fatherhood – Page 8 – developing dad

Pennants, Rainbows and Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food Allergy PTSD

Parents of kids with food allergies tend to have a form of PTSD. It’s a commonality that ties us together. We get it. We know when we’ve run into another parent who understands us. Most parents empathize, but only we can truly understand.

At least that’s how we feel.

Food allergy PTSD leads to a lifetime of sensing threats around corners, threats both real and imagined. We have intimate knowledge. We have the knowledge you can only get when you are holding your baby and running for help while he is dying in your arms. The one job we are tasked with above all others, to keep this child alive until he can do so on his own, is slipping away and every second counts and you know, KNOW that were this a hundred years ago you’d be burying your baby. Having survived it you are changed. Broken. You are facing a changed landscape and a changed job. It’s unfair but it’s pointless to dwell on it.

I remember thinking terrible things about the parents of young kids at Target or Wegman’s or any of the other places one finds themselves mixing with young families before having kids of one’s own. I remember thinking, ‘Wow. How can they talk to their kid like that? It’s just mean. I’ll never be like those people.’ I remember thinking of friends that had a kid, ‘I’m tired. I’m always tired. Who are these people that think they’ve cornered the market on tired.’ These were reasonable thoughts to have. I had no freakin clue what the hell I was talking about. Having no clue was my perspective. Still is in many areas of life, to be honest. The fact that it was completely uninformed and laughably ignorant doesn’t invalidate that perspective.

The only thing that could revoke the validity of my perspective was having kids. Since then I have caught myself scaring my three year old into compliance during a short trip to Target. I like to think that my terrifying, clenched-jaw frustration was less upsetting to the ecosystem of the store than the screeching of others. Of the parent of three trying to get the grocery shopping done without a full meltdown, but to anyone that saw me around a corner, grasping the scared little boy’s biceps and staring him in the eye with the insane focus of a cartoon villain I’m certain mine would be the one more deserving of a call to CPS. Dad scary can be truly scary. I remember this from my dad, who I knew all along was the most gentle and loving and thoughtful father the world has ever seen. But toddlers require different. My mother once caught me at 5 or so playing with matches inside a camper and when she told me ‘Just wait til your father gets home.’ I knew enough to be terrified. Since it is required to scare kids early on to make the point, we change. We have to. And when we do we feel shame around other parents who might be having a good day while I’m staring at my little boy and doing my best impersonation of DeNiro in Cape Fear.

When it comes to other people and our kids food allergies it’s insane to think they can have our intimate knowledge even after they’ve heard our harrowing tale. Only we have that. That’s why we are each other’s best support. We can speak shorthand. We can elaborate on our stories, on our near misses with one another and know that we are understood. Regardless of how compassionate, empathic, caring and sensitive we are, for most of us, we’d be lying if we said that we didn’t change when it happened to us.
For many of us there’s residual shell shock and we find ourselves frantically unloading on kindly people that will listen and simply increasing our volume because why shouldn’t everyone share my perspective and this fight. At least all parents. My god, your hummus and carrots are a literal loaded gun free to be played with in any room where my little boy is. Don’t you get that? Is hummus really that important to you? ARGH!! You’re awful!!

Intimate knowledge can be like that. It can seem so true to you, so elemental that you forget there was a time before you had acquired that knowledge. Acquiring it leaves you changed. When I became a dad I was surprised by a few things. Certainly the amount of time there is in 24 hours. I thought I had that concept down, but I was way off. I was surprised by how aware of my own mortality I became. That’s how the responsibility hit me I suppose, that and the love. Also, I was surprised by the instant sense of connection and empathy I felt for parents everywhere. We can get as modern as we want but the primal nature of holding your newborn baby, however he or she got to your arms, is universal. Nothing was the same ever again. Almost immediately I was sliding away from my former perspective and a new life was stretching out before me. As it unraveled it revealed understandings of my life and its meaning. Now that I was here, on this side with the other folks that had had this beautiful and magic epiphany, I knew it was where I wanted to be. I proceeded on this path and began to find less and less in common with the people who hadn’t had kids. I was fully a parent.

Then I was born into a smaller family of parents. The rare club that was more exclusive and less desirable. I became a food allergy PTSD dad. I became a husband that had to relearn how to relate to his family and the world with this terrible new knowledge. Our son had an anaphylactic reaction to a single bite of a sandwich with a small amount of dressing on it that contained a small amount of sesame and it nearly killed him. It would have had a seed fallen to the floor from our bagels or our Chinese food that we had eaten regularly that first year and he had gotten to it while we were in the other room. Its traumatic information to live with. As hard a time as I had relating to parents before having kids, and as hard as it became to relate to people without kids after having them, it is now equally hard to relate to parents that don’t worry about their kid’s immediate environment every minute of every day. I just don’t get them. I can’t. What’s worse now, I somehow feel like they should all be able to relate to me. The childless, the parents of kids without life threatening food allergies, everyone needs to be in this thing with me. Right?

It’s easy and understandable to lose perspective. Sometimes it’s even advisable. And since it’s our kid’s lives I’m all for erring on the side of crazy if there’s any question of safety. But from time to time we have to poke our heads out of the bubble and remember that it’s a great big scary world out there for a lot of people. For a lot of reasons.

In my son’s classroom, where they will see me and confront me and Charlie every day, I may need to ramp up the nutty. Perhaps it will cause that extra attention when it’s called for, which it may never be, to save my son’s life. But if I want my message to be heard by the people that don’t have reason to understand my plight intimately, it’s my job to learn what invisible realities they are facing and try to share in those struggles. To not be so blinded by the dangers of the world as to forget that others have children suffering even worse, more assured tragedies. That while there are loaded guns ready to end my child, there are others whose children have bullets headed there way. That there are many parents in the exact same situation as me that couldn’t stop the grip of the unknown entity that ruined their lives forever. That it is a great gift I’ve been given to be able to know for sure what I need to do to assure my child safe passage and that I shouldn’t ever take for granted how lucky I am. That if I want empathy and understanding I have to remember that the world is full of parents facing innumerable struggles, challenges and threats and it’s my responsibility to support others and seek out ways to help, just as I ask them to do for me. Compassion is not a finite resource, it is infinite and needs to be fed constantly in order for it to grow.

Sometimes the PTSD and the eminent dangers make me rude. Make me insufferable even. Sometimes I’ll need others to forgive me for that. Sometimes I have to forgive myself for that. Sometimes I have to learn from it.

What I’ve Learned

I’ve heard that there’s no style of learning more effective than experiential learning. This stands to reason. I have some experience in this area. Here are some things I’ve thought and some things I’ve learned.

I’ve thought, ‘What a freaking nuisance. You know this is just an overprotective helicopter mom and because of her, because of these two or three nut jobs I can’t make myself a damn peanut butter sandwich without breaking building ordinances. Anywhere.’

I’ve thought, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ve got it covered. Sure, little Billy’s mama made a stink about it, but we got one of the pizza’s with soy cheese. We’re not jerks, of course we want the kid to be safe and able to have fun.’

I’ve thought, ‘This is mom’s issue. The poor kid gets stuck at the table with all the other kids he doesn’t know and has to have a special plate of crap brought out to him with his name on it. All because mom loves the attention she gets calling 13 times a day to make sure he’s not eating anything other than what is on the stupid list.’

I’ve thought, ‘Seriously, what’s the worst that could happen?’

I’ve rolled my eyes and used air quotes when explaining that a kid in my care, but not my kid, had ‘food allergies’ and gone on to explain in coded but withering judgment of said child’s mom and her hyper anxiety.

Whether it was coincidence or not it was always the moms.

Thank god, none of these misconceptions had fatal outcomes or even critical ones.

Then experience came knocking and taught me in an afternoon how mistaken I was.

Do you remember your 9/11 story? I do. For years after that terrible day anytime you were with someone you either didn’t know before or hadn’t seen since before that day the conversation always got around to your story. Your experience of that day. Still happens, just not as much as more and more ‘adults’ are not of an age to have remembered it or you’re so familiar with everyone’s tales that you reference rather then recount them.

Well, parents of kids with anaphylactic food allergies engage in the telling and retelling of their tale whenever we find someone that gets it. Unfortunately for us and our kids, parents of kids with anaphylactic food allergies are the only ones that get it. Each of us encounter the ‘me’ from above who doesn’t get it and we know they don’t get it and it can only make us act crazier. See we have to be crazy, insane, so crazy that you’d rather just bitch about me and my hyper anxiety then have to deal with my crazy wrath if any of my seemingly bizarre and self centered requests are found to have been ignored. We’ve been granted the greatest education possible through our experiences. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Many parents have a crazy period early in their first child’s life, first week or two, when they can’t stop thinking that it’s possible that the baby will stop breathing and just die. We had this bit of experiential learning ourselves and for a 10 day period after getting the kid home one of us was awake at all hours of the day and night to make sure this didn’t happen. How we’d stop it if it did is something we never even considered. Just seemed the right thing to do. Then you realize, this is crazy, if he’s gonna give us a few minutes we need to take them. You learn these fears are baseless.

Then, a year later or so, we were having our normal lunch. Then little red pin pricks around his red and watering eyes. That’s weird. Then bright red blotches all over his face and a high whistle of air trying to get in and out. Then running to the car. Then heavy vomiting as its the only way it seems to breath. Then, no breathing and beat red. Then enormous vomiting. Here’s something. Do you know where you park at the ER if your baby of 1 year of age is red and unable to breathe, turning purple and all of you and your wife and your baby are covered in vomit as he writhes to try to loosen the vice grip of the snake he feels choking him, only its not a snake, it’s his own body choking him from the inside? Where ever the f**k you want. In our case it was at the door. The car was vomit filled, and I mean covering the windows, all of them, including the windshield. By at the door, I mean they see you and guide you right to the door. You leave your car there running, doors open.

I don’t know about you, but my experience at the ER has never failed to include a stop for at least a second of triage. Not us. They see a baby, see he’s barely holding on to his precious little life and the breaths are gone, they point and TELL you, ‘RUN!!’ and you do. Your adrenaline is flooding your body and brain and you do it. You run.

When you get there you don’t care who it is. You just need someone to save your baby’s life. They do. You calm down on the outside and panic on the inside as you help your baby calm down. Eventually he’s laughing and playing and you and your wife are trying to reflect his carefree demeanor, sneaking in conversation about what the hell could it be. You won’t get answers until you see the allergist in a few days. So you empty your kitchen. Almost all of it. Because something in there can cause that silly fear you had as new parents to be a reality. Your little love can just die. It’s knowledge you carry until there is either a cure or you die. That’s it. That’s the list of all the ways you’ll come to stop worrying. You get better at living with the knowledge, but you reorder everything. Used to have a career working in the city, but since I know from all my conversations how many people think this whole ‘food allergy thing’ is being way overblown by nervous parents, I pretty much ignore that job and rest on the laurels I’d earned and after that on the sheer audacity to just show up late, leave early or not show up at all, while trying to find something that works closer to home, since you’re told that if he goes into shock the staff at the daycare’s can’t go with him, he’ll just be taken by the ambulance, terrified, waiting hours, hopefully, until we arrive. So, I take a 20,000 pay cut and take a gig, a good gig, one I love, but a step down to be sure, to be with him for the day, feet away, always ready to run. Which you’ve done once and hope to never do again.

These experiences stick with you. Forever.

Dysfunctional Bliss

This weekend I found myself in the ridiculous position of standing fast, insisting my child finish his pancakes before he could get his Skittles. I’d say its the principle of the thing, but I have a hard time coming up with the principle. Perhaps the principle is the simple exertion of authority. This sounds like bullying even to me, and perhaps it is to some degree, but until you’ve spent a good amount of your time with a four year old in your care you can’t know how important it is to hold fast.

I’ve spent a long time avoiding power struggles. It was a tactic that I not only employed, but one that I taught. Seriously. I co-wrote a curriculum that I’d teach to young adults working at a summer camp for kids with intellectual and developmental disabilities every year about the allure of a good power struggle, what it accomplishes and what challenges it presents. Then we’d work on skills to recognize, deflect, avoid and re-engage in order to avoid the power struggle. As counselors it was a no win game for them since inherently, as the caregivers, the power dynamic was in their favor. By accepting the invitation to the power struggle they were simultaneously lessening their own authority and feeding their charges defiance. Year after year I’d see the best of the best get sucked in. I thought to myself, that won’t happen to me.

Ever notice that when you take such absolute stands they almost always bite you in the ass? I feel so bad for my kids. Before I had them I was a perfect dad. Seriously. I could have easily been a dad-coach. I could write a dad behavior plan with detailed instruction on how to interact, how to behave, what to let your kid win on and how to always end at the result you wanted to and I could have guaranteed the results if you committed to the process. It’s what I did and I was good. Parents consistently praised our abilities, mine and those that worked with and for me, to bring out aspects of their child that were wonderful and yet to be seen. We were good. So what the hell happened that made me so, so… mediocre with my own kids?

It’s a simple answer, really. Its the expected answer, though perhaps one you can know to be correct without fully understanding why. It’s because I love them so damn much. It’s because they love me so damn much. It’s because we resist every separation and on a level we aren’t even conscious of, we know that we have to separate to survive. Granted, it’s decades away, but when you love something this much you need a few decades to let go fully. it’s because disappointed expectations is a part of the process for both growing up and being a parent. It’s because we each, parents and kids, think there’s some version of a perfect god in the other which is hugely disappointing when a perfect god is incapable of resisting the urge to punch and kick you (toddler attacking parent and NEVER the other way around) or when the perfect god has chosen to make a thing like Skittles and then made them ‘bad’ for you. It’s because on the grandest and most minute level we are engaged and intertwined so thoroughly with our children that in order for them to grow up and be independent we must be constantly working at cross purposes, us holding on to whatever control we have in order to ensure their safe passage and them trying desperately to gain more and more self direction in order to learn through trial and error, the very errors we try so hard to protect them from, how to navigate the world. The one tiny piece of information I lacked that would have assured my burgeoning dad coaching business its failure was nothing less then the very nature of parenthood and family. The parent child relationship at its best is by definition dysfunctional. Magically, blissfully, frustratingly and wonderfully dysfunctional. So much so that I can’t help being proud of the little tykes and how maddeningly defiant they can be.

Riding In Cars with Boys

Driving with my kids is a joy that I’ll always relish. I wrote a piece once about the road trip to my future that I took with my dad decades ago. He responded to it. In his response he gave me one of those direct instructions that he’s parsed out over the years that are offered so sparingly that you know immediately he’s giving me instructions. Were he a more crass person it might be accompanied by something along the lines of, ‘Hey, don’t be a dope…’. Not being a crass person, he just stated directly, ‘Always say yes if your kids need to be driven somewhere far away. Its the best conversations you’ll ever have with them.’ Its great advice, I can tell already.

Driving the kids to ‘school’ each day at this age when they are coming to as people, where every discovery is a process and there are a thousand discoveries exploding like fireworks in their constantly curious minds, is a privilege. These trips are filled with questions and laughter and tears and fights and I Love You’s and play that song loud’s and the rest. It occasionally is even accompanied by long stretches of silence, believe it or not. We have a long, nearly unbroken off the beaten path two lane road that takes us through a beautiful ‘country edge of town’ that allows for smooth passage lending itself to peacefulness. Enough peacefulness at least that they can breath quietly for a few minutes if the mood hits. It’s all quite blissful really. It’s the calm between the hubbub of morning prodding and deal making and the hustle and bustle of the day for both them and for me.

This morning was different. It happens from time to time. But I only had one with me. Today it was because the younger one, Teddy, has been pretty congested this week, and since Mom would be working from home today and also slightly under the weather, he’s home as well. Having moved his car seat to mom’s car it’s always arresting to see the bare (though disgustingly, VISIBLY sticky with all the drippings of a toddler through the whole winter when it’s too terrifyingly cold to clean it up!) seat where a kid, an adorable, cheeky kid, usually sits. Its even a little viscerally disturbing.

Just last week I came home and Karen told me that she had one of those close calls where somebody nearly ran her over with a truck. It’s the kind of thing that happens to anyone that drives at some point. Probably a few times. When it does it has a way of immediately reordering ones priorities and this was evident in her as she retold the tale. It was really scary and she was appropriately shaken up. Nothing to stop her from anything, and nothing to scare her off driving or anything, just palpably aware of life’s fragility. We all have been there, and it passes. It’s always good to feed that respect.

It’s a respect that I didn’t fully have until I had kids. Amongst the surprising reactions to parenthood for me has been the awareness of my mortality. It was amongst the first reactions I had after the love and adoration and uber respect for my wife, right after Charlie was delivered and made me a dad. My healthy respect for and mild fear of death became a different thing and it has remained different ever since. I’m pretty much solely worried about death because I can never ever be okay with leaving these guys. Even if it happens 50 years from now, in my sleep, peaceful and having said my goodbye’s. This dream scenario will still leave a gaping hole in my kids hearts and it’s natural and I can’t stand the thought.

The other fear, the true fear, is the fear that something unnatural could happen. That the proper order could get mixed up and we’re left without one of them, or the thought that Karen or I, or the truly awful thought, Karen AND I could be randomly run over by a truck and that’s it. Done. It’s at the same time too scary to consider and so scary it’s hard to ever fully rid it from your head. I even play out the scenarios. I can’t help it.

Being a dad is not often scary. It’s exhausting, confusing, exhilarating, exasperating, inspiring and even liberating. But occasionally, when a bit of scary slips in, it’s terrifying.

Then your little man asks you to put on the funny song and turn it up loud and the car is filled with the beat boxing skills of Matisyahu as we drive down the road having the time of our lives and it passes.

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.

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.

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.

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