Tag: kids

What’s In a Name?

  I’m in writer’s groups. Private groups that more than anything else have really made me feel like I’m a real writer. Really writing actually has very little to do with feeling like a ‘real writer’ in my experience. Being allowed, if not always invited, into these private groups on the other hand is validating.

In the past week or so a couple of these groups have had discussions about the names we’ve chosen for our blogs. After sharing my story, after telling all these cool writers why I chose ‘Developing Dad’, it occurred to me it’s a topic I’ve never fully addressed here. 

Developing Dad. It’s become a part of my identity. A part that feels so natural now that I’ve already gone through the phase of hating the name and have come all the way back around to thinking it’s pretty perfect. It’s me. Rather, it’s very very imperfect, just like me. 

So, anyway…

Let’s just start with the obvious. Alliteration. Alliterative titles sell. This piece of marketing wisdom, completely fabricated by me, is the full extent of my knowledge in the field. So there’s that. 

I started writing about what I was experiencing as I prepared to greet our firstborn. When my wife was about 3 or 4 months pregnant with Charlie I decided that I’d write about what the experience was like. I’ve always been a ‘writer’, but I’d never been so publicly. So that first venture, well, it was a dipping my toes experience. I created a ‘blog’ that literally no one, no one at all, read. I mean not a single time. Except for that terrifying time I sent it to someone who is a writer that I knew from work. She nearly immediately moved across country. I don’t think it was because I shared (ugh) some incoherent, self involved, unedited mouth vomit with her, but I wouldn’t blame her at all if it hastened her desire to return to whence she came. Sincerely, I’m sorry Rebecca. I thank you for protecting my dignity.

After we had the kid I went into a bubble and got lost. I fell in love, lost my mind, grew old and weary and eventually was so broken down that I needed to write to regain a sense of self. This all occurred in about two to three months. These writings, which grew in many cases out of my aforementioned mouth vomit, became passable, mildly succinct stories. Sincerely, Rebecca, I am so sorry I didn’t wait. I got much better. I must have sent you 10,000 words. I still lose sleep over it. 

One day I heard a story on NPR. It was about a site that was amazingly beautiful for readers called medium. It sounded great and it was free, so I culled through some stories and found one that summed up how I felt about becoming a dad and I put it on medium and I thought, what the hell, I got kids now, I have to pursue, even if meekly, my dreams. How else will I ever be able to tell them to do so. So I shared it on Facebook. Well, my friends really liked it. So many nice things to say. It was a buzzing charge to my brain and I started writing like crazy. Before long I looked around and knew I had to have a blog. A place to contain it all. 

I didn’t think of it for more than a day. I was thisclose to naming it ‘Daddy’s Issues’, but thankfully I laughed that one off and went with Developing Dad. 

One way to look at it, the way I see it on the surface it that I was about 2-3 years into this whole daddy thing and what had become evident to me was that every time I felt competent, every time I thought, man, I got this, well, my kids reminded me… nope. Being a dad is not something you become and then you are that. It is, but it’s also so much more than that. It turns out that dadding is something of a constant evolution. I’m in fact always, endlessly in the act of becoming a dad. I’m always developing as a dad.

Another way to look at it, the way I’ve looked at it for the most part, is entirely different. I’m an old dad. I am 42 at the moment and my kids are 5 and 3. I have a good long time left and I’m going to make the most of that time. But being this age I’ve realized some things I hadn’t realized when I was 22 or even 32. One of those things is that I want to know everything about my parents. I want to know how they met, what they were like before they met, how they made it through having young kids and no money, what life was like when they were young, what their parents were like, why they chose to do what they did, what made them laugh, what their favorite movies were, how they dealt with losing their parents, how much they loved me, how they did so even when I was awful to them. I want to know everything.  My kids questions might not be exactly the same as mine, but I suspect they will want to know more than they will ever ask. Will wonder what we were like when we had them, will look at our old bodies and wonder why we look at each other the way we do. It’s a cruel trick life plays, to put us with these people for the entirety of the time when we are solely interested in ourselves only to take them away before we’ve had time to fully know them. 

Well, I hope this collection of stories, about everything I am, my memories and my thoughts and my opinions and my love and my humor, I hope it’s something they can come to when they want to know more. I hope that it’s something they can read and hear my voice when they can no longer hear it anywhere but here, and in their memories. I hope that if they ever question what they are worth they’ll be able to come here and know that they are the entire world to me and their mom. When the memories are all that is left and they wish they had the chance to know me more I hope they can take some comfort knowing that I left as much of myself as I could right here, for them, to bring the picture they might have in their head, a picture they will think is not fully developed, into better focus. 

When I’m gone and all that’s left of me is this I hope it’s a tool they can use to more clearly see who I was and how much they meant to me. 

That’s what’s in a name. 

My Kodachromatic Memories on Sammiches & Psych Meds today

Join me today over on Sammiches & Psych Meds as I wallow in the moment and the past…

http://www.sammichespsychmeds.com/my-kodachromatic-memories/

My Father Gave Me Love and Art

Several, though NOT all of us...
Several, though NOT all of us…

The home I grew up in, the one I’ll only see in pictures and inhabit only behind my closed eyes ever again, was one that had life oozing, sometimes tumbling, out of every corner and on every wall. Hell, the walls themselves can never fully mean to someone else what they meant to us. You see, my father is an artist and he designed our home. He’ll hasten to point out that he’s a designer, and he’d of course be right. But art is in the eye of the beholder. In fact I’d use a version of his own argument against him if he ever were to push back too hard. Not that he would, I suspect. He’s always been a dad that’s happy to allow us to be wrong and to learn in our own time. As we’ve gotten older and wiser the times that time has proven us right have increased and on this one I’m right. Just like he was when someone would say that Norman Rockwell was not an artist, but rather an illustrator. Besides, my dad’s art, much of it from his ‘art school’ days, some from the days when they were a young couple trying to decorate a home, hung all over those walls he designed.
Now ‘illustrator’, at least as far as I can tell, holds no innately pejorative meaning. It’s not an insult to call someone who illustrate’s an illustrator. But in the particular case of an artist of Mr. Rockwell’s talent and the way in which his work was received by so many contemporaries and more recently by so many subsequently, there is no mistaking the pejorative if not downright disdainful way the term ‘Illustrator’ is spit out in regard to this man’s considerable work. Now I paraphrase here, and my dad is not one given to high emotion, but I’m quite certain that my father would find this assessment to be straight up baloney. Or Bologna, if you prefer. It rankled him. His art was no less artful for being purchased. Was in fact far more technically impressive, emotive and often breathtaking than the celebrated works of his contemporaries who looked to shock or amuse rather than paint and convey. I believe these things. I did even at my most harshly judgmental, Brooklyn bohemian, cravenly desirous of the approval of the cool people that I ever was. Because my dad was right.

We went out of the way for a day on a family vacation when we were kids to spend a night in Stockbridge so we could visit the Rockwell museum and the work is extraordinary. I assume we stayed near Stockbridge. Even then it was ridiculously expensive and we were a family of 6-9 kids, depending on when you caught us. I mean, I have 2 and we’re challenged to make a day at the beach. But my dad, he was going to see the Rockwell Museum, and we were going to as well.

image
imageThe art that hung on our walls, it was and is beautiful. It was original and creative and something I’ll have a sense memory of until the day I die.There were pieces made of crepe paper and lacquer, some evoking scenes from nature others crinkled and crumpled and exploding from the the frame out to you. As a kid, even now I’m sure, I’d be hard pressed to resist feeling them, running my hands over the points and crevices, riding the ridges of the bright orange that has never seemed to fade with time. Or the hard wood drawn on with varying sized nails hammered in that should seem hard and unforgiving but convey soft fluidity as the lines denote structure and movement from top to bottom. The figure could be wind, it could be human, it could be a spirit. I could look forever and for me it would never fully be decided. Or the dark stained blocks, differnt shapes and sizes, but all right angles, creating a skyline if laid flat, and a sense of looking down on a city as they hung in their frame on the wall.

Art wasn’t just something he did. He breathed art. There was something of it in the very life he’d crafted. He is 6’3″ and as a young man, for at least the first 15 or 16 years of my life he had a big, bushy black beard. He looked, as EVERYONE noted, like a living, breathing Abraham Lincoln. He and his beautiful, loving wife had 6 kids. They didn’t always have enough to make it all work, but somehow they did. Didn’t matter, even if they couldn’t, there was always room for one more at the table. Anyone who knew us, even just a little, they always knew that about them. Many would ascribe it to my mother, a truly charitable and loving soul, but they were a team. The decisions they made were based on what served the greater good, what completed their vision of what a beautiful life looked like. For my father that picture was one that couldn’t avoid including art and curiosity, and daydreaming and all that it had given his life. He was a designer, true, but he was an artist not only of multiple media’s when that term meant something altogether different.

Art was a living and breathing thing in our home. I don’t know that this part is true, but I even think that my dad’s parents met somehow through community theater. This may be a fanciful fiction, but it’s got some truth in it, even if it isn’t fully ‘correct.’ Music, books, theater, these were all an integral part of life growing up in the Medler home. I wasn’t quite brave enough to try to participate in the creation of said art like my older brothers were when I was a kid, but I sure am happy I was exposed to it. I became a big reader and lover of novels. It was what spoke to me. They were performers. I envied them. I’m glad I’ve found and stuck to writing. I’m glad to be a part of this part of the family legacy in some small way, even if it doesn’t exactly mesh with the rest.

My father also communicated with me through art. When I was not much older than ten, maybe twelve, we found ourselves home alone for an evening. Honestly, I’m the third child in a family of six, or sixth of nine if you choose to define our family in the most inclusive way, as we all do, and this might be the only time when we found ourselves in this predicament. My younger sisters were at friends houses, my youngest brother may have been traveling with my mom, or maybe he was not even born yet, I’m not sure. In any case, I distinctly remember my father mentioning that he’d heard an interview earlier in the day and that Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie were playing at Finger Lakes that night. He really wished he could have gone.

‘Why don’t we go?’ I said. I knew Arlo Guthrie was the guy who did the Alice’s Restaurant song. I liked that.

‘Yeah?’ He asked.

‘Yeah.’ I said. I was really excited. Things like this had yet to start happening for me.

That night we just drove out there and stayed for the whole thing. It was great. My first concert. Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with my dad. A night to remember indeed. He even played Alice’s Restaurant and his shtick was pretty amusing. I had no idea how much of an inspiration Pete Seeger would become as I grew up. He seemed super old then and I don’t think he’d even STARTED cleaning the Hudson yet, though I’m certain I’m way off. I didn’t know he had, anyway.

Another time he rented Breaking Away from Wegman’s on a Friday night and said, you should watch this. It’s important. He would later rent Brazil and say I should check it out. Wasn’t of any use though as neither of us could make any sense of it.

In our home, filled with art, there was a piece of furniture that no longer seems to hold the place of importance it once did as a family focal point. Our Stereo. It was six feet long, two and a half feet tall and big. Speakers covered in earth tone fabric occupied either end in full and in the middle was a door that rolled open. Behind it were the records that were important enough to keep out, to listen to. Eventually we’d overrun his truly beautiful collection with Disco Duck and K-Tel Collections, but early on, it was magical. All the first editions of the Beatles. Beach Boys. Ray Charles. My father’s favorite band, The Lovin’ Spoonful. I remember dancing in underoos to Summer in the City. Loving the Beatles before knowing it was a band anyone other than us knew. I remember my seventh birthday and my cool cousin buying me ‘Off the Wall’ after seeing how much I loved every time ‘Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough’ came on and having something that could stay in the Stereo. It felt so SO grown up. I had taste, I had arrived, I had something adult enough to have to stay in the stereo when the doors rolled closed. Now my music, my history in songs largely stays in my pocket, on my phone. I’m sure it will seep out and as they get older more and more music will return to the air. But it’ll never hold the mystique and the mystery and the excitement that the stereo in the shape of an upright freezer in the dining room held.

The artist and the writer's... Plus some pretty cool art on the walls..
The artist and the writer’s… Plus some pretty cool art on the walls..

My father has given me more than I could ever possibly recall. He gave me life, after all. As a father now I realize that even more than that, he gave us, all of us, his life. Freely and fully and happily. I’m endlessly thankful for it. But beyond that, beyond the sacrifice and the work and the love he also gave me art, and I can’t thank him enough for that.

This Past Sunday, Afloat in our Bubble

I cleaned out the fridge this morning. I’d like to say it was an easy task as it’s something we stay on top of, as one should, and I didn’t at all remove a cucumber that had decayed into a soft husk of bursting pus that made me screech like a woman in a 1940’s domestic stage play frightened by a mouse that scurried across her kitchen floor. I’d like to say that.

Keeping our house clean is a ways off, but we’re getting better every year. We moved in to our little house, our lovely little house with  the beautiful back yard and the elementary school and ball fields across the street when our youngest was just a few weeks old. Our big boy wasn’t yet two and we were in what’s referred to in the parenting manuals as the ‘hot mess’ stage of the transition from newborn to whatever comes next. Recently born, I suppose. That day was magical despite how incredibly taxing it was. We were in a house. After decades of apartment living we’d managed to get into a house. An adorable little house on a picturesque street in a small town with great schools. As far off into the future as we could see this little house would be the perfect place to live.

We’d tried to pack for weeks, but the little one and the toddler at home made it a challenge. We did pretty good, but we paid the movers to do a bunch of it for us. We didn’t have the money, but let’s face it, we’d just sunk our next thirty years into a very cute home that we didn’t realize was so cozy (small) having lived only in apartments to that point.

Here we were, overwhelmed, overjoyed and overexcited with a newborn and an almost 2 year old moving into our first home on a gorgeous day in mid December. On an average day with our kids it would have taken a lot to get through to us, to knock us sideways from what we were enmeshed in, but on this day, the day we are moving to our family home, no chance.

It was December 14th, 2012. The day a man walked into an elementary school a couple hours away from us and murdered 20 six and seven year olds and several of their teachers.

…..

This past Sunday in the midst of our family morning we remained detached from the world at large and somehow didn’t know that another terrible thing that haunts your thoughts and never leaves your hearts had happened. There was no disturbance in the force field we’d built around this home, one that is wholly in our minds and unshakeable in so far as we can never imagine something senseless and tragic and angry and violent ever happening here. Then I ran out to run some errands, buy some fruits and veggies, pick up some mulch to beautify our little slice of heaven we love so much and I turned on the radio and I learned what had so tragically happened in Orlando. I felt nothing other than sorrow. For the people, their families and for us. All of us.

I suppose it’s our turn. Our turn to say that the world, this beautiful blue marble where cosmic coincidence has resulted in a wondrous and vibrant diversity and richness of life, a magical reality unique in the cosmos, is going to hell in a hand basket. To claim with certainty that we know the path we are on is unique in human history and march defeatedly into a future of bleak, stark destruction of all that had been so wonderful so recently. Before we came along and fucked it all up.

I feel like we are on the edge of a cliff when I’m feeling optimistic. Most of the time I feel like we are in the fall, hurdling to a life ending thud that will spell ruination not just for us but for all those that will come after. The anxiety and fear that courses through the world at this time is so overwhelming that it makes it’s way inside. It is so pervasive, so insidious that it permeates even our personal boundaries, even our skin. On days like today it hits us in the gut and punches our hearts and feels like it’s growing in strength and we, shrinking.

How much of this is being 42. Do wild eyed 23 year olds see the brighter future? I’ve worked with so many of them, since I was one, and I know they are out there, doing far more than I ever did or could to make the world better. Undeterred by all our hand wringing inaction. Is it just that now, now that I’m a dad, do I not identify as much with the victims of these crimes and instead identify more with the parents of those victims? I might. Parenthood has made me so much more capable of empathy when it comes to other parents and to kids. The fact is I see those victims, some of whom were older than me, but most were younger, much younger, and my heart breaks for how they spent their final moments, ripped from love and joy and exuberant expressions of it and destroyed by anger that was based on fear, so far as I can tell.

Whatever it is that makes me feel it,  whether it’s the same feeling  my parents might have had when they thought it was all going sideways 20 or 30 years ago or when their parents harbored feelings that the world had lost it’s way a generation before that and so on and so on or whether it really is true, it’s hard for me to shake the unease I feel about this world and what it seems is happening to it.

…….

Sunday morning while the world reacted and I cleaned out the filth that had somehow been allowed to fester undetected and undeterred from the back of the fridge something beautiful happened. I saw Karen and Charlie snuggling and talking while laying on the trampoline in the sun. Charlie, the boy who was not even two when we moved here is now five and for twenty minutes he layed in the trampoline, cuddling up to his mommy talking about his friends and his world. Trying to figure out if they could live in the trampoline. Whether they would need a fridge and where they would put it. I was so delighted that I was able to sneak up on them and get some pictures.

As much as I fear everything that’s happening these days, and I truly do, I also see many many people doing wonderful things to help other people. It so surrounds us that we don’t even notice it anymore. If you pick your head up and really look for it there is so much good in us, so much kindness being exercised in great and small ways everyday.

For now we can’t avoid the painful reality. Nor should we. As sad as it is that this national, global mourning we engage in is becoming ritualized, it doesn’t mean we should ever, ever let it slip past. No. We must mourn together to heal as much as we can, to show communal and human love and compassion for those who will never be able to move on from this day of tragedy or the many that have come before or the ones that seem will inevitably come in the months and years ahead.

When we are done living and breathing this tragedy, when life goes back to everyday sameness I know I’ll never stop appreciating those moments. The ones we’ll look back on in thirty years when we will be empty nesters missing the kids who could never ever visit enough to make us satisfied, when we look back at this time and are able to remember when the world couldn’t reach us, when we constructed fantastical worlds with the imagination and freedom of five year old little boys hoping to live the rest of their days cuddling with mom on the trampoline while daddy was cleaning the fridge.

Hello. Everythingisokay.

  I don’t think there’s a lot that could make me feel anything short of insanely lucky. My life is great. I have nothing to complain about and as a result I tend not to complain. But to say that life is an unending bowl of cherries, filled with joy and devoid of pain, lapping up happiness and shutting out fear and anxiety would also be untrue. 

My default position is of gratitude. I am thankful for all that’s been granted me.

I’m getting older. I’m not getting old, don’t mistake me. I’m just, you know, getting older. You are too. We all are and have always been. As I get older perspective evolves and I see things I never noticed before. My responses aren’t as quick as they once were, but they’re considerably better informed. I usually benefit from this. You could say I’m in a sweet spot where the benefits of maturing are still outrunning the detriment of decaying. I’m 42.

I’m incredibly thankful to have my young kids at this fairly advanced age for such an endeavour. The challenges are largely physical, if you discount the emotional and financial. My five year old, delightfully, falls asleep in our bed each night. It’s warm and wonderful and something we all love. I am starting to think, however, that he is becoming strategic in his placement atop our king sized bed in hopes of defeating me, getting me to throw up my hands in a moment of surrender and allow him to stay. I’m 6’2″ and 225 and strong and still I dread trying to lift his dead weight, sound asleep, 4 foot even, 56 pound body off the middle of that massive bed. But I do it, because I know the 3 year old is right behind him ready to awake to take up the one free space in our bed come sometime after midnight. 

These are things you don’t necesarrily see coming. There are a ton of others. But rarely are we warned of them and even if we are, we’re not really going to understand until we’re going through it. I solemnly swear, right here, out loud and in public, I will NEVER tell a parent of a newborn that it’s just as hard now. It’s not. Newborns, especially the first one, the one that teaches you everything in a nonstop round the clock barrage of ‘teachable moments’ what it means to be a parent, are life blower uppers. I fully believe that teenagers are as well. As for the rest, don’t believe those bitter, forgetful, wretched souls who try to convince you that they are as hard as 5 year olds. They aren’t. Not by a thousand miles. 

There are other things you learn along the way, about what life becomes. Again, I’m 42 and maybe some people have told me this before and I just wasn’t in a place to understand them. Maybe it’s too scary a thought to process, so you don’t. Maybe you’ve processed this long before I’ve had to as not everyone has the great good fortune that I so thankfully have had. 

I spend portions of everyday fearing that the phone will ring and the world will dissolve around me as I’m told that one or the other or both of my parents have died. My mom knows I suspect as we’ve had a couple of scares and, while nothing’s ever been said, perhaps she hears a fear I’m trying to hide in the way I say ‘hello’, that makes her hasten to say ‘hello,thisismomeverythingisokay.’ 

‘Hello. This is mom. Everything is okay.’ I have a family now and I understand, at least intellectually, how this all fits and works together, this whole circle of life thing. Until recently, last five and change years, to be exact, I’ve come off the stance of thinking to myself, I’d trade everything, including my own life, the own rest of my days, to make sure that is the last thing I hear before leaving this world. On speakerphone, knowing my dad is there listening and waiting to hear the latest stories of the boys successes, excited to tell me about an article he saw with awesome things my friends are doing in the community or them waiting to tell me about an author they think I’ll like or about the party they had the other night with some of the kids to say farewell to their grandson as he headed off for his Jack Kerouac/On The Road adventures. 

I don’t know that others feel this when the phone rings and they see it is their parents. Surely some are understanding of the whole thing and appreciative of hearing from mom and/or dad, as I most certainly am as well. Surely others in a similar situation are merely avoiding, imagining the whole thing impossible, choosing rather to continue to see their parents as the undefeatable, indefatigable pillars they’ve always known them to be, the way they still are, pushing off all thought of the matter until it is upon them. Sounds like a better way to me. Unfortunately I have a temperament that doesn’t allow for such ease of thinking. I can’t stop imagining. It’s a wonderful quality in so many circumstances, truly. But in this stage of life, for me, it’s impossible to put it fully out of mind. 

For me it’s like knowing the earth is going to stop turning on it’s axis and all life will cease to have meaning at some time in my future, in my lifetime, but I can’t know when. It’s just there. Waiting to catch me and remove the ground from beneath my feet. It’s going to hit my chest, hard. Iknow it will. I saw it happen to them. I saw there world crumble. I saw them cry and cry and not know what to do. It only lasted a few moments because they had to take care of me. I was just little after all, as were my brothers and sisters to greater and lesser degrees. But it showed up again as they had to go through the ceremonies and the condolences and the quiet nights alone when they might not have known I was still up and might be coming down to watch tv or grab a drink. Maybe I was exactly what they needed in that moment. I can’t imagine anything less than my own kids being the salvation that will keep me alive after the bomb lands on me. 

I’m fortunate. I’m in a position where I’ve never had to confront an issue so many I love have. My life is one of gratitude and as a child of my parents I’m sure I’ll make it to the finish line, my own finish line, one that will be hopefully at the end of a long and fruitful life as grateful as I am today. But by the time I get there I know I will have passed through times that will test that and I hope I can sustain the weight of all the good fortune I’ll have endured. 

I Don’t Want to Let Go

imageTeddy still babbles. He’ll sit with the Lego Duplo’s and play by himself and there is a stream of playful and emotive gibberish. He has started to use words and and pretend and play make believe with his creations and the figurines, but if I listen in the right way, if I’m able to listen loosely I can still hear the patter of the 2 year old he was.

Being a parent is a lot. Early on we weren’t up to the task. Seriously. We are excellent, loving parents. Any kid, and I mean any kid at all would be lucky to have us. But the truth is that as excellent as we are as parents, we just aren’t very good at it. We don’t revert naturally to routine. We don’t always provide excellent examples and we are just terrible at doing so many of the things that we are ‘supposed’ to do.

Our house is a mess and while it’s better than it was, it’s never gonna be an ordered and soothing environment. I like to think that has to do with our artistic bent, that our clutter and struggle to eliminate is an element of us that is strongly informed by our connectedness and the meaning we see all around us. Meaning that I turn into stories.

imageWe don’t sleep train. We shouldn’t have to at this point, frankly. Our kids are well past the age when that should not be a thing that needs doing. I’m afraid that if our kids are ever to get themselves to bed, it’s gonna happen on it’s own. For now we each take one and we snuggle and struggle and ultimately find them asleep sometime within a couple hours of getting them up the stairs and into their rooms. In my case, with the three year old it is sometimes in the chair after losing the fight of getting him to calm down in his bed. Other times it is both of us on the floor looking up at the green stars on the ceiling that emanate from Winnie’s honey pot when you press the bee. Sometimes we find the moon, other times we find the one constellation, an outline of Mickey Mouse’s head. Yep, Disney even invades their sleep. Still other times it’s on the ‘big boy bed’ the five year old will be moved to once I am able to solve this endlessly flummoxing Rubik’s Cube of a task that I am told should never have been allowed to get to this point. In my moments of confidence, a wonderful if fleeting thing when it comes to my life as a dad, I like to think that whatever we’re losing by not giving them normalized sleep routines is more than made up for by the love and feeling of security we’re giving them by never leaving.

imageWe are inconsistent practitioners of reward systems, a crime doubly indictable as I’ve been designing and implementing such programs for much of my 20+ year career. We don’t practice anything approaching appropriate self-care. The clothes are piled up, usually separated into piles that require sniff tests to determine whether they are clean or dirty. We take them into our bed and let them stay the night. Every time. We are wonderful parents to have as we never fail to give love. But we are just not very good at the component skills.

I’m not complaining. Well, not much. Now that our lives are this way I can honestly say there’s very little I would change. Perhaps I’d employ more consistent rewards or maybe I’d have a few more date nights. I’d certainly have a neater pile of clutter, that’s for sure. Okay, there’s a lot I’d change.

But I won’t, because at this point, this is who we are. We are fumbling through this thing together, imperfect as hell. I’m not saying we refuse to grow or we won’t change. We’re changing all the time, growing all the time. We’re just doing it together. At this point that means we’re messy, tired, together and happy.

imageI don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to hear through the coherent play and listen to the babbling that is working it’s way fully out of my son’s mouth. Truth is I might already have heard the last of it. That’s the thing. Nothing we do is going to stop them from growing up. Nothing I do will keep us from watching life slip ever past. The older they get and the older we get the more clear it becomes that none of it is forever. None of it lasts like I’d like it to.

It kills me to think that I’m ever going to step out, I’m ever going to be finished. With loving and watching and helping and messing up with my kids. That I’m ever going to walk away from my wife who I’ll never see again or that she’ll have to walk away from me. I don’t want any of this to change because for the first time since I was too young to understand the implications of it, I don’t want to ever die.

I want to live forever and never say goodbye. Never grow old. Never die. I want to live this life I have for a million lifetimes. Not some version of it, not some other life, but this one. Mine. With the same pains and the same joys. Now everyday that goes by where I don’t hear my boy babble, like the ones that came before he uttered a sound and relied on us for his every aspect of existence, every tiny change that moves some aspect of their lives to the past is a process. One of letting go. That is how we think of it.

I often think that parenthood is the first time it’s highlighted for you that so much of life is the process of constantly letting go. It is, but it also isn’t. It gives me some agency, some power, some sense that this is my choice. To let go. To slowly choose to hand away life one tiny handful at a time, knowing that at the end the last thing I’ll let go of will be life itself. It’s inevitable. It’ll be all I have left to hand over.

imageThat’s not how it is though, is it? I don’t want to let any of it pass. I want to live equally in the moments where I was three, sitting on my momma’s lap playing with her long hair that flowed out of her ’70’s style bandana, staring at the wooden cross hanging from a leather strap around her neck. I want to spend eternity smiling at the brown lunch bag my father drew pictures on just for me. I want to fall in love for the first time at 12 years old and play act what I thought it meant to lose it all. I want to feel lean and limber and strong and beautiful as I dance with a basketball unafraid of anyone who might wish to stop me. I want to be brash and cocky and altogether terrified on my first day of college and I want the world to open up to me at camp as I found what it was I’d do the rest of my life. I want to meet my wife, sit on those bar stools forever. Falling in love and diving into the unknown. I want to have my kids, meet them for the first time, and I want to watch them grow and marvel at the spectacle. I want all of this to be held. Why would I ever let go of this?

The answer is obvious. We ‘let go’ because we have no choice. Because we can’t choose to hold on. That being said, I want to get as much of this as I can. I want to watch my boy play on the floor with not a care in the world but what the little elephant on the back of his train that he built from Lego’s and imagination is going to do next. Forever.

 

 

Kindergarten Rotation

2016-05-08 13.56.34‘Don’t get too excited, Charlie’ said Miss K., his pre-school teacher.

‘I’m gonna be too excited. My heart is gonna burst out of my cage.’ He replied. He was beaming. I realize this could be read in such a way as to think he might be expressing something of great concern. He wasn’t. It was a rebuke. Think of it more like, ‘I’m gonna be super excited and you can’t stop me. I mean seriously, I can’t stand still. I’m bouncing out of my shoes. You don’t get too excited!’

Today was kindergarten orientation.

‘Where are you going with your daddy, Charlie?’ The daycare director asked, with a wink, prompting the response she loved and she knew I would as well.

‘Kindergarten rotation!’ Orientation, rotation… Close enough and I ain’t changing it.

I have mixed feelings about my boys entering the school system. On the one hand I hate it and on the other I dread it. So, you know, mixed.

My feelings come from a place, they aren’t just anti-everything, white male suspiciagression. I actually failed at school. A lot. It’s okay. I’ve overcome my shortcomings and had enough bursts of effort to actually attain a bachelors after about 10 years of mostly not trying. While I don’t have my first dream job, pro basketball player, I have a version of a dream job and I’m working on a second, writer.

When we got home to meet mom and head out to the school he started to wonder what was going to happen. Like, what actually was going to happen. I immediately tried to hide my fears and anxiety by over talking. It’s not something I have to work at, in fact I come to this tactic quite naturally!

‘You’re gonna love it. You’re gonna go into a classroom with all the other kids and play. I guess you’ll play. Honey, they’re gonna play in the room right? We’re gonna go in a different room and meet all the other mommy’s and daddy’s and the nurse.’ I said, anything but nonchalantly.

It came out all wrong because I didn’t believe it. I mean I believed the details but the enthusiasm wasn’t there. I was starting to think back to my first few months of kindergarten. All the tears and nonstop screaming I did. I mean it was a lot. I generated a river of tears that was remarkable for it’s persistence. I was my own little Lake Tear of the Clouds building the mighty Hudson of toddler sorrow that I rode to the principals office everyday for months. She tried everything a nun has in the quiver to get me to calm down but it didn’t work. Eventually she just started giving me lollipops to shut me up for a bit while she continued to work but it was of no use. I’d just blurt out again when I was sent back. Some days must have been worse than others as I was occasionally sent home with my mother who’d cuddle me and play with me the rest of the day, when she wasn’t tending to my little sister.

In retrospect having grown up and lived as an adult for some time now I actually think I was consistent, always tears all day everyday and some days the adults just had had enough or were having a bad day and decided today was a day I needed to go away. I’d have never been allowed to go these days. I wouldn’t be five until the week of Thanksgiving. Not that this understanding of why I’d handled it the way I did would ever make the older kids stop singing, or chanting actually, ‘kindergarten drop out’ as they skipped around me that summer.

Charlie was so excited to even be at the school. He’d been hearing us tell him, for years now, how one day he’d be one of the big kids who got to the ‘big kids’ school. Never mind that when he gets to the ‘big kids’ school it will be a shock to him to find a (half) school day lasts two and a half hours as opposed to the 9 hour ‘school’ day he’s had to this point at his daycare, this is the big time. When we got there, in the mass of moms and more dad’s than I’d assumed would be there, and overexcited 5ish year olds, it became a tad scary for Charlie and he clutched our hands.

‘I bet you can’t walk all the way around on the wood and not fall off.’ I said, pointing to the boarded border of the tree around which a group of kids were busy playing/slash burning off some of their excitement to be here, kindergarten, the destination so many were surely looking forward to in the same way that Charlie was, hearts bursting. He of course could and was excited to do so and even brushed up against some kids. Who knows, one of these kids might be the best friend he has through high school. Maybe his first love is in this crowd. Sworn enemies. Everyone needs a good, harmless nemesis and I had already spotted several that would fit the bill.

He was immediately back between us holding both hands asking if we could stay with him. Of course we can, I was thinking. And we will. We won’t throw you to the wolves, your our guy and we’ll never let these people kill your enthusiasm, destroy your curiosity and make you obsessed with GPA’s and other meaningless signs of conformity that surely spell your demise. Don’t you fret buddy.

We lined up, as is one’s natural inclination in the halls of a building designed in the classical American architectural tradition of grade schools, as a family. Hand in hand. With other families standing in the same familial posture both in front of and behind us. As I stood in the hall, a 42 year old man who could hardly be described as anything other than confident and self possessed in any normal setting, my heart raced.

The line moved swiftly and the parents in front of us were very cool. Far cooler than I in my standard issue button down and Khaki’s. It was a workday after all. I made the dad chuckle with one well placed punchline. Something about a prison that worked on the honor system. I don’t really remember what the setup was. In hindsight it had to be that I, holding Charlie’s hand and silent and ready to start sweating, was staying perfectly silent so as not to draw any attention, particularly the kind that felt palpable in the air of the school hallway, mocking attention, and had been listening intently to this obviously comfortable dad being cool and hoping I could say something that made him laugh. Thank god there was an opening and I had something.

Charlie meanwhile shouted, ‘It’s a classroom!’ That exclamation mark is not misplaced. He shouted it as if he’d found the final golden ticket. Immediately I grasped his hand a little tighter. God forbid we make a scene. I’m as disgusted as anyone else is at this behavior, stifling his natural and understandable excitement. Although I do believe I may have failed in my attempt to prepare him for this day if the thought of there being a classroom in a school was such a surprise. I judge myself horribly and constantly for my temperamental disdain for expressions of exuberance and excitement. Honestly I do. I’m like that scene in the birdcage where Robin Williams while choreographing implores his dancer to be flamboyant and expressive.. Fosse, Fosse, Fosse… Martha Graham, Martha Graham, Martha Graham.. but on the inside. On the outside, stay still. I’d have NAILED that part. And I’m not even a dancer!

2016-05-08 13.56.37Before too long we were at the front of the line, he had wiggled free and was gathering with all the other little boys around the box of Lego’s, ready to invent and build and make friends and laugh and play. Just like we wanted him to. I was faking it and thankfully he was making it.

 

 

What You Mean to Me, on Mamalode

I have a story on Mamalode today. It’s a note to my son’s trying to explain what they mean to me…

If you haven’t already, be sure to follow Mamalode on facebook and check out their site daily… They offer only the finest in writing on Motherhood, Parenthood, Family and kids

http://mamalode.com/story/detail/what-you-mean-to-me

 

A Phone Call To Mom 

I have a column that runs every Friday on The Good Men Project. Today I recall a phone call I made to my mother accusing her of all sorts of failings. I was unfair, unkind and coming undone. She responded with grace and love and it made all the difference!

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone.. 

http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/call-mother-becomes-painful-transformative-experience/

My Kodachromatic Memories

I’ve had tightness in my chest and shallow breathing for going on a month. It’s largely a result of pollen and my bodies late life decision to no longer recognize that springtime friend that greeted me with joy for so many years as I thawed out from so many winters. What was once my friend, the dawning of life in the blooming and bursting nature outside my door is now my enemy, a predator and my body has chosen, without consulting me, to fight it using all the parts of me I can’t control as it’s shield.

It’s no big deal. It’s a minor pain in the ass that I forget about sometime in May and remember in early spring annually. The older I get the less invincible I am.

I’m changing jobs and as exciting as it is I’m taking on a massive new challenge. I’m looking forward to it and I’m thinking about it and the tightness in my chest feels a natural psychosomatic reaction as well. Though I know it isn’t. It’s merely my body deciding not to work like it once did. Same way the knees did when I tried to run the Brooklyn half 10 or more years ago. I made it one mile before hobbling to a train and turning to low impact ellipticals in the gym. The way my lithe and supple and strong body turned to a big and broad and strong body before turning to a big and unresponsive mass. Thankfully I’m told the heart keeps getting stronger even if it’s harder and harder to make what I see in the mirror reflect what I still think I am in my brain.

Getting older is hard for many reasons. The physical reason’s are a lot to be sure and I’ve only just begun that journey. Being where I am now, mid-career, early family and years from financial security is a constant struggle. The same one so many travel with me. But there’s also the dawning realizations that an active mind, one at rest and given a few minutes to contemplate can’t help but notice. For me it can happen in the car or at work or watching my kids in the back yard as they bounce from one thing to the next, bound by no laws of energy I’ve come to think of as universal since being bound by them years ago. It’s all gonna end and it’s gonna happen soon.

IMG_0030I love my kids beyond all reason. It’s the only way I know how to do it at this point. I understand that their are some terrible situations out there where children aren’t afforded that type of love and it shatters me when I hear of bad things, scary things happening to them. Things I could watch in movies or read about in the news years ago about terrible things happening to young children are no longer things I can ignore. I feel it now viscerally. Iit kills me now in a way it never could have before. It’s empathy for strangers and it’s hard to have at times, but it’s proof to me of some sort of reason for all this. My mind intellectualizes and thinks that reason is survival, we are here and our point is to survive. Even if that’s so, for me that contains within it what others find in God.

I’m a slightly older dad, but in a life so short as this one even slightly older has ramifications. Perhaps nostalgia just overtakes you at this age, I don’t know. What I know is that for me the overwhelming rush to nostalgia and the amplifying emotional response to it is something that came around the same time I had kids. In a real way they’ve been my greatest teachers about what life is all about. I’m living in a museum at this point. Our home is awash in the memories that will be those I sprint to as the ‘time of my life.’ This is the golden passage that will live longest in my mind, this time when we are a small, highly interdependent family who’s only plans, only one’s we can even imagine, revolve around all of us. Their will come a time when that isn’t so, which is sad to think about.

2015-02-28 22.31.44All the stuff to come actually has some sadness in it. For me at least. Because what’s next after our family is our slow walk away. We aren’t going to live forever. Even those of you firmly in belief that this is not it, that there is more after, surely even you must share some of the melancholy I can have when it hits me that what comes next isn’t this. This amazing life all opened up to me, when my kids want to hug me and read with me and kiss me and tell me they love me.

For me it’s good to remember that I’m going to die. It’s a positive reminder that what we don’t take and hold and cherish will be gone. Nostalgia is my guide as I look longingly back at the life I’ve lead to here and all that life yet to happen, yet to be stored in memory. We curate this museum in our minds, Karen and I. We arrange and rearrange the memories because we simply love to hold them. In doing so I’ve come to learn the value of my young memories.

2013-02-05 10.40.55In those memories of my youth the world is colored like 70’s and 80’s quality Kodak film and there are faded edges. My mother is there in her Jean bandana and my dad in t-shirt and Lee’s and we’re eating cereal from little boxes at picnic tables at Hamlin Beach, about fifteen miles from home. They had six kids and it was how we took some vacations. We loved them. or we’re at Hersheypark and loving the rides and smelling chocolate in the air. Or we’re all crammed into any of a series of station wagons driving down the highway on our way to adventures. I’m sitting in the back facing bench seat, crouched so my back is where my butt should be, so I can dangle my bare feet out the rear window, dangling in the Kodachromatic sun as the wind sweeps over the lot of us from all the open windows, always open in the summer, a thing we barely do anymore.

I have to visit there to keep my mom mommy and to see my dad as the  strapping man much younger than I am now managing what I now am able to see was a circus of nonstop work, that I lived in and couldn’t possibly conceive of then. I have to go back there to keep the edges from fading in any further than they already have. These are the glory times of my life, just like these times are now, and for the rest of time I’ll return there, here, because I don’t want to go.

Life can only be lived forward and as far as I can tell it can only be lived once which is it’s only flaw. I used to think nostalgia was something silly people did who were afraid of life but I was dead wrong. It’s what lucky people do to remember all that was so graciously and gloriously bestowed on them.