second half of that stretch, as my responsibilities grew beyond the 10 magical weeks of camp. Life now, in my little 2-week day camp, a short day at that, is not what it was, but I’m still getting what I used to from it. I love camp. I really do. What is watered down here is still meaningful and an opportunity that I’m delighted I have dived into. It’s giving me camp and I can’t tell you how great that is.

My wife will tell you, and she’d be right, that I’m really stressed by the situation. I’m a pretty laid back dude, but in the weeks leading up to camp I get tension headaches, can’t sleep and become quite unpleasant to be around outside of work. For certain folks, HR folks, it’s possible I’m even unpleasant at work at those times. But now that I’m here it’s all worth it. Because it’s good for me to have my walls breached. To be effected and to be visibly breakable. To be in need of others. To be vulnerable.

If you’ve read my work before you might think I’m a walking ball of vulnerability. You’d be dead wrong. Couldn’t be more wrong. Writing is where it appears sometimes, sure. But in real life, in the room, I’m guarded, aloof, pleasant but distant, funny as sincere and never really vulnerable. But camp breaks me. It gives me license to care too much. It makes me ask for help and it insists I take it. It makes me fragile. Being fragile is human and connective and altogether unpleasant when I’m strong enough to fear it. Thankfully camp, even this modified, watered down version of that which I used to take straight in huge gulps, makes me break.

Camp is a reset button that I need to feel the most fully realized version of me. The me that needs the world around me. The me that always exists but often hides within me.

Pessimism, Optimism and Freeing My Truest Self

“Pessimism is easy it turns out. Not easy to endure, but SO MUCH EASIER to maintain than optimism. Pessimism is cloaked in world-weary, leathery toughness, but it’s all an act. It’s really just fear dressed up.

Now, if you know an optimist that person is a badass. BAD. ASS.”

Please read the rest on Mamalode!

Hell Found Me at the County Fair

Saturday we found ourselves, all of us, lost amidst the deep weeds of toddlerhood.

We were leaving the county fair. It was hot, crowded, noisy and uncomfortable. This was the setting as I did my own performance piece re-enacting every episode of cops ever. The big one was melting while the little one was overdone and riding his big brother’s coat tails. All the mistakes that can be made were. We were unprepared for the crowds, the food, the animals and the heat. Naps were skipped and bad behavior was mollified with treats. In hindsight any parent of any ability could have predicted the outcome. We could have predicted it. But we chose instead to barrel through because that is what you do with toddlers. If you waited for optimal conditions you’d be frozen in place, TV blaring, hiding from your kids. Forever.

Instead we took them to the fair where hell found us. It’s not the fault of the fair. Its not the fault of the heat and it’s not the fault of the various vendors and tricksters hanging their sweet booty, in the form of plush Spiderman dolls or blow up Spongebob’s to attract the hearts and minds of the worlds most brutal and successful class of negotiators, toddlers. Actually it’s totally the vendors fault. And of course the toddler’s fault. Everything is their fault. It isn’t their responsibility to do anything other then what they do, but lets not kid ourselves, we’re all grown ups here, it’s ALWAYS the toddlers fault. That’s okay, they can hardly be blamed for it.

Back to our story…

As I sit on the vacuum packed, stifling, Twinkie-shaped, sardine can of a school bus with with all manner of humanity, waiting on the edge of my seat to see if one of us will crack, scream and dive out the window as the bus tries to weave it’s way through the throngs of fair goers oblivious to those of us on the bus and our plight, toward the traffic that it will have to navigate before getting us to our abandoned vehicles in a vast empty field 3 miles away, I felt relief that at least we were nearly done with this trial. I believe that life tests you and it looked like we were going to make it out of this one having passed this test and learned a lesson.

The bus eventually picked up speed as we traveled away from the fairgrounds. A breeze moved the still hot air and we all let our shoulders down a bit. Even the enjoyable parts of such a day, for parents, are challenging. An example? The Butterfly’s. Going into the netted area, filled with flowers and butterfly’s was something like magic. Until you try to control a 4 year old and a 2 year old that don’t really get it. We were given small, foam style paint brushes upon entering and were told they were dipped in nectar to attract the butterflies, which the 4 year old could eventually do. I turned for a second to look and marvel at how he had managed to procure a butterfly for his very own enjoyment. Being four and having the attention span of a gnat and needing the validation of constant achievement at video-game speed he was bored nearly immediately, which was fine, I still had to look after the 2 year old. Where the hell did he go! Ah. There he.. wait. Teddy, no! He had started brandishing his brush like a weapon and was trying to in fact ‘squish’ the butterflies. Thankfully he is not as coordinated as he thinks he is and no butterflies were harmed in the making of this disaster. In the future, even later that day, this was the memory we isolated and highlighted as the ‘magic’ part of our trip to the fair.

As I slowly drove the air conditioned car I had a few moments of serenity on my way back to the fairground to pick up my wife and kids. A thought snick into my mind. I could probably get away with sneaking off for a bit. Have a beer, catch an inning or two of the Mets game. Why not. What would they care if they got to stay at the fair for a few more minutes? Kids love fairs!

Having arranged with Karen to have the boys across the street from the gate through which we entered the fair I knew it was not to be. They were waiting and I had what they needed. A car, some screens (I don’t care what you think about this, keep it to yourself, talk behind my back, just don’t think I care about your data and research) and a ride back to the grandparents house.

I’m afraid that my abilities as a writer will fail me as I try to describe what it was I returned to. The fairgrounds are in a rural area and the lawns of the residents of the modest homes in surrounding the grounds are filled to bursting with cars that paid a bit extra for the convenience. These folks who paid $10 to be able to leave immediately, when free parking was right down the street, people I called suckers not 3 hours ago, are the smartest people. Ever. As we crowded our car onto the edge of one such lawn, across from the parked police car, lights aglow for apparently no reason other then to be prepared, my family came into sight. The full blast of a Volvo AC unit with the windows up can completely cancel out the sounds of what was perhaps the busiest moment of the busiest day of the county fair, megaphones ablaze, kids screaming from death defying rides and all manner of annoying, ice cream truck style circus music blasting from the concourse that is perhaps as much as 25 feet to my left. What it can’t obscure is the wailing and screaming of my four year old son, retreating to the maze of automobiles behind him, blood curdling screams that would cause me, you and any other decent person to stop and watch to be sure that he is not in mortal danger.

He is not, but it’s not so evident. You see, I’m angry now. Again, it’s unfair, not his responsibility and still entirely his fault that I’m now on a warpath. He’s a big four year old and his brother is squirmy. Being outnumbered and overburdened by the necessary and unnecessary items that accompany a mom of toddlers from a fair, my wife was not able to fully gather him in his state and it was a full blown disaster unfolding. I kid you not, everyone stopped, as if this were a real episode of cops, and watched as I stormed, cheeks ablaze in frustration and fed-uppedness as I marched directly at the boy and restrained him physically. This was a situation in which diplomatic methods could not be employed, not yet at least. We were in the midst of a full blown rebellion. What was needed was a police state, removal by force and I was the brute squad.

Here I was, a stranger in a strange land, looking to all the world like the type of father I was, but not the type I reported to be. I prefer to be the benevolent dictator, allowing my boys to think they have choices. ‘do you want to brush first or read a story first?’ that kind of thing. But when the moment is upon us, when hell is staring me down at the county fair all artifice is lost. This is a regime that must occasionally use the full force of it’s bestowed powers and put down all threats. Today that threat came from within and I’m terrified to think what the surrounding masses thought of our little performance. Surely they saw my anger, his frustration, our failures and must have come to the same conclusions I’ve often come to when seeing others in this or other, similar situations.

Within five minutes, a seemingly short time until you’ve spent it confined in a station wagon with two screaming, not shouting, SCREAMING toddlers, we were able to diffuse the situation using the wisdom of our elders who always have spoils ready for their grandkids visits.

‘Okay, Charlie. I guess I should call Grandma and tell her to put away the cupcakes and ice cream. Cancel the pancake dinner. Charlie doesn’t want it.’ I said in my best toddler-whistle falsetto.

Deep breaths. Wiped tears.

‘No. I want cupcakes.’

‘You do?’ I asked.

‘Yeah’

‘Okay, I’ll tell Grandma, as long as your a good boy and say you’re sorry to mommy.’ Still falsetto.

‘I’m sorry, mommy. Yeah!’ he shouted, and got the attention of the other.

‘Cupcakes!’ They yelled in unison.

Perfect

Girls weren’t so perfect when I was a kid. Don’t get me wrong. I went through the yearbook and put stars next to the girls I crushed on and even wrote ‘mint’ next to the two Kelly’s, both two years older then me and friends with my brothers. They were more then perfect in my eyes. They were better looking and just as unattainable as the starlets on the screen. They were fantasies that I lived and breathed with. Perfect, beyond perfect, in my eyes. But nothing like they are today.

Boys too, but it’s different I think. The perfect of today is pristine, calculated and ultimately sad. On the bright side, these bright, emotional and soulful people dressing up like plastics, yearning and striving to out perfect the next girl in line are unable to outrun their humanity and as a result, if they are able to learn to love and respect themselves they will find something that developed in the sadness, in the yearning, in the very straw that broke their backs and set in motion their will and determination to be seen as perfect, beautiful and flawless. It’s the same drive we had as children, a thing society forgets about teens, they are children. Its falling off of perfect that makes you human.

When I was about 27 years old or so I learned that if I kept telling myself that I was gross and awful it motivated me to eat only pears, and I mean only pears, for a whole summer while working out harder and harder and working round the clock at a camp for individuals with great needs for support. I ultimately lost about 60 pounds. I’ve lost the photos because whatever perverse pride I took when I was living like that was offset by disgust at the lollipop-head that I saw in those pictures. When people would ask, ‘How’d you do it?’ my response was always a simple joke that diffused any further probing. It had the added benefit of being not at all a joke in the ‘its not true’ sense, though I was able to laugh it off that way.

‘It’s easy.’ I’d say. ‘The trick is to just hate yourself. It’s a great motivator at the gym and the only way to get a six-pack.’ Genetics are funny and I’ve had personal friends that couldn’t avoid the six-packification of the midsection, but for me this wasn’t the case. To have a six pack I had to feel I didn’t deserve food. I had to punish myself daily with workouts that were painful. Worst part, it felt freaking great physically. Being long and lean when you are naturally stocky is buzzingly awesome. It feels good in your organs and your bones. It feels terrible in terms of your human relationships, but inside your own vessel, just freaking awesome. It creates its own momentum until it doesn’t. The same way drinking and gorging myself on crap and alcohol as a 19 year old had reinforcing factors on the way to gaining the the freshman 80. That’s not a typo. I went from 185 upon entering college, to 265 upon returning after my freshman year.

Nobody ever thinks about, or even thinks to think about the underlying emotional issues that might be affecting a male, a young male at that, who chooses to maintain a slide for so long that they are simply begging to be noticed. Truth is I’m an outlier to some degree. Don’t get me wrong. There are a gazillion outliers like me, men who react this way to some external stimulus. In my case my best guess is that I was trying to find a sense of control on the one side of the coin and on the other I was engaged in avoiding all responsibility. But this came mostly from within. I didn’t have to deal with what it seems like young women have to confront on their journey through the minefield that is the process of going from girl to woman. It’s a transition that is confusing enough without the terrifying landscape they seem to confront.

The act of becoming is fraught with self doubt, harsh self-criticism, misunderstanding and missteps. It always has been. But in this new day when we are constantly exposed and constantly watching everything and everyone, I fear we’ve come to a place that is harder to navigate. I can’t for the life of me think of a more terrifying thing then being a 14 year old girl in this world where every flaw, every natural and beautiful imperfection is multiplied a million times by the microscope of ever present marketers deeply invested in exacerbating every insecurity of every fragile adolescent for the purposes of selling a thousand cures. The devils have even discovered that they can get these girls to do their work for them by training them through constant and ever present shaming images and ideas that result in a culture of competition that tricks sisters into believing that sisterhood is not a support but a competition to be won or lost. In every interaction. It’s a brutal world they’ve created and feed constantly in order to sell product. It’s an evil landscape that they have no choice but to navigate and there is virtually no path through that can’t be obscured and camouflaged by the game makers constantly scanning the landscape to ensure that no passage be readily available to their prey.

These young girls are trained, constantly, on the strive to an unreachable perfection. Its unreachable ever. In fact the message they are responding to, the one that so convinces them that they cannot rest until perfection is obtained is a lie. Any perfection found on this path is just another vantage point from where you are taught to look further down the road, where even greater perfection lies. Keeping you always underwhelmed, overworked, too perfect and further and further from acceptance and happiness.

It’s hard enough to find without the game being rigged against you.

5 Common Courtesies to Ditch with Toddlers

Ever notice how animalistic we become as parents. Right from the start. In fact we tend to mirror the journey of our children from completely helpless disasters through all the necessary stages of socialization and refinement. Well, in the process we must teach our children the expectations of society, the rules of the road and how to be a decent and kind person. All of those things it turns out are the finishing touches. Now, for us, with two toddlers, many of the rules we’ve always lived by are less then useless.

See my post on the topic at Sammiches & Psych Meds, where I’m now officially part of the team. Tanks so much, everyone!

So Much To Look Forward To

Our boys are very simply, magnificent. They are cherubic angels sprinkled with fairy dust sent to bring joy to a cruel and unforgiving world. This I believe. They are also 4 and 2 years old, respectively. So between bursts of sunlight and sparkles they can really be a challenge.

The emotional stability of my boys is reasonably questioned. The boundless energy they display is matched only by the sheer vigor of their mood swings. Laughter is only seconds from tears and vice-versa. It has a way of keeping you on your toes at first. But like all creatures we adapt. After a short time it becomes little more then white noise. Our ears and brains develop a filter that allows in the noises that mean something real is wrong and block the rest of the calamitous cacophony often arising around the corner. If it didn’t we’d surely go mad!

When you combine this with fair doses of competition for attention, stubbornness, the logistical requirements of properly caring for people that are proud pants-poopers and the ever encroaching hospitalization for exhaustion that my wife and I have a bag prepped for, we haven’t done much adventuring in these early years. Figuring it out day to day has been a good deal of adventure in and of itself.

We marvel at families that travel regularly with small children. We are prone to bouts of shell-shock after particularly bad car trips in excess of 2 hours. Flight? Are you kidding me! Forget the obvious ~~excuse~~ reason we don’t do this, we have a kid with anaphylactic food allergies, we could give a good list of 10 other reasons why it would be too much just to get to the plane. Forget the extreme likelihood that the two year old would escape and open a door in flight. We don’t know how these people find the money! Kids are freaking crazy expensive. We do fine, but we can’t be messing around blowing hundreds of dollars on travel that will surely end with a plane full of people being sucked out mid-flight because I can’t catch the little one. He’s squirmy. And determined. No thank you.

That said there are signs indicating that our families self-imposed period of semi-quarantined early childhood might be transitioning. It’s thrilling to think that soon we might be able to schedule a few trips, get our kids out and about now that some sense of stability and regular sleep patterns is just around the corner.

I’m excited to think of taking them to baseball games and camping. I’m looking forward to seeing them off to school, real school, not the daycare we’ve been calling school for years. I’m excited to think that seeing relatives far away will be more frequent if not exactly as frequent as we’d like. Real vacations might be upon us again in the not too distant future and it’s exciting. We’ve even made the loosest of plans to take them to our favorite vacation spot in the Adirondacks this year and to go and stay a night or two with their cousins and have some fun family time at the end of the summer.

I spend a fair amount of time these days soaking in the end of the little one’s phase, but their really is so much to look forward to. I have very warm feelings about this time when we all became a family. Everything from finding out we’d have Charlie, to moving to New Jersey, to buying our home and welcoming Teddy into it, through becoming fully able and capable caregivers, a journey that is equal parts depleting and replenishing. Still I find myself here looking forward to all that’s yet to come.

The family trips will be exciting and tiring and full of memories. The many successes and failures that we will be able to guide them through and the ones they will have to navigate on their own. The days I plan to keep them home and have adventures when I can connect with them naturally and excitedly. The teen years of anger and testosterone when frustration and exuberance are met with verve and curiosity. I can’t wait to take pictures of them before dances and have surprising conversations that reveal how much more is there then a parent often can see. I can’t wait for them to fall in love. I’m even looking forward to the heartbreak and pain, knowing it will tear me up as well. I can’t wait to see what sparks their imagination and motivates them simply out of interest, a need to do something. I want to know who these kids are going to be when they become adults and I want to see every step I can in the process. For those steps they have to take on their own I look forward to hearing about it years later when it’s all from a part of life that might have been really hard to live through but is looked back on with fondness for all its dynamic growth and tumult.

All of it that I sometimes don’t want to let go of, all of it that I fear before it’s arrival, all of it will make my boys who they are going to be and I’m so happy to be here to see it, to help, to worry. to laugh and to marvel.

30 Years Ago, 30 Years From Now

Me, Karen and the boys... — Me, Karen and the boys…

When I was eleven years old life was pretty damn great. I was finally able to play on the CYO team where I was the star everyone saw coming. I was finally allowed to leave the school where I was punched more than I’d have preferred and was instantly popular in my new school, where I wouldn’t catch a punch for a good five years. Girls, girls I was starting to notice almost all noticed me! Of course one or two didn’t, which was also great because that allowed me to talk about them for hours on end with my best friend Cory while we shot hoops, rode bikes, got into trouble and hung out everyday. I remember it like it was yesterday. The map of the streets, and all the little curbs you could catch air off of, and all the paths through woods, the towpath along the canal that could take you uptown to the theater that played matinee’s of Back to the Future that I’d bring myself to after earning money mowing the lawn. The locks that everyone else jumped off but I was too mature (scared) to and the trail into the woods where parents didn’t venture and where we taught ourselves to smoke cigarettes. If there was nothing to do for some reason I had a basketball court across the street that was essentially mine for years where everyone came to play. Hoops on either end but we only ever used the one side, the one with the net that came off, then the chain that went in its place only to become half destroyed and half tangled so you couldn’t get that satisfying sound of the chain swish when the ball made it through. It’s all engraved in my brain. It was 30 years ago. And it feels like I’m still there.

30 years from now I’ll be in my 70’s. I fully intend to be vibrant and present and years away from my final farewell. But still, your 70’s is your 70’s. My great accomplishments will have been achieved, whatever they might be. And don’t kid yourselves. Anyone that makes it to their 70’s has had their fair share of great accomplishments. They’ve had a fair share of everything, actually. They’ve had love and loss. They’ve had wins and losses. They’ve had boundless optimism and crushing defeats. They’ve had magic. They’ve had insurmountable challenges that they prayed to be saved from only to find out how capable, how able, how great they actually could be. They’ve learned that most of the tragedies are actually just turning points. They’ve survived what they thought would kill them. Maybe physically, maybe spiritually maybe just situationally, which often feels the worst but leaves the least scarring. They’ve bought and sold and bought. They’ve seen cruelty. They’ve been moved to tears by beauty and by rage and by love and compassion. They’ve had a life.

It’s impossible to think that I’m as far from 11 as I am from 71, but no matter how I crunch the numbers it always works out that way. Sadness is a small ingredient in this soup. Gratitude is the broth, the part that all the rest swims in. If I had to isolate a feeling I wish for you guys when you reach an age, it’s gratitude. It’s truly the key to unlock true acceptance, love and happiness. Because this gift you are given is not to be trifled with. I’ve seen people who didn’t get it, who stewed in hate, anger, resentment and ugliness and it’s not worth it. It’s scary to be truly vulnerable but it’s also necessary if you are going to ever be able to feel what all of this can be.

I started writing when I was not much older than 11. Back then it was the muse that would get to me. It might be months on end of filling notebooks or it might be years of living and reading and thinking and learning, not once putting pen to paper. Putting the pen to the paper was great. Not in quality of the work, but in the quality of the time spent producing that work. When there’s so much to say, things you’ve only just figured how to articulate, so many things that you don’t know how to keep all the plates spinning and fear you won’t be able to get out this new piece of knowledge, this new way of understanding how the world is all connected, but it organizes itself, you let go of trying to hold on and you find yourself simply flowing. It’s remarkable. It’s playing pool on beers three and four, the angles appear to you effortlessly and you execute their plan intuitively and confidently. It’s a jump shot going down for days, the hoop starts to look bigger, like it’s looking at you and you know you can’t miss. It’s finding a task that excites you and becoming so enmeshed in it that you lose awareness of yourself and function fully engaged. It’s a way of refreshing yourself to be so fully immersed. It feeds you and gets you back to full. It’s a glorious feeling that has occurred to me at the keyboard and with my open notebook. I hope you both find something that replicates that feeling. It’s so gratifying.

I shared it with a handful of people from time to time. It was hardly their fault that they didn’t fully understand the task they’d been assigned. They were to merely report that it was brilliant. Transcendent. Perhaps they could have questioned what it was I was doing wasting time working when I was sitting on a goldmine with this massive and massively beautiful talent. Instead they said hurtful and mean things like, ‘It’s really very good. I really like it.’ I eventually would recover and write about how cold the world can be to an artist.

Then you two came along. Turns out you guys were just the kick in the ass I needed to start living the life I talked about wanting. I started with a terrible first attempt at blogging while mom was pregnant with Charlie. Writing has always been my way of logging memories. Not just of events, but also of experiences. Of feelings and thoughts. And even in the excitement before I met you, at the mere thought of meeting you someday, I had to start building my collection of memories up. But I couldn’t do it. I’m embarrassed actually by the things that were there. I’m not kidding when I say this, I was literally the only person to have ever seen this blog. Even your mom, who was kind and supportive only heard what I read to her.

That fear of being fully exposed, the fear of being vulnerable in front of people, it owned me. Not just in what I had written but in life. My life was in service to never feeling vulnerable and exposed. Ultimately it’s a goal you can accomplish and many men do, but it’s a goal you’ll regret achieving. It’s fools gold. As men you need to know, feelings are often hard for us to understand and to recognize, but when you do notice something don’t succumb to the foolishness of thinking you can outrun yourself. You can’t. That game is rigged. You can’t avoid feeling vulnerable or exposed. If you do you might make it through protected, but you will have lost the only opportunity you have to live a great life.

Sure, I am a proud father and I would not at all be surprised if you accomplish a great many things in life that would make your resume a thing to be envied. But I can tell you right now at 2 and 4 you each have the chance to have a great life. A beautiful life. But if you hide from life, avoid pain and discomfort, try to keep who and what you are covered up, you’ll get to the end and realize you wasted the whole damned thing. I’m so thankful to you both for being the unwitting teachers who clued me in to this.

Before that it was your mom who crumbled the walls. She helped me understand that I had to stop hiding from life. Which I did actively through passivity until she helped me engage and be vulnerable in front of just one person. Her. In doing so I saw what I’d been missing.

Writing here has taken many turns I didn’t see coming when I started. I’ve had some successes and it’s been great. I hope there are more. But in the end, this, the developing dad blog is about you guys. Even the parts that are so clearly about me and my journey. Some day I’m not going to be here and you’re going to be left with an understanding that you didn’t know as much about me as you wished you did and it’s my hope that this can be a small supplement to your record of me, mom and our family. Not just when I’m passed, but before that as well.

I want you guys to have the chance to read about how we were with you each and how much we loved you. How obsessed we were with you. I want you to know who I was growing up. I want you to know that I’ve made huge mistakes and lived to tell about it. I want you to know that I’ve been really depressed for long periods of time and even thought about ending it all. I’ve even taken comfort knowing it was an option. Then I want you to read about the amazing wonderful life I got to live instead. I want you to know that therapy is something you can do. It’s like working out and eating right. Therapy can be part of being healthy and you should never ever feel anything is beyond repair. I want you to know fully, from my own words how flawed and human I was. I want you to know that I was funny. Sometimes in really inappropriate ways, though I’ll probably hide most of the really blue material (I also want you to know I love old phrases that were not even a part of my life, but once found I incorporated them into my language, things like ‘blue material.’) from you guys. I want you to know that I made bad decisions and that none of them were as bad in the end as they may have seemed at the time. I want you to know that I had a big heart and my work meant something to me.

I want you to have a chance to meet the me of 41 and hear about what I thought about. I want you to have a place to go if you’re ever curious about who I was when I was growing up. Your parents voices are your native language and I want you to have this always here so you can hear my voice in your head saying my words to you when I’m gone. I want you to hear me say I love you, Charlie, with all my heart. I want you to hear me say I love you, Teddy, with all my heart. I want you both to know how much this life has meant to me because I got to be your dad. I want you to know I just cried a little after saying that.

I want you to have all of this, all of me for as long as you want it. I want to be there in the only way I can be at the times you’ll wish I was there but know I can’t be.

I love you with all of my heart, Teddy.

I love you with all of my heart , Charlie.

5 Lessons Learned While Hiding in the Other Room

Have you ever taken a step back and tried to understand your toddlers understanding of the world? If not take a minute sometime to just observe. You might be surprised by what you find.

From time to time I am home alone with the boys for an hour or two on the weekends. It’s not often, but it happens and when it does I do my best to hide from them observe them from afar to see what I can learn about what they know. Here are a few of my conclusions.

You don’t at all have to teach a child to hate – To the contrary. They come to it quite organically. That said, they have nary a care to your race, creed, sexual orientation or income bracket. Their sole determining factor between love and hate is whether or not you are giving them what they want when they want it. Furthermore, as toddlers, this may still result in them hating you. Granted, they have only the most vague sense of ‘hate’ and likely mean something more like, ‘I’m mad at you’, but still they are perhaps the demographic least afraid to hate. Granted, it’s usually balanced with cuddles but still.
They are intuitively aware that posession is 9/10ths of the law – At least when they posess a thing. When someone else is in possession of something, and really it can be anything, that to falls under the category of things that are rightfully theres because at one point they were holding it. Our four year old likes to say it was his ‘from when I was a baby.’
Sharing is not a virtue, it’s a liability – This is mostly in regard to toys. My son told me yesterday that he wanted to play a game in which the only rules he could articulate were that ‘..all the toys in the world are mine.’ I’m not paraphrasing. He was so proud of himself for inventing this game. He thought he’d cracked a code or something.
They have a sense of natural law – You use what you got. In our case we have two boys, 4 and 2. The big one is huge and he uses his hugeness to approprate property of the younger one, be it land or durable goods. The little one, he’s crazy. It’s like he’s in prison and he knows he has to act insane from time to time to keep the bigger one a little off balance and afraid to come after him. Its an intricate dance, but one that’s mostly entertaining and remarkably effective.
They are aware of how adorable they are – Seriously, they know. They know that eventually we’ll break, whether its a laugh or a cuddle or all out crying, they on some level know that we are powerless over them in the end. Thankfully they tend to go about their days happy and grant us the illusion that we are in charge. I think they pity us.

Their is a good deal more to learn, but for now, I’m just going to hide in watch from the other room and hope they don’t hear me. Besides if they see me gorging on these Skittles I’ll have to share.

Pennants, Rainbows and Love

I wasn’t a baseball kid. I wasn’t just not a baseball kid, I was anti baseball. It seemed to me to get so much credit for so little. Firstly, it was painfully slow to a kid with boundless energy. How could it be considered a sport when well over 90% of the time one was tasked with either standing still, walking or even sitting. Secondly, the ball was hard. Like really hard, and people threw it at you. Thirdly, it was filled with guys that looked ordinary. Basketball had Kareem and Magic and baseball had fat guys that pitched once every four games, sitting out the 3 in between. Nowadays it’s every 5 games. The Mets even experimented with a 6-man rotation this year! Finally, it presented itself as preeminent. It was self-evident that as the natinal pastime that it was the ‘best’ sport. It wasn’t, not for me.

It even tried to boast about it’s groundbreaking nature and it’s role in social justice in regard to the accomplishments of Jackie Robinson. Are you kidding me! You have a ‘gentlemen’s’ agreement to ban black ball players for over 50 years and then one gets through, enduring the hateful bile of a fan base you created to be racist and you, baseball, get to take credit for the ‘transformation’ to an ‘integrated game.’ At least that’s what it seemed like to me.

As far as I was concerned baseball as an entity, Major League Baseball, should treat April 15th as a day of atonement. It was your institution, the league, the business that chose to enact and enforce unwritten rules to ban most non-whites and all black people. For more then half a century. Now you celebrate the annversary of the day as if MLB is part of the accomplishment while the only role it played was grudgingly resisting but ultimately allowing a brave man to better baseball’s station at the cost of near constant abuse. Well done, baseball. Take a bow.

To hear others speak of it when I was a kid, people who were around for it, black and white people, it’s as if it were the greatest accomplishment of the Amercian century. By far the most important moment in sports in our history. Which just didn’t resonate with me. I’d shrug it off and think, what the hell took you idiot’s so damn long.

Fast forward to June 26th, 2015. Sitting in my office I got an alert on my phone that tthe Supreme Court had ruled that Marriage equality was now the law of the land. Gay people now had the right to marry in all fifty states. I was and am elated. In my life we’ve gone from vilifying gay people, referring to ‘gay cancer’ as if HIV and AIDS were nature’s punishment, God’s judgment, legally classifying their love as illegal, because somehow we thought it was immoral. Being gay was classified as a mental illness until fairly recently. It’s silly. I should still realize that this was always absurd and that it was prejudice and stupidiity that made us such a backward society in regard to this subject for so long. But now I have context and I know that my country that has given me so many reasons to be proud and so many reasons to be disheartened and upset still has the capaciity to change, to evolve, to make steps toward perfect. That, as much as the genuine joy and appreciation and admiration and excitement was what I felt. It makes me feel very patriotic.

Now, all that’s left is for me to celebrate this day in the future, to share with my kids the amazing and indescribable feelings of the day I lived through when America changed for the better as a result of the tireless efforts of common citizens displaying uncommon courage for decades, expressing their beliefs, asserting their truth, enduring unfairnesses and abuses, never giving up and ultimately creating a better world for those to come. And when they don’t get it, when they don’t understand why it was such a big deal and why it took us so damn long to do the right thing I won’t have a good answer for them. I’ll be proud of a thing they won’t understand. I hope that acceptance will be the norm in their lives. I’ll be proud of them and of us. I’ll be happy that they will grow up in a world where at least legally, hopefully, we’ve put this behind us.

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