developing dad

5 things I didn’t know I wouldn’t miss

I am engaged the quintessential experience of humanity. I am a parent. This leaves me fulfilled and happy. It also leaves me beaten, bedraggled, frequently befuddled and perpetually busy. Not to mention strung out like I’ve been on a amphetamine binge. But fatter.

Parenthood is a many splendored thing. It is in many ways the beginning of something magical that should and shall be heeded. I’d be missing out on the experience if I didn’t drop everything in order to allow for the transformation that the process compels. As part of that transformation, and like any beginning, becoming a parent also represents a certain finality. We are no longer who we were before and while we may resist, ultimately the change is inevitable.

Please note, dear reader, that there is not a single thing in the world that would ever make me wish I were not a parent. My sons are the miracle of my life and I hold them in esteem befitting such a designation. But as a human and as a man dammit, I feel its within my rights to blame them for a few things. That said, I had no idea before having kids how so many of the changes would be so easy. Allow to enumerate those things I feared I’d lose, lost and didn’t really care that much.

1. Money
Let’s not kid anyone here. I wasn’t rich before and I’m not rich now, so to some degree the money situation hasn’t changed too much. But there was this brief but magical time between getting married and having kids when the thought of a nice dinner out and a few drinks, even at NYC prices, was NEVER filtered through the question of ‘can we afford it.’ Now, we have gone out to dinner once a month for the past two months and it’s been magical as we have recently lucked into an amazing babysitter that we love. That said, these nights are plotted and budgeted weeks in advance. In addition, we’ve become guinea pigs for marketing companies just to get the $40 gift card so we can splurge on pub fare for our once a month, 3 hour date.

2. Pop Culture Knowledge
We were enthusiastic devotee’s of Downton Abbey, but then they steered the ship into dramatic turns that hurt characters we liked and we haven’t watched an episode since. Seriously. I’m okay with this one at all times other than when I’m proven culturally irrelevant by coworkers. Not friends or family, they have known of my irrelevance for some time by now. Just coworkers. I can’t be bothered with ‘dark’ or ‘gritty’ fare that so often makes up ‘important works.’ My beaten and sleep deprived brain, surviving on the high octane fuel of toddler tender moments, which are hard to come by, will not be handed over to sinister endeavors. I’ve taken to calling the TV, when it is in my control, the ‘Big Bang Box’. Life’s just simpler this way.

3. Reading Books
I have great memories of decades in which I was constantly reading. I’m done now. Maybe not forever, but at least until I’m rich and the kids are out of the house. Until then I’m either with the kids, cleaning, sleeping or getting a too quick buzz in order to wind down the coffee induced heart palpitations.

4. Technology
I’m an old Dad to begin with. I try, you know, to a degree. But the stuff where you understand and have some sense of making the smart decision in regard to techie stuff? Game over, I’m done. Gimme the technology when it’s simple, prepackaged, inefficient and designed for mass consumption. If I need to do any learning I’m frankly out of my depth.

5. Travel
HA! Okay, this is cheating. But I feel it’s my duty as an American adult to claim to love travel. I met my wife on Match.com. The process of dating intentionally and reading through copious ‘profile’s’ of single women in their 30’s made me realize that claiming to love to travel or wishing you could travel more was a required statement. Seriously. It was on 100% of the profiles. Which made me realize, when I really thought about it, that I hate to travel, at least in the way that people mean when they say they love to travel. It sounds terrible, admit it. But the truth is that I’d love to travel if time and money weren’t factors in my plans. If I could truly experience a culture, say for months at a time with the potential for actually working and living in a place, I’d be all for that. But certainly that’s out by now. Which is fine with me.Travel the way I’d have to do it, on the cheap and with a blindingly fast turnaround and head home time frame is little more than disorienting and stressful. The reality is I love travel that is in driving range. Oceans, mountains, capes, all of these are within my a reasonable drive from my home. This may change in time. I hope it does. But until then you can count me as your one friend who boldly and defiantly dislikes travel.

The Hum.

We occasionally find ourselves dissatisfied with life. Not unhappy, just, blah. Suddenly, without warning, we feel like we are failing. Our whole lives are on display and in the way all the time.

We have a small kitchen area that has been blocked by gates since moving in over two years ago. The dumping ground it has become makes us feel bad. As has the general disarray of our modest home tasked with holding the detritus of a life being lived by two toddlers and two parents that both work full time. The fridge is a mess. There is a general paper explosion starting in a basket on our counter that bursts forth slowly, perpetually until it occupies half our free counter space, at which point we just plow them back until they so overwhelm us that we take a day off to organize them, starting the process over. There’s been an empty bottle of olive oil on the counter for weeks, months perhaps. The bags that sit inside the gate reach out into the room and are scattered between the edge of the kitchen and the door leading to the garage (not to mention the disaster that is the garage) and are so permanent that any topographical map of our little kitchen would have to include them as permanent features. The TV’s on. The monitor’s on. Every godforsaken screen is covered in dirty, sticky toddler finger prints and I daren’t guess what lurks in the back of the cabinets. The top of the fridge. The top of the damned fridge.

Adding to this is the general unwellness of parenthood. It’s true. Your spirit soars with the magic of new life, new life designed to inspire your heart to give up on all self-care in order to bathe this child with love and affection and the endless hours of work it takes to present them clean and fed and rested to the world. Leaving you generally speaking about 36 hours from a shower in either direction at all times. This defies all logic, but is so. You’re left with back pain from the terrible posture required of you nearly constantly. You are fat from a diet of kids foods often, healthy grown up foods rarely and downing copious amounts of coffee just to live. The kind of coffee binging that leaves you so dehydrated that it hurts to pee and you say things like, ‘man, I really need to start drinking some water’, while you sip another coffee, pour the water, only to find it the following weekend in the very place you’ve been looking past it since you put it down. A week ago. Full.

Then there is the noise that keeps you a bit crazy these days. Exhaustion has a sound, and it sounds like whining to everyone in ways you find embarrassing way too late, about how tired you are. You are a cliche, and that hurts when you’re aware enough to notice it. But how could you when you are so distracted by your obsession with avoiding mirrors. I mean, you look grey. Their I said it. I’m fat and grey and I don’t know if I’ll ever bounce back. To cope with this I choose candy. Lots of it. So what. The only people I’m starring for are my kids these days. Well the lady of the house too, but she’s in this with me.

Then there’s the noise. My children’s voices and the things they say take my breath away dozens of times a day. They are magical, truly special creatures and I assume my honesty on this blog I write is about the only thing that can keep each of them from being re-elected as President of the United States. But I seriously wouldn’t be surprised if they overcame that too. They’re that amazing. But the reality of each day is that your toddler can be amazing 36-48 times a day and still leave you with hours upon hours of really challenging behavior. Challenging behavior that comes with tears and maniacal comic-book-villain laughs and screams just to scream, just to startle you into looking, only to find a giant ear to ear grin on this little boy that just screamed like he was being stretched by Prince Humperdinck’s henchman. All to the soothing sounds of the most infernal and dastardly aural creation the world has ever known: The Fresh Beat Band. Actually we haven’t really watched them in a couple years, but I still hear them. Everywhere.

The mess. The Exhaustion. The noise. The work. This hum that so annoys me each day. This hum that I can’t stand at times. This hum that causes my wife and I to lose patience with each other far more often then we’d care to admit. This hum that we so desperately wish to quiet will one day fully dissolve. Already the nights are longer, and the boys are bigger and if pressed I can become sentimental about 3 AM wake up calls for feeding and the tiny fingers that looked like a dolls.

The thing about this hum, this hum that I have a really hard time embracing and complain about far more than I ought to is that it will someday disappear. The corners will be clean, as will the counters and the floors. The TV will be on to entertain only us and the noise of a full house will dissipate and be replaced by more pleasant and welcome noises. We will be allowed to enjoy silence, sweet sweet silence. The exhaustion won’t ever fully go, but it will get more manageable. The hum will fade, like all other things, to history. When it does I suspect I will relish the clean and the quiet. It will allow me all the free time I’ll need to look back and appreciate all that was done here. To appreciate the times I couldn’t appreciate fully in the moment. To fully embrace and love the hum that I’ll never get the privilege to be enveloped in ever again.

My Life in Stories

We have two boys. Two separate but intertwined stories. I’m lucky to be here at the start of their tales. Amongst the first things that became evident was that I was not going to see the end of their story. I can’t even hope to see these stories through to their natural end. Nope, these tales are meant to extend beyond me.

My life has been anchored around stories. They have been a tether to the world and to the people in my life for as long as I can remember. I have loved movies and television my whole life, but in my heart I’m a reader. These days, with two very active little boys I’m often only a ‘reader’ as a description of who I was. That said the nights are getting quieter and longer, slowly but surely I can now begin to think of building a bedside tower of books to read for sheer pleasure.

I’ve had my nose in books since I was a kid. I used to sit on the landing at the top of the basement stairs, atop loosely stapled carpet, door to the “living’ part of our home closed, sequestered in my private little compartment, feet on the steps, bare bulb overhead atop the dangling string used to turn it on and off. There amidst the stored 2 litre bottles of Adirondack sodas I’d read through the scripts of the plays I’d seen my older brothers perform in middle school and high school productions. I’d read all the lines and all the stage directions and recreate Oklahoma! in my head. I’d devour the scripts to Cheaper by the Dozen and Sweetest Little Girl in Town for the hours between getting home and being beckoned from the kitchen just on the other side of the door beside me, to the dinner table.

On occasion we would go up to the Seymour Library and I’d look for scripts by Rogers and Hammerstein. I’d investigate the section filled with scripts until we were leaving and I was forced to pick. It was what friends of mine would do at the record shop, what I still do at book shops if I can steal a half hour in the afternoon. This was all before I was 10. I’d get a stocking stuffer book about Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabar of the quality you used to see at drugstore checkouts. Books with all the slapdash appeal and accuracy of neglected Wikipedia entries on singers of little note from bygone era’s. I’d read that biography time and again until it was incapable of maintaining its structural integrity. Then I’d read it ten more times, being sure to keep the many loose pages precisely where they should be. As a teen I would discover novels. I’d go through phases. A little Holden Caulfield here and some Phillip Pirrip (Pip) there. I’d take the Electric Cool Aid Acid Test in college, not a novel but so full of eclectic and eccentric characters that it read like one. This would spark my curiosity about Kesey and his perfect representation of how we all got it wrong. I’ve come to think of that type of outlook as misguided and stereotypical of my young manhood. To be fair though, he wasn’t altogether wrong, but as I went on my tools became more refined and I gave more credit to my specific history and I fell in love with John Irving. The early striving and reaching and failing of Water Method Man or the so-close, pre-brilliance of Garp, the tease that made you know that something great was to come. It did with A Prayer for Owen Meaney. A fairytale of the neighborhood sort. The story was so great I didn’t care about the clumsy attempts to make a statement of the moment in the midst of an allegory that was timeless. I followed Mr. Irving to India and to the prep schools of the fifties and sixties and the Hotel New Hampshire and felt like I was getting a private tour of a brilliant mind trying to understand the complexities of the human heart. It was thrilling and I relish visiting their still. I’ll skip alternate chapters in Owen Meaney now to avoid the now dated commentary on the political realities of the time it was written. I’ll read only the first half of A Widow for One Year. These are my stories and I can consume them however I like.

I moved on to Russell Banks. He is still the pat answer for the question, who is your favorite author. I didn’t have the patience or inclination for the early stuff. It was designed to spit at convention and in so far as it buttresses me when i know its right to spit at convention, it was helpful, even not reading it. But everything from the blended cultures and New York upState teen life of Bone to the Hardscrabble New Hampshire of Wade’s life were and are things of brilliance. Being in these books are some of the most wonderful times of my life, reading these books and discovering a tender hand at the helm of such hard stories of hard lives. The pure intellectual self satisfaction with which I read the account of Owen, the youngest son John Brown, as he told his tale like it were a gospel, and for him it was as John Brown in fact made himself a bit of a god while pushing us to confront our sins. He was as much a True Believer when it came to god and to abolition as ever there was. The book was a tome. And it was and is something I’ll carry with me forever.

I have had a very real and vibrant life in stories. They have provided me with a language to understand, organize, proclaim and make sense of the story of the life I’m living. What none of them have prepared me for is being a bit player on the outskirts who dies half way through. But to some degree this is where I found myself after Charlie was born.

At the moment, a phrase that is pretty much the entirety of my life since having kids, I don’t often think of the end of my story. In fact I rarely think of my story at all. Not that it’s not important, and their are certainly things that bring it to the fore now and again, but

Before I was a parent, I was the author of MY story. I was the maker of worlds and the decider of fates. Granted, on a small scale, but still. To some degree, to be the author of my tale was the ultimate power I could wish for. Since having the kids I’ve lost all that authority. Now my life and its schedules are determined by the needs, and frankly, often, by the wildly swinging vicissitudes of two toddlers, who with all the authorial power, but none of the awareness or judiciousness of a good storyteller, throw chaos like beads from a Bourbon Street Balcony on that which pleases them and threaten with tears and tantrums if they are displeased by something so slight as having to endure a moment’s boredom. I am completely out of the moment to moment control and authorship game when it comes to my life. My story is now one of messiness and disorder and to be honest, I never knew that I’d so appreciate losing the long view of next week or next month in favor of trying to manage and please minute to minute while always attempting to ensure safety and security measured now in years and decades.

Before kids I was having a great time steering the ship and living my story. But there was a terrible reality that started to creep in. The terrible reality that this is a story with an ending that is coming ever so slightly into focus. Looking 30, 40 or even 50 years out, there it was. The lines were blurry but I’d started to recognize the colors of that portrait. It was navigating, this knowledge that we all have at an early age, from my head to my heart and becoming more real for taking up residence in both.

Thankfully, I’ve come to understand better the larger view. I’ve sacrificed my central role in the story to be sure, but I’m so much happier now. In this story. In their stories. Still a featured character, one with impact and one with an important role to play in the stories of our protagonists, but more to the side of the main characters. For my graciousness in ceding the lead role I’ve been given a new perspective. A new perch. I’m still headed to where I’m headed, but now it happens in the middle of the greatest story I could imagine, one designed to be of more interest and import to me then nearly anyone else on earth, rather than at the end of a story that was mine, but which never grew to live beyond me. I’m a part of a larger, more inclusive and connected story now. I’m a part of something bigger, better and far more enjoyable.

Facebook, Parenthood and the Bursting of the Bubble

Parenting is isolating. Kids make you a recluse. Many of us find our way to Facebook. From what I’m told Facebook has gone the way of the dinosaur insofar as social media is concerned. Which is fine with me. Gets rid of all the youthful riff-raff and their unintelligible slang. Seriously. I’m far more comfortable with outdated technology as long as I’m rarely asked to change and can avoid being constantly reminded of my impending irrelevancy. Anyway, Facebook is where grown ups, people of a certain age can see and be seen. It’s a place to brag and to bitch. And to bitch and to bitch and to bitch. It’s a place where, if you construct your network right, you can find endless support and understanding from peers in the same boat not to mention a good deal of criticism and snark. Some warranted, mostly just the rantings of similarly frustrated people enjoying the most wonderful, treacherous days of their lives, looking to act out.

As one ages and creeps toward ultimate decrepitude one becomes wistful for times past. Times that our psyches have ably transformed from the real life reality they were into a magical utopia of proper thinking and moral rightness. I find myself judging things that are new (in this case meaning things my parents didn’t do or have, be they normative parenting expectations or technological doodads) to be lacking in a certain moral fiber that allows me to judge them righteously rather than responsibly. This is the ‘young whippersnapper’ maneuver, and I’m growing quite enamored of it.

We have lost something valuable by not ever losing touch with our peer groups. Their used to be a natural incubation period after having kids that we’ve lost due to constant interconnectedness. Someday we’ll evolve to intuitively know how to handle being in front of everyone we know and having a front row seat while they stand before us. We’ll know how to consume the media in an intelligent way that allows us to know the tricks that both our friends and our minds are playing on us. But that won’t be me. For now, for me, there’s something lost by not becoming a hermit for a decade or so after you have kids. It’s the way nature and my environment trained me to navigate such a traumatic and magical transformation.

In the past we all had kids. Over time the acceptable ages for this (attention-seeking) behavior has crept ever upward. Until now, when I’m engaged in the absurd task of caring for toddlers in my 40’s. Seriously. This is where I have failed nature. This isn’t the way this is supposed to be done. One by one, or occasionally two by two, we all split from our various friend/social groups. Facebook is a help this way as I can remain a voyeur on my former mates, but the truth is I don’t stay in touch. Its an aspect of my character. I used to think it a flaw, but its not. Just who I am. Having this window into my former lives is hugely valuable. It’s also somewhat detrimental. You see, I was meant to go into a bubble, hermetically sealed from the eyes of others, for years. I was meant to do so in order to fully allow me the time to transform into a standard issue dad, delighting in the originality of my bad puns and relishing the comfort of my ever diminishing fashionability. A sense that in my case was formed in the era of skater/grunge/B-Boy styles that has thankfully left my formerly clownishly oversized clothing nearly perfectly fitted now that I’ve ‘grown’ into manhood. Further more the bubble is a place populated by your parents and siblings and neighbors with similarly aged kids and it was here where you learned what you were supposed to be like. But not anymore. Now we hide from our neighbors, hang on desperately to our classmates and original peer groups and never allow ourselves the period where we are supposed to fully forget how we are viewed by anyone other than our kids and our spouses and our larger family. That blessed bubble has been burst.

In the bubble your non-parent friends took on the same feeling of irrelevancy to you as you did to them. You knew something they didn’t and you knew you couldn’t ‘tell’ them anything you’d learned. They had to find it for themselves. And you went about grocery shopping and eating dinners at home and raising kids and building a foundation and ensuring healthcare and playing chauffeur and doing laundry, good god the laundry, and midnight feedings and 4AM cuddles and reading books a thousand times and living like children yourselves eating recooled leftover chicken nuggets and half apple sauces 4 nights a week and turning every available floor into a play area and generally living in a home too messy, though thoroughly sterilized, to ever host friends and barely passable to host family. You know, doing the day to day stuff that would allow your kids to go out and one day have the same disregard for their friends once they had kids because its the circle of life.

In the process you grew to care less and less about what others thought and started to anchor your life around your couch, kitchen and your place of employment. You lost touch with culture and one day realized you hadn’t seen any of the movies nominated in five years, but you know every word to every Pixar or even Pixar-ish film that’s ever been made and you like it that way. Whole presidential campaigns and fashion trends would pass without your notice and you’d find yourself thinking of a night out to The Macaroni Grille as a treat. It would go like this. For years. Decades even.

You’d also get to navigate boyhood again, making many of the same mistakes, but fixing some and taking pride in the fact that those things you avoided the second time around were out of the lineage and wouldn’t even be issues for your grandkids. And in the process, the person you were helming this seemingly out of control ship with was that beautiful girl you couldn’t believe liked you all those years ago and you are now family with her, the only immediate family you’ll ever have who was totally chosen, picked out special, and you are in more than love with her. You’re in LIFE with her. With her alone. She’s the only one that gets it. Gets it the exact same way as you do. And you are in love again, but a better kind. A more complete kind. You’ve done all the work together and you’ve beaten out any of the doubt or concern and are fully yourself and made to feel great about yourself, your fatter, less relevant, but fully realized self.

There was something nice about a world where we simply retreated to build a safe bubble for our kids to grow up in and ourselves to grow unselfconscious in. Where the world was not dominated by competitive parenting. Where we befriended other families at the park and on the street and they became our family friends. Where our only advice came from our own parents and siblings and not the ‘new parent industrial complex’ out to capitalize on our natural feelings of inadequacy, out to exacerbate and exploit them so we’d buy and buy again their book, their foods, their methods and anything else they can charge us for. A place you could emerge from culturally irrelevant and personally powerful. Clad in polyester pants with a too high waist looking the embarrassment you are to your now prepubescent kids, proudly out of fashion and unfit. Providing them a model of the ‘truly cool’ person who cares not what the world wants them to be but rather places value on that which is truly important in seeking and finding lasting happiness. Forget having good self esteem. You were past that. You knew who you were and what that meant. You were a parent.

But you whippersnappers with your fancy ‘thinking machines’ and the facebook have gone and ruined it.

Bah..

Endless Winter and the Next Great Generation

‘Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

…

… Hell no! And it ain’t over now!’

-John Blutarsky, Delta Tau Chi

I realize that the long term models are calling for a thousand year night and infinite coldness. I know there’s no end in sight to this permafrost. Who’s to say when this winter will end. Could be as soon as this spring. That’s just the optimists view though and I know from all your endless thermometers and ceaseless single digit and negative degree temperatures that we may not survive this thing. In fact the only data that speaks to our survival is the endless drumbeat of all history. So let us now talk about how it is we want the survivors to remember us when they come across our tools and remains and ruins. Do we want them to construct a civilization that chose to wave the white flag of surrender at this, our coldest hour, or do we want them to remember a brave if freezing people determined to to live while living and not folks that gave up at a time when we were faced with this, the greatest of challenges.

I am not stone hearted and I too bemoan our fate. But I have children and it is my duty to make sure that the number of days we have left in our lives is forever surpassed by the life we have left in our days.

I have taken to describing to them the feel of grass between their toes. To sharing with them the meaning of the word sunlight and developing simple experiments that can be created out of our household stores which, though dwindling, it remains imperative that we use them to foster their sense of discovery. For if my children are the lucky ones that survive this I want them to have some sense of what normal life was like before the ice age that has robbed them of so much that I took for granted.

The depression and the sense of general unwellness has been well documented. While it is not all defined as a response to the harsh reality we confront, if you look through the content being distributed by your network of friends you’ll notice a theme of darkness and depression. Of general defeatism. And I am here to say, STOP THIS.

I acknowledge that there is no great likelihood of this ending and us once again knowing the joys of warm sunshine on our skin. I shall likely forever long for the sounds, smells and visceral joys of a day at the ballpark and I weep that my children won’t know the same. While the stores of food for humanity will likely deplete rapidly it is now time for us to cultivate sustainable agriculture in this new landscape that is unforgiving and refuses to nurture and foster our historical crops that will become boutique items that can only be grown in green houses. Sure, we’ll develop these resources further, over time, but what will I do to teach my children of the joyous sensual delight of eating an apple off of a tree or picking wild blackberries that were once so prevalent just beneath the snow they will now know as there native landscape.

The reality that we will never again be truly warm and filled with the invigorating sunlight that once lasted late into an evening of a summers day challenges not only our minds and our bodies, but no less then our very souls. I say stand up and throw off the shackles of our former lives and learn to live anew. Fight the darkness with all you have and curse the night and do not allow it to hold sway over you. For we are the greatest animals to ever live and no threat to our existence has ever defeated us. For we have seen the stars and been so awed as to decide to visit them and have done so in less then a century since converting from whale blubber to oil. Less then a century since learning to light up our nights en masse. The challenges that will face us are not unlike those of many of our forefathers. It is time for us to consciously be aware of the burden we leave our children. If we don’t act to change all that we are doing in order to re-imagine humanity living in a permanent state of winter, we will have only ourselves to blame.

So damn your Seasonal Affective Disorder and Curse the devil. Stand upon the shoulders of the greatest generations which have come before us and gird yourself for the fight of a lifetime. For it is nothing less then the fight for life. We are human and there is no force in the universe that can outwit us if we determine we will not fail. We can’t fail.

Courage.

Finding Compassion and Mourning Loss

Most of what I write is done in my head while I’m actively engaged in other pursuits. If an idea sticks around long enough to congeal into a sentence and if I whittle and hammer that sentence into something I think might be of some value, I jot it down. Usually digitally, but this trait is so ingrained that I have boxes and boxes of handwritten sentences from the past 25 years or so stacked in various spots in and around my house. Of those I would guess that a substantial portion, perhaps as much as 5% of them, are about the topic of suicide. A good chunk from my teens and twenties was about my sincere and often serious consideration. It was a part of my character I referred to as ‘my death wish’. For me I faked my death by drinking ungodly amounts of liquor both sadly and alone. There are innumerable times in which I put myself in situations in which I could, and even should have wound up dead. I suppose that for me it was enough of a manifestation of my feelings to satisfy me.

In retrospect I have a hard time understanding why I was so sad. I thought I was awful for no real reason. And not ‘I’m really in the dumps’ kind of awful, but rather, ‘the lives of those near me would be better if I were dead. I make life awful just by being in it.’ It sounds crazy to me now, but when you have a soundtrack of your own voice working to construct sentences around such a feeling all day every day, it can really start to blot out reality and sound rational when it isn’t ever given the light of day to be refuted by the world around you.

Another part I’ve spent a good deal of time writing about was my grandfather. When I was 12 my grandfather killed himself. I’ve written quite a bit about this privately, but so many other people, almost all of the people in my life, are so effected by it that I feel sometimes like something as basic as simply saying it, saying that my grandfather killed himself is somehow stealing the pain of others or exacerbating the pain that others are experiencing. No one tells you not to say it, it just feels like something not to mention.

It’s had perhaps as profound an impact on my life as anything else. I’m a middle kid from a giant Irish-Catholic family and the timing of this for the person that had to bare the brunt of it in my household could not have been worse. Six kids to raise, more than half of them teens and a toddler for good measure. She has handled this with grace as she does all things. Much of the story is hers, but the small part that has been mine has been a weight and I bring it up only to inform you of the root of my perspective.

There are people who will read this who may have thoughts about my sharing of my perspective and my past. All of these peoples opinions are valid. As are mine. The thing is, we all see the world through our own personal keyhole. With such limited access to such a broad subject as life, what we see through that keyhole is at least as informed by what is on our side of the door as it is by what is on the other.

There have been several occasions, most recently the passing of Robin Williams, which have brought me closer and closer to a tipping point in terms of my feelings about suicide. My thoughts about those that go through with what I thought about often as a young man. Sadly, an event in my circle occurred last night which has made me think about the subject once more. An event so sad and only sad that I find myself changed.

A young man, far younger then me and far too young to have died, passed at his own hands last night. A man I didn’t know well but a person who profoundly touched many of the lives that have touched my own. There is infinite sadness filling the hole he has left.

Until now, due to my early, personal and all consuming experience with coping with suicide,the subject,I have held very stern and fairly cold and unforgiving opinions about people that have chosen to end their pain this way. I’ve always had endless compassion and empathy for the survivors. The sons and daughters and the brothers and sisters and of course, the mothers and fathers and husbands and wives. I’ve witnessed as best as one can from a short but protected distance the journey that ensues for those closest to the person in such pain. My feelings of anger led me to a position all these years of anger and judgment. How selfish, I’d think? These were my firm, defensible opinions. Not uninformed I might add. And every time popular culture would start godding up a Robin Williams for example or before him the similar feelings I found myself feeling in the aftermath of the overdose death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, I’d find myself prepped and ready to unleash all of my pent up anger and frustration and judgment. I’d craft an impenetrable wall of logic, passion and scorn, wad it up into a ball and hurl it at the world.

With this event, with this tragic and epically sad event I feel nothing but compassion. I fear all the judgment I’ve made in the past was merely a way of releasing the anger I felt at my grandfather for compromising my family. To some degree it took me getting to a certain age so I could get some perspective. He was my papa. If parents are gods to a child as the world slowly emerges while they hold your hand, Papa’s are Zeus. To such a small creature as myself the thought of compassion or empathy for Zeus sounds crazy. But you grow up and you learn that they are simply human, just like you. You know this earlier, but emotionally it takes some time to think of them as anything but residents of Mt. Olympus. This latest news has informed that perspective and filled me with sadness.

I’m sick for the mere thought of his parents. The journey they are on now is one with no maps, no guarantees and virtually no guides. I am positively sick for them.

He was a young man who accomplished impressive things in his short time. Not of the typical, garden variety worldly accomplishments kind. He accomplished great acts of caring and loving and giving that I was afforded the opportunity to witness first hand a thousand times over at the place where I knew him. It was a place of work, yes, but it was more a community of caring and he was an admired practitioner in a land of giants. To know that there was so much love their for the taking had it been what he needed just kills me. Love of truly good people who thought the world of him. And not just yesterday, everyday. He was squarely in the middle of this powerful community. And even that didn’t save him.

I have been there. I often had to remind myself of how awfully I judged people that did this in order to keep myself from trying it. I think it was chemical and I think it was situational and I think it lasted much longer than it should have because of depressants. Alcohol. But I also think I did things that put me in a position to die, and not little things we all did a few times, real things. I’m lucky. It always surprises me when I hear people say that they can’t imagine what he must have been feeling. I always assumed we all could understand it. I can put myself at the moment. I can see how one gets there. I can remember being that age and that stage and feeling it. Intensely.

As has been true since I first found out it had happened, my thoughts and feelings about my Grandfather continue to evolve. Thankfully. Now, as a man, as a parent I have a great deal more understanding and acceptance that despite whatever was happening, he didn’t know how his final act would so effect those around him. He had no idea, couldn’t see so far beyond the giant pain that was hurting him so deeply. Whatever ideas we all think we have about the event, we don’t know. What we can surmise though is this. He was in extreme pain. He was a man that loved his family dearly and deeply and the pain was enough to block out even that. So now I take the time to feel sorry for him. Truly sad for him. It took me almost 30 years.

Meltdowns and Moments

There’s a lot of little boy in Char these days but his fading toddlerhood is grasping tightly and asserting itself. He’s resisting a change that is as inevitable as it is terrifying as it is exciting. With every transition like this parts of him pass to history and parts of us do as well. While the resistance can be annoying, we all get it. We understand more than he knows. We abhor the idea of him being independent in all the ways we are diligently training him to be. We’re at the ‘finishing school’ stage of toddlerdom. We are working to teach him courtesy, niceties, the expected behavior of polite society. As a conscientious objector to such responsibility he is reverting to earlier tools of resistance, such as crying, yelling, aggressively resisting direction, stamping feet and crying louder.

The kid is in an epic phase of melting down. He has the toddler equivalent of senioritis. He’s resisting the change that he wants. Now that it’s upon him he’s freaking out. When I think of it this way I’m able to have some more patience. He doesn’t want to be acting this way either. He just is discovering that big parts of life are not controlled by him and he doesn’t believe that the way life should be.

He’s taken to hurting us to test the limits of his powers. To explore the darker side of life. He is fond of telling me my status in his eyes upon seeing me. “I don’t like you, daddy.’ He’s even said he hates us. He’s four and we are the safe space to explore these things, so I tell him that that’s fine, but that I’m still the grown up and he has to obey me because I’m in charge. I tell him that mommy and I and his teachers are in charge because we know how to keep him safe. To which he says, having heard who the hell knows what, ‘but daddy, I don’t like you.’

But here’s the thing, Charlie. In the way that you mean it, that I’m doing something that makes you unhappy or uncomfortable, even though it’s what must be done, in that exact same way, I don’t like you right now. In fact, when I see you, changing into a boy, leaving behind most of your toddler ways, and for the final time putting down all of what was you as my precious little baby, I too don’t like you for doing it. Were I as in tune and in touch with my emotions as you are, and lacking all of the niceties of adulthood, I’d have an epic tear spewing meltdown too. I may not be thinking it when I’m pulling my hair out trying to convince you to take your medicine or brush your teeth, but you are beginning the long walk away from me. You’re simple need to grow up is chipping away at your need for me. And once you’ve had that feeling, the feeling I still have for you, feelings that are ever so slightly less necessary with every tiny milestone you cross, I am sad and wistful. Sometimes I yell and shout and try desperately to hold on to every inch of my influence and necessity, because, and this is where I’m with you my melting down boy, the second I was given that gift of being your daddy I’ve treasured every difficult, painful, joyful, hysterical, maddening and delightful aspect of it and I know that I’m never going to have any of it back. I’m going to grow, and our relationship will morph into other things, but I’m never going to rock you to sleep in a swaddle ever again. I’m not going to change another one of your diapers. I won’t be buying you stuffed animals at Thruway rest stops and delighting in catching you in the rear view mirror, snuggling your buddy until you fall asleep. More things will be added, but now begins the subtractions. You are growing up, and for that I’m mad at you. Don’t mistake me, I’m proud of you, thrilled for you, impressed by you and awed by you and everything you do, even the tough and challenging stuff. Its just that I’m also sad. And when I realize what that portends, I’m even a little mad.

Life is full of change and transitions and they often are as painful as they are exciting. This won’t be the last time you are made uncomfortable by change. That’s okay. The changes are okay and so is the discomfort. The discomfort and the resistance are signs that we continue to move through life, accepting challenges, some of our choosing and many that are thrust upon us. While it may not be pleasant all the time, change is the one constant. Everything changes all the time. Resisting the change, being uncomfortable and even angry at the change makes you human. Keep changing, keep resisting, keep fighting and keep crying. It’s the road to where you’re going. It’s a road with beautiful and tragic changes and sometimes it’s hard to know which is which until it’s over. But keep changing, stay curious, keep that fire that so infuriates the people that fear the changes as much as you do and don’t be afraid to be afraid. Without the changes and the fears and the failures you’ll never get to where you’re going. But once you get there, and for me that’s here, with you and your brother and mommy, you’ll appreciate every fall and every wrong turn that got you to precisely where you were meant to be.

Our Second First Date

It’s strange to sit across from a person you clearly love, you’re clearly committed to and realize that you’ve forgotten how to be alone with them. I mean how can you be uncomfortable with a person with whom you have an open-door bathroom policy. With whom you have a nearly decade old conversation going with.

I’ll tell you how. Have kids and don’t even pretend to take care of yourself. Fall so head over heels in love with your kids and be so bowled over and unprepared emotionally that without a word you both decide to fling off all sense of reason and balance and dive headfirst into losing yourself in your kids. It’s exactly as unhealthy as it sounds. We made not even a passing attempt at fooling ourselves. We were goners at first sight. The last time we were on a date, one with drinks and hopes of romance, we were entirely different people. Our lives have been taken over by kids and we gave up our other identities long ago.

So when it finally came around, last weekend, our first true date in four years. we were woefully unprepared to let the shoulders down. We’d captured romance in the wild from time to time in the years since and we are as solid as solid can be. She is the love of my life and I’m perfectly comfortable stating that I’m the love of her life. But there is no sense denying that the giant elephant that trampled our previous selves has left us with some work to do.

We found ourselves across from one another in a quiet restaurant chosen by our former selves. Two people full of ideas and interests eagerly and enthusiastically looking to share and listen to this person we wanted to impress. Those people while still in their same shells, sort of, were gone. All we could think of was the kids. We both wanted this to be about something else, but what else is there at this point? They aren’t only our beloved children, they’re also our only context for a relationship at this point. It was uncomfortable. They didn’t even serve alcohol so we couldn’t loosen up chemically to hope to spark things. Nope. Just blank stares, apologies for everything, unable to get out of each others way. It was awkward and painful. In fact, by the time they came for the order we had already decided to get a RIDICULOUSLY overpriced appetizer each, to woof it down and get out of their as soon as possible. Which is exactly what we did.

We moved on to a pub. Sports on the TV’s, loud music and 50 or so adventurous and ordinary beers on tap. It was the best thing we could have done. We both started to unwind and we removed the unwritten rule that we had imposed about not talking about the kids. We ordered french fries and onion rings and about a beer in our shoulders relaxed and we started delighting in making one another laugh. Some of the laughter was about the kids, some of it was about our own foibles. Some of it was about what was occurring in the room. In the moment. It was a delight. It was natural and easy. Before long we were up to our old tricks. I may have even convinced her to write a guest post as ‘Developing Mom’. We welled up and we cracked up and we felt a giant spark and shared excitement. We started to plan our future dating life now that we had a wonderful babysitter (a story for another time). We made sure to have enough cash to tip her graciously so as to be sure she’d be willing to come back. Two toddlers isn’t every 25 year olds idea of an awesome Saturday night. Then we started to cop to our general difficulty. It’s midwinter and the combination of cabin fever, short days and freezing cold had made us both hard to be around from time to time. Not to mention the daily challenges of raising the boys. We haven’t always been either fair or loving to one another and it did us both some good both to admit it, and to be relieved of some of the responsibility for it by the other helping to carry the load.

I’m getting excited. We learned some things on our second first date. We certainly have more things to learn going forward. But what’s becoming clear to me and I think to us, is that we have to do some work on our own at this point. Each of us on our own have to think about how we want to engage the world around us and who we are each going to be as we slowly get out from under the crushing awesomeness of new parenthood. We have to share our new ideas and new dreams of the future with one another as many of the parameters have changed in the years since we related to each other what those dreams originally were. We have to discover ourselves again. We get to discover each other again.

A few months before the first one showed up... — A few months before the first one showed up…

I fell in love with my wife almost instantly when we met. We were married a year and a half later and we were parents 2 years after that. What’s happened since has changed us and we have to take time to remember those people that we were. The wonderful thing is that I get to do it all over again. At this stage of the game there’s nothing that holds so much excitement as getting the chance to fall in love all over again with the woman I love more than anything.

On The Road Again

Okay. It was a cruel trick to prompt your interest by using the great Willie Nelson’s song title. I have two children neither of whom can wipe their own butt yet. Both of whom are interested in doing so at the most improper times. We are not ‘on the road’ anytime soon.

You may have noticed a badge on my blog as of late (a picture, to the many people, myself included who wouldn’t have understood it to be a badge) that says ‘Original Bunker Punk’. Or something like that. It’s not here in the section I write in and I can’t be bothered to look.. Anyway, this badge is a welcome addition to my ever dwindling sense of self. A much needed boost to that portion of my brain and my person that has been neglected for the years since the kids turned up. It’s me. A newer and more up to date me. I couldn’t be prouder of that badge. I’m a bunker punk.

Now I have been called a punk precisely never. So what. One things for sure, I’m a weirdo and I’ve recently become not only comfortable with that, but also proud of it. The punks that have picked me were not looking for any credentials and I took them up on their invitation before anyone could look into my bona fide’s. I’ve come to truly love the daily support and ribaldry that membership in this syndicate has afforded me. We are a fairly talented, awfully opinionated, very supportive, hysterically funny and genuinely delusional group of auteurs and authors. So say I.

So when I was told we were going on tour I immediately started getting in tour shape. Beers for breakfast, sleeping in cars and driving from city to city selling bean burritos out of my trunk. When I sobered up in a Walmart parking lot, surrounded by various baby boomers in various recreational vehicles, I decided I should go back and try to figure out what my group leaders really meant by this. Thing is, I don’t really know. What I have determined is that they were, one at a time, posting a ‘tour piece’. This consisted of answering a standardized set of questions. It was an interview. Well, shit, why didn’t they say so. I mean the whole reason I did this was to get attention, and now you’re asking me questions! Form questions, but still, that’s an honor in my book. I’ll take it!

Without further adieu….

1. What is your most prized possession?

My most prized posessions are all the handmade pieces of art and loveliness my parents have made for me. Any of my dissatisfaction with life that peeks through from time to time is merely temperamental, human condition stuff. My parents, like all parents, are imperfect. But they are imperfect, perfectly so. They are wonderful people who have taught me how to love life and the people that are in mine.

2. How do you unwind after a long day?

I used to drink. A lot. Probably will again someday. But the truth is engaging my brain in activities that differ from what my stress is induced by is the best way to unwind. TV is the norm. Books, particularly novels and baseball books focusing on the sports history before 1901 have been my choice of late. Mostly, when I have a minute, I write. I’m pretty much engaged in the activity all the time, in my head, so the chance to get the ideas out is wonderful.

3. What is one song that has followed you throughout your whole life?

I have not been stalked by a song, but their are a few that stick out I suppose. Blackbird, The Beatles I remember from my youth and love it still. My mother would sing Stevie Wonder, ‘You are the apple of my eye’ to me as a kid. I’ve always loved ‘Baker Street’ by Gerry Rafferty. I don’t know why, but it was always a song I thought was great, even though many find it mockworthy.

4. If you could give one piece of advice to new bloggers what would it be?

Write first with complete honesty and shamelessness then make it artful afterwards. For me writing is a way not only of understanding the world, but of getting to know myself, and unless I feel free to be as honest as I can on the first go round it’s usually not too good. At least on those pieces that are meaningful and connective. Funny can be applied to nearly any sincere piece of writing without harming that sincerity, but without the sincerity you’re just engaging in an intellectual exercise, which has it’s place, but doesn’t resonate as much as the really true stuff.

And finally, a quote from moi….

Nobody cares what you know until they know that you care.

And this one from my mom…

Cash rules everything around me, cream get the money, dollar dollar bills, y’all.

Deep stuff. Powerful.

The Dumb Dads Guide to Love and Parenthood

Those of you reading this are parents. If you are not a parent, go away. Go outside. Have a drink in the middle of the day. Have two. Go speed dating and drive anywhere within ten hours to go see live music that makes you happy, or even sad if that’s your thing with music. Go read a book, for hours, until you are so tired you fade to sleep. You get the hell out of here. Stop reading this instant and go live the life you will look back on fondly someday. Leave this echo chamber. You don’t belong here and the chatter of this place will only annoy you. TAKE. A. NAP. and know that we all look at you with piteous envy. Pity cause babies are awesome. Envy because of every other thing. Almost literally, every other one.

Now that it’s just us, allow me to tell you, my people, the people that will ‘get me’, what’s the what. But before that, if you go around telling people things like, ‘I never had any troubles with it. My kids slept through the night from the start.’ go to hell. Seriously. Get out of my sight. Its fine if your little magic unicorn babies were perfect. I believe you and I’m happy for you. But if you’ve been exposed to the same parent talk that all of the rest of us have and you still choose to say such things to people having really difficult times, I have no need of you. Disperse. You are not welcome here. You are simply one of two types of people. You are either just straight up a mean person that practices the unhealthy art of Schadenfreude or you are so lacking in self awareness and just plain old awareness that I don’t allow that you could possibly enjoy this. Get. Scatter.

For the rest of US, the brave truth tellers unafraid to bare themselves, failure in front (I happen to suffer a similar biological trait, come to think of it) this is our story. I wish that this were a list of misfortunes and that I would be deserving of your feelings of empathy. But it is not. It is in fact a listing of decisions made, some of them resulting in unnecessarily difficult situations, bordering on the untenable. While I appreciate the empathy you may have, I warn you now, it is undeserved. These are the decisions of a dumb and loving dad who has made many decisions that could be mocked by anyone with even a passing understanding of foresight.

We have a spare room, yet we choose to put our two toddlers in the same one. This is the result of idealism mixed with laziness. This is a standard form of reasoning for me. One that causes many a situation I regret, but one that almost never results in me learning a lesson.
We were so overwhelmed, and perhaps so old, that it took so much of our energy to get through the baby times that I walked away from a job because I wasn’t good at balancing my responsibilities. This comes from love. Pure love. Its dumb and defensible and I’d do it again. But if you’d like to donate to the dumb daddy fund please note this in the comments. I’d link to a fundraising page, but, you know, lazy.
We have had exactly one evening (maybe 3 and a half hours, give or take) away from our kids. Ever. Our oldest just turned 4. This may be the dumbest, and oddly, considering what it is we’re talking about, the laziest of our transgressions.
For all our tough talk with our kids we break like 7th grade shoplifters in the mall security office when they get feisty. Our precious little boy is now four and like many other four year olds he’s added a hefty dose of monstrousness to his repertoire. It’s to be expected and yet, it’s incredibly unpleasant. We are considering just barricading ourselves in the kitchen and throwing sugary treats at him when he gets ~~angry~~ emotional.
We have a memory of putting our little man to bed and it taking all of five minutes. Granted, the lead up has always been a bear, but now, both of them require their own hour of support, love, confrontation therapy and 7-12 separate tuck ins. I’m not really sure what of the many dumb things we’ve done has resulted in this, but make no mistake, whatever part of this is natural, we’ve done our share to make sure it is as bad as it can be.
Superheroes. We dumbly allowed these to happen. Damn. Wish I could have that one back.

Their is no amount of trials and tribulations that having kids has brought us that could even move the scale when it is balanced against the shear awesomeness of having kids. But my god, will I ever stop adding to the challenges with my own stubborn commitment to being a dummy.

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