personal essay – Page 5 – developing dad

Becoming The One

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is a total and utter cop out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Deep Dark Wood

Police Line Do Not Cross

Fear is powerful emotion. It is a motivator and a regulator to our more dangerous instincts and does a good job keeping us out of harms way. Their certainly are fears that need to be stood up to and conquered as well. Those are the fears we keep listed in our head throughout our lifetime. It’s a to do list of sorts and you have an ever dimninishing, but mostly unkowable clock keeping score.

But for those fears that are necessary, those fears that provide insight into what’s safe and unsafe and suggest the best path forward we’ve developed systems to ensure that our children are provided at least a base level of fear for things that should be feared. Our tools are blunt and we can instill too much fear for sure. Perhaps this abundance, this collateral fear is there for a reason. Perhaps it provides a measure of insurance that helps keep as many of us inside the curve as possible, ensuring the greatest number survive the day.

A lot of children’s storytelling, be it in books or movies is of this variety. After a while you realize that we adults are pretty savvy and can see danger in everyday interactions or in subtle signs throughout a story, that we are perhaps to be more attuned and aware as tension driven by our communal standards of common decency are breached. But kids, they need it drawn big and bold. The bad guys look evil and intend to do evil and are open to announcing as much. We tell these stories and we make these stories because they can introduce the concept of ‘people who do bad things’ into the conversation in a stark and scary way. It needs to be blunt at the stage where my kids are at right now, which is pre-school aged, 3 and 4. If it were subtle and Mr. Joker were merely trying to fashion his evil doing by way of insuring that the riff raff, the common folk, perhaps even people of backgrounds more diverse than the predominant ones in the neighborhood aren’t shown these houses for fear of upsetting some invisible social order, it would be completely lost on my kids. As it seems to be on most of that ‘predominant’ class as well. Their villains are in makeup, have evil gadgets and intend to do harm for no other reason than evil. It’s not just in superhero movies either. Children’s literature has been this way forever. Checkout some Brother’s Grimm if you doubt me.

Tonight we watched ‘The Gruffalo’s Child’ on Netflix. It’s not as good as the first in the series, ‘The Gruffalo’ but it continues on the theme. It’s a story of how myths are made in order to protect children by instilling appropriate fears. In each the ‘deep dark wood’ represents the world, and the Gruffalo, and in turn the ‘Big Bad Mouse’, are the representation of danger if not exactly evil. Each story goes about showing how the myth came to be and how the resulting terror was put to effective use by concerned parents effectively instilling fear in their children. The stories worked to both pique their curiosity and put them on guard. They’re brilliant stories that get it right.

The fears that you conquer while growing up come to rest in a place in your brain that you don’t tend to. You know when to be fearful and you know how to behave to avoid most dangers. For those you can’t avoid you either conquer them or they conquer you and you go on with life.

Then you have kids. Then you go about learning anew all that the world has to offer in terms of danger. And you go about the delicate dance of protecting your kids from the information and exposing them to it and trying to make them understand something that defies understanding. Evil doing is just a reality. You accept that it exists at some point, but even then you don’t understand it. You might think you do but then you forget to turn off the news and they hear about murder and at first they call it bad and you say yes it is and you turn the channel. They are FOUR. They don’t need to learn about or start trying to accept murder is a thing we do to each other from time to time tonight. It can wait.

So we keep teaching them about the deep dark wood and we hope that the message seeps in. But on days like today I myself don’t know where the ‘deep dark wood’ ends and the circle of safety that wasn’t breeched when I was a kid begins. Is it at my front door. Anyone can obviously break in and do harm if they were so inclined but the news doesn’t make me register that as a real threat as of yet. Is it school? I always knew it to be a safe place to be scared. Scared of the kids at the other table. Scared of the girls you’d eventually befriend and look forward to seeing at the bar the night before Thanksgiving in your 20’s. Fear of teachers. Fear of punishment. All the fears you don’t enjoy but you want your kid to have. To learn from. What the hell is the deep dark wood now. Is it everywhere.

The day we moved into our new home with a one year old and a newborn in tow classrooms full of 5 and 6 year olds were murdered. I was enraged. I was gutted, devastated and mad. Since then countless examples of this new reality have flooded my brain and I’ve stated clearly why I think guns and our culture around them need to change. I haven’t moved an inch from my perspective nor have the others who sit on the other side. This is not an argument. I believe by now it’s intractable. Nothing I say can make me or anyone else think differenly about our thoughts about what the solution is to this epedemic of mass shootings leaving so many innocent lives in shambles.

For me, the adult with the more nuanced ability to see and react to danger, the experience to know that not all danger looks dangerous, the part that really scares me is what is happening in my reaction. I’m still mad. I’m still devastated for those poor families trying to understand that which can not be thoroughly explained. I’m still just as upset as I’ve ever been. But there’s something else there, something to be truly afraid of. I’m starting to sense an exhaustion with banging my head against the wall. I’m starting to lose hope that a solution can be found. I’m starting to feel a tiny little piece of accepting this as evil and putting the topic away in the space in my brain where I store the remnants and scarring from the battles lost. When I recognize this the fear comes back.

Don’t go out that door, guys. On the other side is the deep dark wood and the Big Bad Mouse will get ya.

The Destination Justifies the Journey

I’m a Herb.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Things We Carry

It’s not impossible to project from here. The boys are only 3 and 4 and already I can see a light in the fog. Nothing crystal clear, nothing close. But it’s reasonable as they approach an age that I can not quite reach back to, but from my furthest memories I can hear faint whispers. They are coming from a me of their age.

Growing up is exciting and fun and challenging and confusing. It’s the stuff of life and it’s great. As parents I can already see how much I’ll marvel as they progress to their ultimate destination of independence from us. I’m embarrassed at how much I often hurt when letting them go and grow even a little, but we must. We want to. Truly we do. But the unbelievable feeling of being so needed, so wanted, so loved and looked up to.. it’s a mighty powerful drug. It really is. One you are encouraged to indulge in fully, to give you the intoxication of pure love that fills your tank at a rate roughly equivalent to the rate that the job requires you to spend your fuel. Its a frantic pace and one that challenges your collective ability to stay standing, keep your balance and continue to progress.

Kids have no idea, at least I didn’t, that my parents were people. I mean I knew they were humans, so they met at least one definition, but they weren’t feeling people, ones constantly balancing their emotions and their thoughts. Endlessly interpreting life and its meanings. They told me they loved me constantly. Still do. I understand what it means now that I’m a dad, but for so much of my life I had no clue all that it entailed.

A parents love is both joyous and sad. It’s remarkably proud and endlessly fascinated. It’s scared. Really scared at times and garden variety worried a lot of the time. It’s fun to love your kids, endless fun. It’s a love that can wake you up and push you past fears, motivate you when the fumes are all you have left and think you can’t go on. It’s also terribly dissembling.

When you arrive on the scene, those first few years, the ones that will hide so far back in time you’ll never retrieve them, never even conceive of them until you are faced with passing this strange and hyper-real time yourself someday, if you’re lucky enough to do so, you become the operating and inciting entity in our lives. For a time we feel we are the sun to your planetary revolutions, but the truth reveals itself over time. You are in fact the sun and you power and light what life we have to give. And we give so much of it to you. So much we can lose sight of each other from time to time.

When you arrive you are all need and as you emerge you pay us in love and hugs and smiles and conversation. At first we talk about the things around us, things we can touch and feel. Things like toys, shapes, colors and love. But as you grow older and need to discover the things that lie behind the horizon of mom and dad you start to push past us. It’s wonderful. It really really is. But we remember we are human when you do it. We aren’t the all giving all knowing force of the universe that your needs have perhaps allowed us to think we were.

But we follow your lead now. Being brave because you are. Pushing past comfort because you are. We try to stay out front. We have to for a time in order to ensure safe passage to the other side. To where you will live in the world. Apart from us but from us. And this becomes our new identity. The path-clearers. The independence enablers. We relish your accomplishments and feel, feel deeply your struggles. But all the time knowing you are safe because we are here walking with you.

Until we aren’t. Not in the way we’ve become accustomed to. Because you need to walk alone. Need to prove to the world and in turn to yourself that you will be able to handle what life throws at you. Because someday you’ll be tasked with being the safety net for yourself. We know this, but it hurts to lose that to. To lose that job that has defined us.

In the happy stories you learn to rely on yourself. To navigate the world and all of its challenges. You build networks of support in a thousand ways and you find comfort in the high wire act of being a person among people trying your best to get through. You even learn that you are so capable that you can give love to others that you see that need it. If you are lucky. You’ve stored all the love that’s been given from your prehistory in those early, never to be recalled days up til now and you realize you are who you are because of you and all those who’ve loved you and you find your way back to us through understanding.

Understanding that we were giants at one time because of you, that the journey we’ve taken, just like yours, was hard and left scarring. You learn to have empathy for the people you thought of as gods who made the moon come out to lightly illuminate your slumber and would keep it there as long as you needed it. Who made life livable and who seemed to stand in your way when you couldn’t understand why they were frightened to let you go.

We weren’t frightened to let you go. Well we were, sure, but it was compounded by the fact that we knew it meant letting the us we became when we met you go to. It was a fear of what we would find in the space you’d leave behind in the middle of our hearts and our homes. You, the purpose of our lives, the ones we so happily surrendered ourselves to the second we met. What will we be without you.

It’s a silly fear I’m sure, but I don’t know how I’ll get past it. I’m sure you’ll be able to see me acting on fear before I recognize it. That’s the job of loving families. We hold on too long and you, benevolently live up to your obligation by walking away. You’ll have to. And you’ll have to forgive us all those times we couldn’t let go when we should have. You’ll come to know that while we walked behind you as you shed those things that children must leave, we were picking up those things we couldn’t let go of to take with us. They are the reminders of our most purposeful, love filled, meaningful times in our lives and we would rather be weighed down with them than let them drift into history. They are the artifacts of the story of our lives and we’ll carry them to the end.

Handle with Care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After 20 Years, Summer Camp Still Breaks Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Much To Look Forward To

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 Years Ago, 30 Years From Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you with all of my heart, Teddy.

I love you with all of my heart , Charlie.

Thoughts, Vibes and Prayers

I had an epiphany this past year. Since then I’ve prayed for anyone who has asked me to. To anyone who asked for my prayers before my epiphany, I’m sorry.

I’ve come to the passionate belief that there is only this. This belief, for me, keeps me honest, accountable and caring. It means all my love, care, rewards, punishment, joys, pains and everything else you can imagine must fit inside the life I’m living now. It’s a deep, core belief of mine. One that I was inconsiderately, rudely and even aggressively defensive about since about the age of 13.

It’s hard to explain, but to the non-doctrinal among us expressions of belief often feel like aggressive acts. It feels like people are judging us, as they surely are, as I am them more often than I care to admit, and we get into a stance where we feel like we have to defend our simple belief that all of this is more than enough. More than enough reason for love and compassion and acts of kindness. My beliefs as well as my upbringing are the impetus for my good deeds and good works. My shortcomings, failings and acts of insensitivity are human. They are not evidence of a bad person. These unkind moments are evidence of an imperfect person or more succinctly they are evidence of a person. My acknowledgment of them, my apologies for them and my attempts to make up for them and correct them are grace. I’m about halfway through this journey if it goes to plan and I have a lot to be proud of, a lot to continue to work on and a lot to apologize for.

On that note I’d like to offer my apologies to anyone who was having a moment of stress, encountering tragedy or simply looking for my love and support and asked me to ‘send your love and prayers.’ I took this request as an attack on my beliefs, if you can imagine something so self-centered, egotistical and thoughtless. I promise you, my responses, my sincere expressions of support tinged with refusal of ‘you’re in my thoughts’ or ‘I’m sending you good vibes’ were sincerely intended to be supportive. They were. But I can’t lie, there was a piece of that love and support that I was withholding. For that I’m truly and deeply sorry.

It was a failing of mine to think these requests, this reaching out for support, was anything other than that. I can pray. In fact whenever I was asked to pray I did. In my way and with a sincere heart.

So going forward if you ask me to keep you in my thoughts, I will. If you ask me to send good vibes, that is what I will do. And if you ask me to pray for you, you’ll be in my prayers.

The Lodge Part Two; Faking It

I have a good deal of respect for the fraud I was at that time. My bravado and false courage was believable. I was 22, driving a 15 seat van from deep in the Catskills down to Union Square where I would pick up families that included at least one member who was diagnosed with an intellectual and/or developmental disability. Pick up was at 5pm on Fridays in the middle of Manhattan. I was the host and the boss. The looks I got. I ignored them, but they were evident. I would drive families that had never met before through the dark and snow to a camp in the mountains that was so remote that the road turned to dirt about a quarter mile out. No houses or light emanating from anything but the vehicle. It had all been arranged by a finely tuned, though still almost totally pen and paper bureaucracy that I had a good deal of responsibility for. They were startled and perhaps a tad frightened by me.

‘You’re Joe MEDLER?’ They’d ask. ‘This Joe Medler?’ They would hold the letter, sometimes pulled from the envelope with my handwriting on it, looking very official, with the logo for AHRC of NYC across the top and a list of board officers and members cascading down the left hand side and point to my name under my signature.

‘Yep. You’re in the right place. Is this Daquan, then? Hey man. Are you excited to head up to the mountains? We’ve got so much fun stuff planned for you.’ I’d say, moving right past the doubts of these now very worried people and instead engaging the kids. I had at least the accidental wisdom of engaging thoughtfully with kids without patronizing them. Usually at least.

Thank god I didn’t recognize the doubt they must have been feeling. I mistook it for something I wanted to help change. It motivated me to be brave and bold and try honestly to change the world. Had I any of the wisdom I’ve gained since becoming a parent, wisdom that often is cloaked in fear and worry, I’d have known they were judging my youth and inexperience. I’d say they were right to have made such a judgment in general, but to this day, and I suspect for the rest of my life, this is the place and the job I was most perfectly suited to. Which isn’t to say this piece of the job was my strongest suit, but this place was the place that fit most perfectly with my emerging sense of right, wrong, fun, learning, priorities. It perfectly reflected my sensibilities. Harriman Lodge. Its my home, the one in my heart and it will always be to some degree.

I arrived at the place from across the state a summer or two ago. I don’t remember the timeline that well anymore. I was driven by my dad as it was the tail end of childhood and the leaping off point for my whole life. My confidence may have had little foundation, but it had good bones. I was a person taught to do what I believe even when it’s hard, especially when others aren’t. I had not yet applied these teachings, but somehow just being here, jumping in with two feet to a new and strange world and becoming a native felt like a stance. Taking the concerns of a person with disabilities as seriously as they took them, feeling like you were literally providing and caring for people that must have had innumerable amounts of ‘no’ and inadvertent and quite intentional discrimination heaped on them over a lifetime that often included severed family relations, neglect and institutional abuse felt world changing. It felt like I was making their lives better and as a result I was finally important. I was important for taking the care of and showing respect for people that needed help to have their voices heard. I was alongside the most wildly diverse assemblage I’ve ever been a part of, young people from all over the globe looking for a unique way to grow up while having fun and being the change they wanted to see in the world. It turned out that the people that were in our charge had a far greater impact on our lives those summers then we EVER could have had on theirs.

That first year was the moment I’ll always think of as my time of discovering the world and inventing myself. Leaping on opportunity and working 7 days a week, up to 20 hours a day, and no less then 16. Even when you were asleep in the cabin you always had one ear open in case a person that needed help was seeking it. You and 5 other counselors in a cabin of 18 guys. Then the leader of the cabin walks off the job, unable to deal with it. Then the Marine, couldn’t hack it. Finally it was me, Mike and Tony. The suburban, the urban and the Russian. And we did it. We had help, but we gave ourselves completely to our guys for more than half of the ten week summer. Ragged and bedraggled. Excitable and exhausted. It was and remains the greatest accomplishment of my professional life. I was 21, a knuckle headed post-teen finding purpose with the rest of us.

We’d all go on to have challenges and struggles. We’d resist the responsibilities of adulthood, shrink at times we should have roared and not use the springboard we were given to jump ahead in life. We’d all come back and do it again and again. I stayed 8 years, often through the long and lonely winters where I’d carry comfortably huge responsibilities only to crumble during down times that allowed me to wallow in ways I needed to in order to grow up. It was the formative experience of my life. One ONLY matched by becoming a parent.

For the first few years I identified as ‘Staff’. God that was awesome. We were weirdos and tough guys and earth mom’s in training and world explorers. Intellectuals bent on bending the world and lifelong service providers. We were on the one hand always ready to be silly and on the other hand so new at adulthood that we applied aesthetic judgment to the way we held our cigarettes. We were terribly vulnerable and horribly self-conscious and lacking the self awareness necessary to avoid embarrassment. I can look at the pictures for hours. When a new one shows up on Facebook I pray all of us will jump on and relive those times and speak of reunions. I can’t tell you how much I hope one comes to fruition. I love those people like my family. They were the people present at my coming of age story and I was present at theirs. I am of these people and I couldn’t be more proud of that.

Something strange happened over my time there. Fully integrated with the staff at 21 I started the slow move away from the group. It took a few years and a promotion or two, but before you knew it I was starting to realize that I was a lifer. I only stayed eight years, but in that time I became part of the permanent structure of the place. Before long I stopped having the bonds with the staff. The staff I’d always thought of as the ‘permanent structure’ that stayed in place as groups of ‘guests’ would come and go throughout the summer, two weeks at a time. I would be emotional when they’d leave and I’d reminisce with my fellow staff, the others left behind. You have no idea how much you bond with someone in this type of setting. How many emotions and experiences you can share in just a few days. But eventually as I got more involved in the year round operations my staff family became ‘big mama’ (Director), Big Joe (Caretaker extraordinaire of the facility) and Jessa-Lee (Year round rep for the AHRC NYC organization for the first couple years). To this day they feel like family to me. Jessa-Lee, though I haven’t seen her in ages, is still one of my very best friends. These people knew me as a pup and not only allowed me to grow up, they facilitated it. Put up with my shenanigans, the false starts and the inconsistencies and knew I was able and entrusted me. Partly because I was the only one who would do some of it, but lots of times because they had faith in me. So I had faith in me.

After that, my family became the guests themselves. My former self, my ‘staff’ self looked out to a horizon that went as long as the evening light. Perhaps into September. It was a short view. By the end I knew that I was with the guys. I was there every year, like they were. It was the staff that changed. Some returners every year, but eventually they all left. We stayed. At least until we didn’t.

There are times now when I look back and know I couldn’t do now all I did then. On the most basic level, it’s a young person’s game. The commitment, the hours, the emotionally raw feelings that come with the whole endeavor, it would be too much now. But I still wish I could do it. I still draw on it, like all of us who were lucky enough to have been there do. It provides a soulful foundation for me. Remembering the whole thing. It’s where I’d fall to if all else failed, if every imaginable tragedy were to befall me, I could always go back there and live out my days working for a roof and food. Sounds crazy I know, but it’s a real thought. It’s even a fall back plan in my mind for me and Karen. We hope to live out our days in our lovely home and have a fully realized vision for what our future will look like. But when discussing fall back plans in the event they should become necessary, the idea of camp has come up on several occasions.

I guess you have to fake it when you start. I did, at least. There wasn’t anything to draw on so you make it up. All of it. Then at some point you realize, I’ve been making it up for so long that in the process something has been made. The whole of the experience has to amount to something. It just has to. For me it amounted to me. I faked it, I made it and that made me.

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