Straightening Things Out, With the People You Love

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged amends, braces, children and childhood, divorce, family, fathers, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas, parenting • 1 Comment

When all the happy teeth of your mischievous smile were covered the other day by your shiny new braces, I remembered brushing your hair. But that doesn’t make any sense at all, I imagine you saying without hesitation. No? Well maybe it doesn’t. But that’s the way I think, all over the place, all the time. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Well I do and, for all we know, it does make sense. Let’s see if we can straighten this out.

When you were a little girl, I used to give you baths, which I loved when I wasn’t consumed by myself and my own ambitions, which was often but, nonetheless, there was always a part of me that stayed aware of loving to watch you play with cups and water and I loved the way it felt on my big hands when I washed and conditioned your pretty hair. It was after the bath when things got ugly. I went downstairs as you dried off and put on your pajamas. Solemnly, you descended the stairs with your detangling spray, a comb, and a brush. Your mouth was a straight line and your eyes were half-lidded. You walked straight to me and turned around, rigid, like a soldier. I doused your hair with the spray and so it began. First, the comb to rake through the bigger tangles and then the brush. You tried to stifle your outbursts but sometimes you squealed as big raindrops formed in the clouds of your eyes and rolled down your cheeks and God it killed me to hurt you.

One of the many beautiful things about primal cultures and children is their convincing ability to inhabit a world of amazingly creative theories of causation. I don’t look upon this ability in a disparaging way at all. I admire it, respect it, yearn for it, and fundamentally believe that it’s a truer way to dwell in the shelter of the world than the diminished world merely understood through the lens of science and its useful discoveries. People used to have gods that oversaw almost every form of activity and nearly everything they did was a prayer. They made sacrifices to influence the harvest. Mimicked myth through ritual. Created idols to protect their homes and sleep. Attributed good fortune to the goodwill of deceased ancestors. Danced for rain.

It’s been almost 4 years and you don’t talk about the divorce much; you never have. But I imagine you might shoulder the burden of your own ideas about what went wrong in your secret and magical way of making sense. What did you do wrong? Were you perhaps mean to the cat? Did you steal cookies? Did you think a horrible thing in anger that you quickly wished you never thought and couldn’t think away? Or maybe you stepped on a crack or forgot to water the plants and your parents got divorced. And though I wrote above that I admired this ability to live in a world where what happens occurs in the realm of art, one of my deepest desires is for you to know and understand in the deeps of your bones that nothing you did caused your parents’ divorce. That blame lies solely with me. Your dad made sacrifices to all the wrong gods and incurred the wrath of their vengeance. And, even though I’ve told you so many times that we’re both sick of hearing it, I remain always on the ready (when you are) to discuss my mistakes with you, to make amends, and set things straight. God, it killed me to hurt you.

But eventually the brush would slide through your long yellow hair like a hot knife through butter and I could see your body slacken with relief. And I would keep brushing for a good long while because I knew it felt so nice to have a brush running through your shiny clean hair without a single snag or snarl. Loosened up, you would climb on my lap and start telling me your funny stories about the way things appear and happen for little girls. The cat likes to sing when she thinks no one is listening but you have heard her, on more than one occasion, sing I Shall Be Released by the big glass slider. When you fell off your bike and skinned your knee, you yelled at your bike and now she doesn’t feel much like riding no more. If you ever get scared at night, you just talk to the moon, which makes you not scared, because the moon is maybe your best friend in the whole world next to Maddie. And I would just listen and love you, brushing and brushing your long yellow hair until it was perfectly straight.

Now it has come to my attention that a smart little girl has taken to sneaking a peek at what her daddy writes on the Internet, so I will break one of my rules—a magician should never ever never reveal his tricks—and explain to you exactly why your shiny new braces reminded me of brushing your hair. You start with the braces. They straighten your teeth. I brushed your hair to make it straight. But these are just metaphors for the constantly ongoing need to straighten things out with the people you love. I am ready when you are. Now turn that thing off and go to bed. I love you. —Daddy

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Making Amends

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged addiction, amends, children and childhood, fatherhood, Jon Sponaas, parenting, sobriety • 3 Comments

I haven’t had a drink in 18 months.

When a guy cops to recovering from addiction and he has two kids, it’s tempting to suppose many forms of unspeakable horrors, which I want to address with finesse because, though my story lacks a particular brand of Hollywood drama, I’m also not looking to minimize the impact that substance abusing parents have on their children. It can be insidious and subtle without being bloody and newsworthy.

So no, I never hit my kids or screamed at them (all that much; never drunk) or called them a bunch of horrible names that crippled their self-concepts, making it necessary for them to seek relief by perpetuating the cycle of abuse or what have you. Truth be told, my kids kick ass. Of course I can’t be certain but they don’t appear to be bogged down by any more self-loathing than your average self-loathing young person. Most of my adult life has been spent, to some varying degree, in recovery so the kids have rarely even seen me drunk and, when they have, I was more inclined to play with them than ruthlessly destroy their self worth like the drunks on TV. So there you go. No terror. No blood. No cops.

But those symptoms—that outward craziness—are only various manifestations of the singular problem that serves as the stubborn root from which addiction and all its consequences flow: selfishness. The tenacious deep problem of the addict—being enamored by and trapped within the maze of self—is, in truth, the problem he seeks to treat with his array of addictive substances.

My biggest concern, in terms of parenting my children, isn’t the fact that I drank to excess and often did ridiculous and dangerous things. I mean, sure, that’s a worry. But the much more crucial issue at hand is the extreme emphasis on self inside of which I lived, necessitating my alcoholism—yes—but worse yet? Setting an example of self-absorption as the model by which my children learned what it meant to be a person in and of the world. However, what’s done is done—an easier cliché to write than embrace—and the recovery process does include a step that attempts to repair the damage of the past to the extent that that is possible. Its focus is on amends. And so, rather than focusing on the damage, I want to here cast my eye on amends. In terms of being a poor model for my kids regarding how to be a person in the world, how do I repair that damage? How do I make amends?

This is a much more enormous task than telling them I’m sorry.

The answer for me (provisionally, because my understanding and relation to these issues keep changing and growing) is twofold: first, recover from alcoholism, which, above and beyond the cessation of alcohol consumption, entails a Copernican revolution in terms of how I relate and interact between my self and the world. And, second, have this new way of interacting and relating between my self and the world bear directly on the way I interact and relate to my children.

To posit something as lofty as “a Copernican revolution in terms of how I relate and interact between my self and the world,” amounts essentially to fancy writer language for not being so damn selfish. The trick, indeed the whole goal of recovery to my mind, is to constantly search the sky for new stars to circle, to abandon the default solar system of selfhood in search of new suns to orbit. Always. Ceaselessly. Relentlessly. Let your sun burn out or explode. Forget yourself.

But how does this new way of interacting and relating between my self and the world bear directly on the way I interact and relate to my children in an effort to make amends? It’s simply this. I need to take the time to imagine myself as a father from the perspective of my children. I have to imagine that I am my children. I have to be my children. Parenting is too often mistaken for me and my opinions about what’s best for kids inflicted on my kids. This is not to say they don’t need guidance; they do. But they also need a dad who’s willing to enter the imaginal fray of wondering how they see, how they feel, what they need, and what they want. And as a result of those meditations, they then need a dad who will accommodate them from their perspective. To be and act like the dad that they want as opposed to just doing what I think is best.

The distinction is subtle, but the results are enormous. It’s the difference between being sorry and making amends.

Tell Me Something Good

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged alcoholism, amends, daughters, emotions, fathers, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas • 4 Comments

The first cup of coffee. A good joke. The quiet certainty that you’re not alone and that you are loved. Sunrises from behind mountains. Long runs. Chocolate.

My daughter’s teacher called to discuss a classroom display of frustration that didn’t seem to shore up with merely struggling with long division. Something else was bothering her. Something she conceals that builds and builds until she unloads her sublimated wrath on that God awful math. She snapped her pencil and cried and cried and cried some more. Couldn’t be consoled. The teacher took her to a different room until she calmed down.

Movie theaters. Sharp pencils. Finding money in an old jacket. Forgiving. Forgetting. Popcorn.

Autumn explodes in a mad dazzle of fireworks but make no mistake: it’s the finale. It’s already over. And I suppose I keep returning to the metaphor of autumn with the hope of unveiling a graceful end. How, I wonder, can we situate death in a good story that’s beautiful? I have snapped my own share of pencils. It’s inherited. This frustration. These tears. And never knowing for certain what’s really wrong. Math’s giving her a hard time, yes, the teacher said, but she also let it slip that she misses her daddy.

Holding hands. Cherries. Looking up at a blue sky and feeling somehow boundless. Reading. Writing. Old wives’ tales.

To our delighted surprise, we realize that there’s no ultimate distinction between self and other. The painful experience of being-apart is merely a trick of the ego, itself the result of an illusion—some Great Reality mistaking itself for a smaller reality that often takes itself way too seriously. For an I is a you and the rest of it too. Unfortunately, however, our insights into ultimacy are ultimately fleeting. Being so stubbornly subjected to our own subjectivity, we find ourselves frequently lonely, afraid, and frustrated by math. We miss our dads. Will, we ask, these wounds ever mend?

The moon. Bridges. The ecstasy of losing one’s self in reverie. Solitude. Silence. Unagi.

The alcoholism recovery people suggest that we make amends to the people we harmed, which is easy if you stole $500 from your old boss because all you do is pay him back. But how do you make amends to your kids for wrecking their family? How do you put that right? I’m of the mind that it can’t be done, that the most I can do is maintain a vigilant attempt to mend the wound, to heal the separation. And this call from her teacher, this report that my daughter is frustrated and misses her daddy, stirred up—again—the issue of amends.

Smiling monks. Forest paths. The way light and shadow converse in a little girl’s hair. Belly laughs. Cold water. Naps.

An old friend, long dead, once, after vomiting blood for the better part of 45 minutes and collapsing on the bathroom floor, asked me to lay down next to him because he was scared. He shook with delirium tremens and cried and we just laid there, knowing he would die. And then from nowhere he said, “Tell me something good.” I peered into the brown sludge of his hopeless eyes and flashed him a counterfeit smile. “Please,” his voice quivered, “tell me something good.” We’re going to win, I told him. We didn’t.

Old photographs of your grandparents. Ice cream. The windows down in August. Devotion. Prayer. Potato chips.

And so, in addition to seeing her three times a week, to make amends, to keep busy with the work of mending, I commit to calling her on the days I don’t see her, to either see her or talk to her every single day. It’s awkward at first. We are often at a loss for words or she responds to my inquiries with single word answers and I flounder, stutter, stop. Until, as if haunted, I demand without thinking, “Tell me something good.” Silence. “Yes, that’s what we’ll do,” I make it up as I go. “It’s my job to call you, but you need a job too, so your job is to, every single day, tell me something good.” Silence. More silence. And then: I have five Jolly Ranchers.

Five Jolly Ranchers. Friendship bracelets. Indian food. A repaired microscope. Substitute teachers.

Autumn explodes in a mad dazzle of fireworks and—yes—it’s all over (nobody wins), but look at that bloody mess of red, orange, and yellow—gasp! Good things. Not a solution or a cure or an attempt at justification, but there nonetheless, always in all ways. And maybe in spite of the despair and the woe and all our lonely missing being-apart—maybe a way toward the real work of the never-ending mending is in the shared discipline of seeking out good things.