essay – Page 3 – developing dad

Life, Death, Me and Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith is many things. Many of which might make it hard for someone to see his humanity. He’s a famous person, which seems to be enough of a reason for many to dismiss someone as a thinking, breathing, feeling person with 99.9% in common with the rest of us. He’s an artist as well, producing art and putting it in the world, another reason for people to feel not only dismissive of one’s humanity but entitled to say cruel things about something that a person clearly has put out as an extension of at least a part of themself. He’s also a vulgarian, a trait many of us find endearing but one that alienates many, I’m sure.

Whatever else he is he is also human. And tonight, while I was doing the dishes and listening to him eulogize his dear friend and colleague, Alan Rickman, I found myself crying. Tears falling and breath heaving in fits and starts as I listened to someone processing publicly, generously, their feelings of loss, their sadness and perhaps something so universal and personal as mortality.

Much of what I write about here is parenthood. I find it to be an experience that provides, amongst so many profound and beautiful and human things, a bridge to connectedness. I’m not a dogmatic believer and I’m not one prone to much magical thinking. What I am, like Mr. Smith, like you and like my kids and yours, is human.

One of the things I’ve learned with age is that humanity is capable of inspiring wonderment and awe. It can summon it’s natural state of curious sentience and without intending to draw out an emotional response from me, one that can take my breath away and instill emotion in me that can circle and swirl throughout my being and bring tears that I have no control over. I know that we are merely actors on a tiny stage in a giant universe and too often we can overestimate our capacity to know what meaning there is. What is not lost on us is love and death. The rest we get wrong a lot. But love and death, well, they amount to meaning to me. Meaning I can’t and don’t want to analyze or understand fully. Meaning that I want to live in and die amongst.

It’s strange to be in my 40’s with such young kids. I didn’t plan it this way, at least not from the start. But now that I’m here I’m privy to so much of life. Every day I revel in the world my children are discovering. Worlds full of what I’d mistakenly come to think of as ordinary and mundane before they retrained me. They are able to reintroduce me to the world and are able to reignite within me the spark of curiosity, the fire of creativity. They move me to joy and deliver an endless bounty of love to my life in between testing me by walking me to frustration and even occasionally nudging me toward rage. At the same time it’s a time of life when I can’t help but notice mortality. It’s creeping in at the edges of my life and it’s a present reality in the day to day lives of so many people I care about. I have visions of my parents at my own kids graduations and weddings and even holding their great grandkids someday. I can even imagine them at my funeral, one where I’m being interred at a ripe old age having died of too much life. I can imagine myself dying. That seems natural to me. But even in my minds eye I see my parents there looking down lovingly on me, happy to have known me, sad I won’t be around anymore. It’s crazy, but it’s true. Because I live in denial and fear, the knowledge, like so many of the rest of us do, those of us still able to hug our parents and tell them that we love them, that a day will come when my world will die and it will be at once the most natural and human experience one can imagine and it will also be the most devastatingly painful reality I can conceive of while still being able to live.

I cried tonight listening to someone share what it means to be human. When I was younger I couldn’t cry. Now I can and I do. If I’m really moved it’s like a fit of uproarious laughter. I can’t control it. I can stop thinking about the funny thing, but eventually I have to think of it again, and when I do, the tears and gut busting roars of laughter come right back and they won’t go until they are done, regardless of my schedule. It’s kind of wonderful. Likewise, feeling the pain, or sorrow, or whatever emotion it is that emanates from others when they are hurting also arrives and departs on it’s own schedule. This empathy is meaning to me. It’s a style of connecting and it’s redemptively human. It’s why we grieve communally. It’s how we express respect. It’s how we honor each other. It’s how we share humanity. It’s empathy and it’s what keeps us together and unites us in the end. We all can empathize with loss. We all will succumb to mortality and if we are all lucky we will all know love in many forms.

Kevin Smith lost a friend last month. A dear friend and each and everyone of us knows what that means. It is what makes us special. It’s what makes our lives have meaning.

I am so very sorry for your loss, Mr. Smith. I hope that in time you will be able to tell the stories of your friend and feel at least an ounce of comfort in feeling his presence again and having a laugh with him, or even a cry, from time to time.

Becoming The One

There’s a good many reasons I write. Most of them have evolved since I started Developing Dad. Initially it was motivated by my desire to make this thing for my kids. A record of who their parents were along the way. A place where they could go back and hopefully see how much they were loved. So they could learn from me while some of what I had to teach was still fresh in my mind. This is one of those posts.

2013-09-08 16.33.09 My father is not always prone to giving advice. He’s actively involved in helping us chew over a problem, but I think he takes a designers approach to most things having been a designer since far before he even had the degree to prove it. Or the career full of successes. He’s a designer by nature before he was one by training. As such, and as a man that will often speak of how fascinated he is with his children and their perceptions and approaches, he revels in seeing us solve problems. Designers know that there are potentially innumerable ways in which to approach and resolve a problem and he loves seeing how others do it.

‘I’m really very happy that you’ve chosen this life.’ He said to me on the back porch of my brothers house the afternoon before our big day. ‘It’s a good life.’

It’s a thought that’s resonated with me. It got my attention in the moment and has held that attention now for going on 8 years. ‘I’m really happy that you’ve chosen this life.’

It’s not passive, I chose it. I chose to give love. I chose to accept it. I chose to look past fear and doubt and aimed at something beyond the immediate. I chose to commit to it. A thing I’m not sure I understood at the time, but a thing he knew far better than I, was something I’d grow into.

I’d come close before this. A couple of times. In each of those earlier instances I walked away from the afair swimming in remorse over my shortcomings and failures. I wallowed in pity over the weight I didn’t afford the relationships until it was too late. Until I’d messed up. In resolving these emotions, past years of recriminations and loud and repeated listenings to Rick Danko bleating out the lyrics to ‘It Makes No Difference’ or Dave Matthews singing sincerely about something I was trying to feel though I wasn’t, I resolved and learned that I was going to have to accept that she wasn’t the one. It was an important realization for me. To know that in the end while the pain was real when it was real and it was honestly desired when it was feined the reality was that it was the fates and I had to learn everything I could from these painful experiences. In the end it wasn’t meant to be.

Which is a total and utter cop out.

In the end of relationships you divvy up. The reality was, to a greater or lesser degree, or just in different ways for each situation, I was at fault. And the fault that was mine to own was that I wasn’t the one. Not because I wasn’t ‘the one’ per se, but because I didn’t choose to become so. Not until the day after the day before my wedding when my father imparted wisdom he didn’t even know he posessed.

He had made the choice, the committment in his mid twenties. He was on the accelerated plan of becoming a good man and becoming the one for the girl he’d marry. I drifted a bit longer. At least when it came to relationships and my ability to be who I thought I was.

‘The one’ barely existed on my wedding day. It also existed absolutely as much as it could. We were getting married after all. She was absolutely the one for me and I look back on that day often with the greatest of memories as it was the day when we set in motion the series of events that would bring about our unending happiness at becoming ‘the one’ for someone who was taking the same leap for us. The truth is that the love that brought us to that place, through a remarkable set of ups and downs was a precursor to a life we are now well on the way to completing the foundations of now that you are both here with us. But I was no more a pre-determined perfect fit for your mother than she was for me. What I was and am is madly in love with her. Which, yes, means I’m enamored of her. But more importantly it means I’m committed to her and she to me. Through the past seven-plus years of our marriage, through several challenging and seriously imperfect times where we have both failed each other and failed ourselves, we always rebound to that committment and each time we do there is more trust, more love and more reason why we alone, specifically are the only partner that could ever be the one for the other. The ways multiply with each passing milestone of a life spent together figuring out what is meaningful to us and to each other. I’m infinitely more capable of being the one for your mother today as she is for me because of how imperfect life is and because we keep showing up for each other each day no matter how hard a day it might be. We’ll continue to do so through fights and disagreements, through joys and celebrations, through the workaday drudgery that life can sometimes be, through laughs that become the special language we’ll only be able to speak with each other that will give us endless capacity to carry one another when life strikes it’s most painful blows. I could never have been the one for her in the way I am now when we were just starting out.

11133746_10206086038933979_5520499095169659982_n The concept of ‘the one’ is much maligned by the cynical and those lacking imagination. We all have times when we question it’s rightness and that’s a part of figuring it out, but don’t be fooled, ‘the one’ definitely exists. But like the rest of life it requres two things. First you have to be responsible for being the one and don’t expect life to present to you ‘the one.’ That’s not how it works. All you can control is you and if you want to find the one, go about being the one. That’s the only way to know if you can in fact become the one for another. Second, go about being the one by showing up, every day, for that person you love. Apologize for your wrongs, celebrate the one you love and show up especially when it’s hard to do so. If you don’t you have absolutely no right to expect them to do so for you.

My father is a designer by nature and as such he has gone about accounting for a structure’s integrity from inception. When he told me that he was happy that I chose this life, whether he knew it or not, that’s what he was happiest for. He saw that I loved my bride fully and was happy that I chose this structure which hewed to the design he favored, built and tested in the life that he’d lead and was still leading, both beautiful in conception and structurally sound.

I was never so fool hardy as to think that there was one and only one meant for me. But I did seem to think that there were many ones and I just had to find one of them. I imagined that having that someone who loved me for me would make life easier somehow. And that I would do the same for her. I imagined that this would happen smoothly and easily as I simply had to find a person where this was true and I’d know they were one of ‘the one’s’ for me. I wouldn’t commit until then.

It was a fundamental misunderstanding of what love is, what ‘the one’ means. The one is not the solution. They don’t arrive fit to your life. They don’t come through the door and morph to some ridiculous, uninformed and frankly selfish version of what you think would be perfect. Instead they come through and you fall for them. That’s it. The rest is up to you, up to you both, to make that moment mean something by committing and recommitting everyday. Do that and you’ll find you found the one. The one and only one for you, fitting ever more perfectly together as you grow.

The Destination Justifies the Journey

I’m a Herb.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handle with Care

I sometimes take a picture of you because you’re just so adorable and amazing and beautiful. And sometimes I catch a hint of fragility in what the camera catches. Other times I see huge heaping mounds of it. Giant reserves of delicate. Like you’re a crystal chandelier in the shape of my beautiful boy. And then, in my minds eye, I see all the thousand ways you’ll be disappointed by the realities of life you can’t even fathom at this point. Sculpted from this thing of beauty into another thing of beauty to be sure. But still, that journey is treacherous and full of potential. Potential harm. Potential fortune. Potential damage and grace.

Maybe it’s you. Maybe I’m not just a proud dad that’s just insanely obsessed with my kids. Maybe your specialness, your perfectness is not a function of my pride. Perhaps you are magical and I’m afraid of being at the helm and breaking you by some silly decision I make that seems necessary that I’ll grow to regret years from now.

I could stare at the pictures of you, the you you are now, on the precipice of independence and I dread the pain that growing up can be.

You’ll be fine. I know that. But you’ll be broken too. You have to be. Good, happy little boys can’t survive growing up. If they could they’d never grow up. Which sounds good until you realize that never growing up makes it hard to be a good man. That’s just the way it is. It’s okay. If you figure out what’s important from being a boy you can pull some of those parts out and take them with you. You may have to pack them away for a time, but they will be there when the time comes and you need them again.

A broken arm is one thing. I can handle that. Easy, actually. But the thought of you being teased or picked on or not knowing what to do in a school cafeteria and feeling sick and disoriented because you think everyone doesn’t like you, that thought ties me in knots. I got caught up in that process when I was a kid. I cried everyday for months when I was sent to school the first time. I was removed eventually and allowed to return the following year, but by then I knew to be cautious. I knew people didn’t like me. I knew they didn’t have to. What was wrong, though, was that I looked at the few that enjoyed making fun of me and thought ‘how can I do what they want me to do? How can I make them like me and stop picking on me?’. All along there was a world of kids who’d have been delighted to play and be my friends. But I just kept trying to impress the cool kids, even shunning kids I’d have gotten along with great who weren’t at the ‘right’ table.

Eventually I figured it out and sat safely where I didn’t want to be. It was mostly fine and it largely defined who I was to the world, or at least to my classmates who comprised the entirety of the world for me then. It took so long for me to be the me I liked and was comfortable being. I learned early on how to make them like me and I leaned on that all the way through school, which I hated because of how it all began. I spent so many years not liking me, internalizing the voices of all the wrong people.

All because I had some tough early days. The types of days grown ups like to say are ‘tough but you get through them’. Days we fool ourselves into thinking aren’t all that important because we were 5 and how much damage can really happen to a healthy and loved 5 year old. But we’re wrong. We can get hurt and scar up in tender places at very young ages. Even those of us that had enough of everything. I see your precious face and your beautiful and awesome expectation that nothing breaks and everyone will love you always and it scares the hell out of me. Because some day you’ll feel weird, alone and scared. And you won’t know why. And it will break you as it must. In the end I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about the ‘weird’ and the ‘scared’. You need to get through these things. We all do. But if we can help you with the alone part for as long as possible and stay present for the times you’ll need to explore being ‘away’ than maybe, just maybe, a small but invaluable piece of you, a piece of the you you are now might be able to make it through to the other side. If it does I hope that you are able to see all the things that I’m getting to see in you. If you do you’ll see what all that breaking was for. You’ll know once again what it feels like to be a fragile chandelier. To look at something you love so much that you can’t even imagine it ever not loving you back. The mere thought makes me break just a little.

Leaning In to Failure

If you want to increase your amount of success, triple your rate of failure. This is how I remember and use what I tell people is one of my favorite quotes. I believe it’s one of my favorites because its one I need to hear as it speaks to a persistence and an energy, not to mention perspective, that is hard for me to maintain. I credit the quote to Thomas Edison. While it may be paraphrased and punched up over time, I believe this was a quote of his.

I was wrong. It was Thomas J. Watson who said that. In any case I’ve always imagined Mr. Watson nee Edison, sitting in his labs creating filaments out of all conceivable items for years on end assured that this would get him to where he was going. In my telling it did. In reality it did. Of course it got there with Direct Current (DC) and would have gotten there much more efficiently, not to mention like a trillion times more safely, had he gone with Nicola Tesla’s suggestion of Alternating Current (AC), but that is not the genius’s wont. He did it his way. Failing ever forward to a destination that was wrongheaded. Turns out his quote on failure was essentially that he hadn’t yet experienced any. Each filament he’d tried that failed was not a failure, but rather a success in proving it was not worth pursuing. A brilliant spin and one I suspect he believed. How else would he go on.

There is something to be learned here from both men. In Watson’s case, a less romantic sort then the more famed fellow, he took the very straight down the middle approach. His quote, ‘If you want to increase your success rate, double your rate of failure.’ Like that. Not afraid or cowed at all at the idea of failing. He just says flat out, essentially, that failure is the road to success. To get closer to success fail more often. Being of the Midwest this type of unsentimental, practical advice resonates with me.

Edison was an inventor as it was a time that called for them and a field of endeavor that had yet to be corporatized. Essentially there was a need and he filled it. Some kid with a podcast is going to do that in some way in the future. I don’t know how yet, but when I do I’ll write about it. In any case I suspect that he’d have been an adman in the ’50’s and a pitchman in the nineties. His quote took a polar opposite approach to failure than Mr. Watson’s, rhetorically speaking, but it arrived at the same spot. Only difference? He denied failure. A thing failed, sure, but that’s not how he’s choosing to look at it. In both cases the advice is to keep trying. Each failed attempt is merely a piece of data, another step down the road to success.

I’ve been afraid of failure my whole life and have not so much avoided it as I’ve simply quit when it was an option to do so when I knew a failure would hurt too much. I salvaged some self respect by choosing failure in an attempt to control it and fail on my own terms. When I knew I wasn’t good enough at basketball, oddly enough when I made the Empire State Games team and played against guys my own age who were so superior to me that I knew, I kinda stopped caring. When math got hard in the 11th grade, I changed my goals of being a math teacher to having no goals. When I was afraid of computers (I’m old and it was a different time, don’t judge me) and was told I had to pass ‘intro to computers’, yep that was a thing for many of us matriculating in the early ’90’s, I failed it 7 times. In fact, college was too much for me so I stayed drunk and didn’t graduate until 9 years after entering when I FINALLY passed that computers course. I’ve dipped out of every relationship I could until years of therapy and the right person finally got me through that. I was so afraid of my writing ‘failing’ that I showed maybe 3 pieces of work to 3 different people over 15 years and never really spoke to them again.

How did I get past this stultifying fear you ask. I met my wife. Then I met my son Charlie and later my son Teddy. Now if you want to see a man overcome fear just take a look at how boldly I step into failure. I lean in. I have to. I have to get to the answers and there’s a clock.

Smartest Man in the World

When Good Will Hunting was released I was 24 years old. Being neither a blue collar worker from the mean streets nor a mathematical genius it’s kinda surprising that I so identified with the titular character. But I did and I saw it at the theater something like 7 times. When asked by a friend why I liked it so much I replied that I identified with the title character. In hindsight it was clearly on an emotional rather than biographical level. But it didn’t take too long or too many drinks for me to utter the following regrettable sentence. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone in the world smarter than me.’ This pretty much sums up what it felt like to be in my twenties.

What I think I felt at the time was that I was a sensitive, angry and uncomfortable young man who was truly afraid to fail. As a result I was constantly engaged in pursuits that didn’t challenge me. Other than all of my personal relationships of course. Anything else I identified with from Will was merely the conflating of feelings I experienced that were expressed by a gifted actor. And writer, apparently. At that age, however, there’s no benefit or learning that can be achieved through uncertainty. In addition you have nothing to balance your opinions with so you inflate them with genuine confidence. I believed what I was saying. I believed that in the way I meant it I was in fact the equal of any man the world over.

I don’t regret thinking that. I regret having said it, but that’s just because of how embarrassingly naive and arrogant it sounds in hindsight. Even if I only said it the one time to that friend and whoever was a part of our moveable feast that evening. In time and with experience and with the compiling of successes and failures I’ve come to understand how innocent and inexperienced that kid was when he believed that he was a misunderstood genius. I have empathy for him and I envy him.

The middle of life is so full and such a mixed bag that it’s hard to fully appreciate while it’s happening. Frankly, being older parents may hold some benefits in this regard. As hard as it is on all aspects of your life it’s also hugely life affirming and provides visceral joy at a level so deep that it can balance some of the really challenging aspects of getting older. I’m thinking a lot about the impermanence of life lately. The impermanence of my life, specifically. It’s somewhat unavoidable at this stage as my world of origin and all its inhabitants show the ware that the years have put on them. Having two little guys running around in a fresh new world, unburdened and unafraid of what they are finding gives a perspective with sufficient weight to help provide me with balance.

The world that they will inhabit 30 years from now, a world I desperately hope to still be a part of, is one I won’t understand the way they will. On the flip side, the life of a person and that journey will be one that I hope my experience and earned wisdom may help them understand. One thing I think will be true is that some version of thinking you’re as smart as anyone in the world and when pressed being sure enough of such a statement as to say it out loud is a really important trait to have as a new man. I’m a father to these boys, so I have to preface this with the note that from where I sit it seems a 50/50 chance that they will in fact be the most intelligent people in the world. But on the outside chance that they aren’t, I hope to god they believe they are when it’s time for them to take on the world. It’s the kind of confidence even if it’s false or misguided, that the world demands of you.

That kind of fire, that kind of bravado, if you’re a decent person in other area’s of your life is what will propel you through the coming realization that all that you had filed away as that which you know about life had shadings you couldn’t see until you came face to face with them. That the confidence of your rightness as a new adult will be balanced by the crushing disappointment you feel when you start to see the world isn’t what you thought it was. That you in fact were just as full of contradictions and inconsistencies as many of the people you judged so harshly. You’ll get past this disappointment in your own time and arrive at a place where you meet the world anew, both of you changed by time and experience and able to accept each other for who and what you are.

Between the Head and the Heart

Interpreting the conversation between your head and your heart is often a futile task. At least in the moment. They often seem to speak different languages in order to plan covert operations. But don’t be fooled, while they may often be at cross purposes, these two aspects of your character are in cahoots. Any obfuscation they employ is done so with the bigger picture in mind. They each know that the other is powerful and know that for you to remain somewhat sane they have to stay in this pitched battle, each taking victories and losses in turn in order to retain any balance.

As a matter of course this means that if need be they will fight dirty. They will employ chemicals in puberty. They will engage your superego in adulthood. They will provide fuel for the id to motivate behavior. With no warning the heart will act rationally and the brain will start to crave risks it normally protects you from. They are at war but they are utterly codependent. A simple exploration of how life would be if ever the heart killed the head or if the head beat the heart into submission is horrifying.

Over the long haul you come to appreciate and respect the various strengths and weaknesses of each. Were it not for feelings of discomfort mixed evenly with ideas to relieve that discomfort nothing so much as going for a walk or lying down to sleep would ever happen. My boys are toddlers at the moment. Okay, the four year old may be a little boy rather than a toddler by now, but I’m letting my heart win this one for the moment and I’m keeping him firmly in the toddler camp. Anyway, they aren’t balanced at all. Their heads can figure stuff out in retrospect, but if their hearts want something their heads surrender immediately. They scream and cry and cast accusations at the first hint of disappointment. It’s not their fault. Their brains are yet to build up defenses and their hearts are enabled to be full actors in order to ensure that they are tended to and there needs met. The hearts are untamed, but fully functional nearly immediately. It’s a blunt tool at this point, but an effective one.

As they get older the balance of power will shift and they will exert more and more control. It’s a long way off, but I trust it will happen. And when it does, I hope they keep the heart active and strong as the older I get, the more important a role it has. I’ve heard woman worry about me and other men saying things like, ‘I worry about him. He just bottles everything up and it’s not good. I wish he’d just open up to me.’ The sentiment in these words is kind and helpful, but totally misguided.

I’ve been using the principles of Rick LaVoie, a thought leader in the world of Special Education, in my work for at least 12 years. One of the eye opening lessons I’ve learned from him was in regard to how we teach social skills to people that lack any facility in that area. More to the point, how we fail in teaching these skills. His point was that we, us parents and caregivers and educators, are often terrible teachers of social skills because our skills are SO advanced from those we are hoping to teach that we aren’t likely to break down the skills far enough for it to be useful for the student. He talks about walking in to a movie midday, when the theater is practically empty. You and I know not to sit near the 2 or 3 other people in the theater. It is so intuitive that we would never think to teach it. But for the individual struggling to understand the social environment this may be a much more important lesson to learn than teaching them to maintain eye contact, a skill that is actually much more complex then it sounds to a person with high level social skills, which is practically everyone not effected by certain disabilities that limit understanding of the social realm.

I think of this lesson often when I hear women who are befuddled by the men in their lives and how ‘closed off’ they are. Sometimes they are even hurt by this, thinking that this man is withholding something from them specifically. While what they’re seeing is true, how they understand it is way off. We are shut off. But this blockage is not located in brain and it certainly isn’t located in the mouth. Women are so skilled in the area of experiencing and expressing emotion that they can’t conceive of how different it is experienced by men. For one thing, we are less and less capable of transitioning between emotions with each shift. If I move from happy to mad as a result of something, and it almost always is the result of something and not just a shift without external input, it’s not going away anytime soon. Having a front row seat to the abilities many women have to cycle through emotions, say a number that might seem small to a woman, say 5 emotions from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed, it is equally befuddling to us that ANYONE can manage such a thing. This would possibly put me in the hospital, but it would DEFINITELY require me taking a day in bed. Most men are simply incapable of this type of emotional dexterity. The thing you experience as us being ‘closed off’ is experienced either as nothing at all to us, or we are sensing our emotions, other than anger and joy usually, as being ‘closed off’ from us as well. We’re rarely hiding anything, and if we are, it’s certainly not a ‘feeling’. The emotional pallet that women use is one that can paint a beautiful and nuanced landscape with details and colors that if men were to spend a lifetime trying they MIGHT be able to see and appreciate, but would never be able to imitate or replicate. Our pallet, if we are lucky, has the primary colors. We have no brush or canvas. We draw simple stark lines.

I was fortunate to be very close to my sisters. This afforded me the chance to do longitudinal studies from close range on the differences in how we took in and took on the world as it unfolded before us. They were and are the best friends I could ever have. If you asked them they might be shocked to hear that since I never give as much as I get. I feel bad about that, but I also know that while some of that is my fault, some of it’s just nature.

I have two sons and very little likelihood that the family will grow. I love our family unit, but wonder if they may miss out on a very important understanding of the world that I was given by having sisters.

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..

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.

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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