The Janus Face of Parenthood

Posted on October 5, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged #brainteen, family, father daughter, fatherhood, fathers and daughters, Janus, parenthood, parenting teens, stay at home father, Vincent O'Keefe • Leave a comment

By Vincent O’Keefe

A parent’s face is a constant mix of past and future, which leads to the tendency to forget the present moment right before one’s nose.

Face it, parents: You’re two-faced. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since parenthood naturally has a Janus face. Janus was the Roman god of transitions who had two faces—one looking toward the future and one toward the past.

My most memorable Janus-faced moments seem to occur while I’m driving. For example, recently I sat at a red light with my oldest daughter, Lauren, who was fourteen at the time. The license plate on the car in front of us read “LIL LAUR.” I smiled to myself and assumed the car’s driver was a parent who probably reveled in the joy of having a baby daughter named Lauren. Memories of my own baby Lauren’s voluminous curls and ocean-blue eyes danced through my mind.

When I told fourteen-year-old Lauren my warm theory about the license plate, however, she replied coldly from the passenger seat: “No Dad. I think the person driving nicknamed the car ‘Lil Laur’ because she loves it so much. I wish I had a car too.” While I faced the past, she faced the future.

It was a moment fit for one of those “Janus words,” or contranyms, that convey contradictory meanings depending on their context—e.g. to weather can mean endure or erode, to sanction can mean endorse or penalize, or to dust can mean apply or remove (dust). My favorite Janus word in relation to parenting has always been “to cleave,” which can mean to cling to or separate from something (or someone). The parent-child relationship often features one person clinging to the other and one person trying to separate from the other, though each person’s role changes according to context. At that red light, I was cleaving to family while she was cleaving from family.

The moment reminded me of a bookend from thirteen years ago that also occurred in a car. When Lauren was just seven months old, my wife and I moved to an Orlando, Florida hotel for two months while my wife completed a medical rotation at a cancer hospital. Yes, that’s correct: I was a stay-in-hotel-room father to an infant for two full months. Let’s just say the Comfort Inn became a misnomer in a hurry. In addition, Lauren had just started sleeping through the night, but that ended in the hotel’s rickety crib. The result? Sheer exhaustion.

The point-of-two-faces happened one afternoon when baby Lauren and I were speeding around town in our tiny rental car. After she fell asleep in her car seat behind me, I parked and tried to work on a book review in the front seat. I had not yet accepted that my becoming an at-home parent with a wife who worked long hours would seriously curtail my production as a writer, at least for a few years.

Shortly into my writing session, Lauren started crying. It was incredibly frustrating, but I knew I had reached a limit. Tired beyond words, I looked back at my crying baby in her car seat, and it seemed fitting that she was facing backwards and I was facing forwards. Together we made a Janus face, though one that demanded adjustment. Obviously, I needed to be more in sync with her needs, to welcome her inevitable clinging and cease trying to separate from it. So I stopped writing for a time, and in the process became a better father.

Ironically, I started appreciating those moments with my child that become the cherished memories a parent clings to at red lights when his child is a teenager longing to drive away into the sunset. I realized a parent’s face is a constant mix of past and future, which leads to the tendency to forget the present moment right before one’s nose. In other words, parents are tweens too.

Thanks to these bookends, I can imagine the not-so-distant future when Lauren will have migrated from the car seat to the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. Little did I know, however, that as we switch places, we also switch faces. Talk about a Father-Daughter Dance.

Vincent O’Keefe is a writer and stay-at-home father with a Ph.D. in American literature. He is writing a memoir on gender and parenting. His writing has appeared at The New York Times “Motherlode” and The Washington Post “On Parenting” (among other venues), and he has been featured at CNN Parents. Visit him at www.vincentokeefe.com or on Twitter @VincentAOKeefe or Facebook at Vincent O’Keefe.

Gifts From My Father

Posted on June 18, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged childhood, family, fatherhood, fathers, parenting, Vivian Maguire • Leave a comment

By Vivian Maguire

I didn’t grow up poor, but my father did. When he told us stories about his childhood, I almost felt as though they had happened to me.

There was the time his father had found a magnetic screen at the city junkyard. He brought it home, and pressed it against the family television. The television flashed over from white, black, and grey images to glaring red, yellow, green, and blue vertical stripes across the glass. For the first time on their living room TV, they saw a rainbow.

“Cambie el canal! Change the channel!” my father and his siblings yelled, believing that he had turned their black and white television into a color TV with his magic screen.

“No, no, no!” my grandfather said, laughing, “No puedo! This is all it does!”

One afternoon, at the park, his mother had forgotten their lunches. They were so far from home, she had had to buy hamburgers at a nearby stand. “The best thing we had ever eaten,” said my father, as he recalled how he, his three brothers, and his three sisters had chewed through the sandwiches of fried beef, mustard, pickles, tomatoes, and greasy lettuce on grilled bread. “When my mother got the bill,” he always paused, “it was for five dollars. She sat down and cried.” I would listen to this story and try to picture my grandmother, sobbing in the playground, with her seven thin children trying to console her, the taste of peppered meat still on their tongues.

My father did not tell these stories as fond recollections; the memories were integral to who he was, and why he worked as hard as he did.

Growing up, I would not know poverty and hunger as my father did, but he still wanted me to understand it. When we were out running errands or stopping somewhere to eat, my father would always hand me a few dollar bills to hand to a homeless person.

“Why don’t you do it,” I would whine. “I’m afraid,” I would say when he pressed me.

“So you’re not going to give them anything, because you’re afraid?” he would reply. I thought he was forcing me to give money to the poor because it made him uneasy. It took years for me to realize, that he was teaching me to see them. He wanted me to be uncomfortable, because he didn’t ever want me to ever be okay with just walking by people on the street, not if I had something to give.

My father found other ways to teach us too. When he bought us presents, he never gave us quite what we had asked for. My father always bought us toys that were close to what we wanted. For my sixth birthday, I had asked my father for a battery-powered car. I pictured myself in my pink, plastic convertible, with all of my friends watching me cruise down the block with matching pink sunglasses on my head, like Barbie. When my birthday came, I didn’t see a pink convertible. Instead, there was a brand new white scooter. “It’s not a pink car,” I told my father.

“Those things are too slow mi reyna,” replied my father. “You’ll be able to keep up with your brothers on this. Get on, try it,” he urged.

I set my foot on the flat base and pushed; it was fast. I thrilled and then laughed at the speed, the convertible forgotten.

Another time, I asked my dad for the Pogo Ball I had seen on television. My father bought me a pogo stick—an almost even trade, except that I almost broke my neck several times trying to balance on it long enough to even attempt a jump. Still, I enjoyed playing with it, until like my other toys, it was forgotten.

But one time my child-desire was nearly unshakable when I saw the Julie doll on television. In the eighties, she was a doll unlike any other that could sense when it was cold outside, her mouth moved when she spoke, she could respond to questions, and knew when she was being moved to another room.

“Are we going to get the Julie doll?” I asked my dad as we walked down the aisle at Toys R’Us.

“I found something even better,” said my father, and my stomach fell. I recognized those words. My father had other plans for me, and I would not get the doll I had been pining after. I had been thinking all morning of questions I would ask her, and now I knew that Julie and I would never speak to each other.

When we walked out of the store, I clung to the doll my father had bought me. She wasn’t Julie. She was Pamela. Her mouth didn’t move, she didn’t know that it was warm and balmy outside, she had no clue that we had left the store, and she only spoke when you pushed on certain parts of her body. “I see you!” Pamela said accusingly when I pressed on her blue, plastic eye.

When we returned home, I hugged my new doll to my chest. I took her to my room and laid her on my pillow. “I see you!” she said, as I pressed on her face, abdomen, and any other parts of her body that would elicit a response. “Muah!” her lips smacked as I pushed my palm onto her mouth. “Hee hee hee!” she giggled as my small fingers explored her belly. “I love you,” Pamela sighed when I pushed my hand onto her chest. I love you too, Pamela, I thought as I pulled her into a loving embrace. Being a child, I couldn’t help but believe that I would be hurting my doll’s feelings if I didn’t return her affection. I squeezed her to my body and whispered, “I love you, I love you,” until I began to believe it.

Over the years, I would receive many gifts from my father that would fall short of my expectations, but like the scooter, the pogo stick, and the doll, I would learn to love my father’s gifts more because of who they came from. Of course, I did not realize at the time that my father was teaching me a lesson that would extend into my adult life. Though I would be disappointed when events in my life did not turn out the way I planned, I would learn how to enjoy myself anyway, and to be thankful for the gifts I received, regardless of the form they came in. Like the gifts my father gave me, my life would not look anything like what I had wanted for myself, not even close. But, when I thought about it, I would see that what I had was even better.

Vivian Maguire is an English teacher, a writer, and a parent. She lives with her husband Randy, and their two daughters, Amelie and Penelope, in El Paso, TX. She writes about parenting and teaching on her blog, storymother.wordpress.com.

When Friends Matter More

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts, General • Tagged fatherhood, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas, parenting, teens, tween/teens • Leave a comment

My ex-wife and son were busy, so the plan was for me to pick up my 10-year-old daughter at 2:00 and drop her off at 8:00. There would be cupcakes, a hike to the summit of Lone Mountain, probably some more cupcakes, Penang curry & pad thai, and the charming way that only your daughter can cull meaning from the various stories she shapes with narrative to bestow upon their splintered totality the thing she calls her life. Of all the things she could possibly say, there’s nothing quite like what she ultimately says. I love her so constantly from the edge of my seat. She’s always on the ready to make new sense, dismantle it, and make some more. Her thoughts dart from place to place with the jacked up frenzy of a frantic hummingbird.

But then the call came. She was invited to an exciting day down on the fabulous Las Vegas Strip with the two girls who have, over the past year, formed 2/3 of their rock solid triangle of BFF friendship. The next part. How can I say it? I told her to have a super great time and meant it. I smiled as I said so and the smile was somehow, at the same time, genuine and propped up with the willpower that wants a coin toss to come up both heads and tails.

My little girl and her best friends remind me of my childhood friendships with Danny Parker and Chris Delaney. There’s something about a trio, a triangle, that feels more substantial than the two person line. What comes to mind is long, long (long) bicycle treks to each other’s houses, sleepovers, maniacal laughter, and the unconscious sense that we were the first people in the history of the world to discover this new form of human relations. This was not even close to being a son or a brother. This was a heroic leap outside that circle, the familiarity of family, into the great big unknown world of everything else. And the feeling I shared with my fellow explorers? It was an entirely new species of love, this friendship, and it was enlivened by the bold sense that the future was a boundless thing as big as forever. In other words, we would never die and this, things as they were, would never end. In still other words, we were down for life.

A concern of mine has been that social media, and the fact that my kids don’t ride bikes, would somehow degrade the magical powers of young friendship for my kids. This is probably just indicative of my advancing age and the tendency of the old to critique young people’s unique approach to the same old archetypes (of my stepdad shaking his head when the Beastie Boys appeared on the Grammy stage in 1986). But my daughter and her friends have proven to me that friendship is alive and well and that Facebook and Instagram can serve as instruments that replace landlines and loud shouts across the playground about meeting after school. Anyway, to watch my family dependent girl leap the gap to a tight-knit group of friends has been a thrill. It’s a common cliché to dwell on the perils of growing up, but it’s not without its share of giddy pleasures and delights.

However, I am an imperfect and messy man who, in addition to being happy for her, is also subject to thinking things like But what about the damn cupcakes and the mountain hike and me, you know, daddy? How many times, I wondered, had I felt tethered to her, trapped? And now, as she begins to construct a world to call her own, by what logic do I experience my freedom as a form of abandonment? Damn it. Is the grass always greener? To what end green grass? Can the fence itself hold up to a thorough line of questioning? She didn’t know when she’d be back or even if she’d be back before 8:00; she would call and let me know. I would read with half my heart, write with half my heart, and wait for her call so we could begin our day.

And I know you’re waiting, here, at the end of the essay, for a resolution of a kind, some valuable lesson learned. Perhaps my conflict rests as I bask in complete acceptance or balance is achieved when my daughter has a great time with both her friends and her daddy. Me too. I’m waiting too. I’m still waiting for my daughter to call.

Driver’s Training

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts, General • Tagged #brainteen, driving, family, fatherhood, fathers and sons, Jon Sponaas, new driver, parenting, teens • Leave a comment

“Where are we going, Dad?”

“I don’t know.”

* * *

When your mother and I brought you home from the safety of the hospital we set you on the bed, looked at you, looked at each other, and then looked at you some more. You were wrapped up in a blanket the size of a hand towel in what the nurses called a “baby burrito.” I remember thinking you ought to look a lot more stunned than you did because, after all, you were just born—very recently nothing. Wasn’t being so newly alive a shocker? Not really. You emitted a steady vibe of unimpressed composure. All you did for the moment was blink and sometimes yawn. Parenting, I thought, was going to be easy.

“What do we do with him?” your mother asked, smiling.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged.

So we took you to a Mexican restaurant and, bored, you watched us eat tacos.

* * *

Blink.

Now you have a learner’s permit and I’m in the passenger seat while you, behind the wheel, start the engine (of a car). You need to complete 10 hours of driving at night so here we are, in the car, in this thick atmosphere of metaphorical resonance. Take the wheel, son. My life is in your hands. I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and fasten your seatbelt.

“Where are we going, Dad?”

“I don’t know.”

* * *

We could go anywhere. Take a right here. Take a left there. Let’s not know where we’re going. Let’s get lost. Lost, it seems to me, is the truest way to be. Aren’t we always ever lost? Think about it. Where are we going? Slow down. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is no nihilist driver’s training manifesto, depressed and meaningless, looking for a café in which to brood and read postmodern poetry. Not at all. This is about the heightened consciousness that accompanies being lost, the careful attention to the nuance of path, and the joy after joy of discovery. Take a left. What’s more of a bore than knowing where we are and where we’re going? Let’s be existentially honest. Look back over the last 10 years. How apt were your maps? Could you have ever, in your wildest imaginings, dreamed up the journey to here? I mean, really. Is there anything more off the mark than the promise of your plans? Of course there’s not. So where are we going? Who knows? Accelerate out of the turn. There you go. Don’t let that wheel in your hands fool you into a false sense of control. Oh sure, you can turn it left or right—you can speed up and slow down, too—but what you can’t do is know what’s coming down the road, where you are, or where you’re going, especially at night and it’s always, more or less, dark on either side of where you are. Slow down. Pull off, here. Easy! Easy on the brakes.

* * *

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are we parked here?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to see that mountain. Check it out. Isn’t it spooky?”

“I guess.”

Here, we sat in the dark silence for 4 or 5 minutes, looking at the mountain. I watched my thoughts wandering around and they wondered what you were thinking. Then, they wandered around wondering about when and how we would die. The dark silence always reminds me of death. Spooky mountains, too. I wondered if you were also thinking about death, but I doubted it because you were probably still wondering about why we were there and where we were going, which, come to think of it, is probably a metaphor for death. And then I suddenly loved you. I remembered your smug nonchalance as an infant and how crookedly we arrived to here and I loved you so much that I thought I might explode from love. There was the moon and the mountain and you have grown up into such a beautiful young man. I wanted to tell you. I should have—but the silence, it seemed, was the mother of this love, and the dark. So I waited until now to write it all down and tell you.

* * *

“Hey, Dad. Which way do I go to get home?”

“I don’t know, Jay. Just pick a way and start driving.”

Photo credit: Scott Akerman

The Whole Truth

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Kristina Cerise • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged children and childhood, divorce, emotions, family, fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters, Kristina Cerise, parenting • 1 Comment

“How often do you see your dad?” she asks casually.

The question is one of many questions we’ve volleyed back and forth this particular afternoon as we sit in the sun and let our children play on the playground.

How should I answer this question I’m sure she perceives as benign?

I could simply say, “My dad visits a couple times a year.”

That’s true. Or, at least, true enough.

Or, I could say, “I see my father’s shadow every day.” That’s also true but it takes some explaining.

I could tell her I see his shadow every time I pass a big rig on the highway and glance at the forearms of the trucker to see if they are connected to my father’s hub-cap sized hands.

I could tell her I see his shadow in the uneven gait of anyone in cowboy boots. And in every pair of Wranglers with extra slack where a butt should be.

I could tell her I see his shadow in the hand firmly gripping the upper arm of the whining child in front of me in the grocery checkout line. And in the neck swiftly turning to administer a fierce gaze and the promise of action to an off-task child at the park.

I could tell her I see his shadow in the red nose of the man in the bar who asks for another with eyes at once hopeful that the next round will bring relief and simultaneously sorrowful because he knows the amber elixir lost its magic years ago and the bottom of the glass is not where second chances hide. And in the father sitting across from his child at a nearby table holding up his end of a patchwork conversation, pieced together as good as it can be given the uneven stitches of court ordered visitations and shared holidays.

I could tell her I see his shadow in the Vietnam vet on the corner and hold my breath while I check to make sure that the stranger is indeed a stranger and that the remarkable resemblance is only just that.

I could tell her all this and reveal myself to be a not-so-well-adjusted, not-so-resilient child of divorce. I could reveal myself to be the dented can somehow placed on the shelf alongside all the unblemished cylinders that made it through similar journeys without permanent damage.

There are plenty of other moms on the playground that appear normal and self-actualized. Friendship with me will cost the same as friendship with one of them. Surely she would prefer to invest her time in building a friendship with someone else. Someone not standing in the long shadow of what could have been but wasn’t. Someone who won’t tense when she hears kids whine. Someone who won’t weep when she sees the easy affection of a father for his child. Someone who won’t speed up to overtake a semi on the off chance she knows the driver. Someone who won’t lose her train of thought when she sees a bearded man at the off ramp with a Sharpie plea written on a cardboard remnant.

I could pose as an undented can. I could turn my best side forward and hide the imperfections. I could pretend to be unaffected by the bumps and sharp corners of my journey.

I could say, “My dad visits a couple times a year.”

Or, I could reveal the scars of improperly healed wounds and say, “I see my father’s shadow every day.”

I look at her and realize that I’ve taken too long to answer what she thinks is a simple question.

Reflections of My Son at the Rock-N-Roll Show

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged fatherhood, Jon Sponaas, parenting, parenting teens, raising teens, teens • Leave a comment

My son will be 16 later this month and, man, it’s tough to avoid clichés about the passage of time. One minute I’m wiping his ass and then, the next, I’m standing next to him on a sidewalk in Grand Rapids, Michigan, waiting in line to see a rock concert. You never see it coming, you don’t think, “Eh, this’ll pass and soon we’ll go see shows together and speak in awed tones about how hard the drummer for Listener hits his drums.” But perhaps this is best. This not knowing. Grabbing the next diaper is not, in itself and always, without joy. Stay true to the ebb or the flow with no eye to their opposites. Just wipe.

And then one day he’ll be 16, wearing an orange hoodie and a t-shirt depicting a comic book character you’ve never heard of, and his hair will be in his eyes; you’ll catch yourself muttering boy needs a haircut, kids, bah. He’ll be sarcastic and witty and he’ll make you laugh, no longer merely because he’s cute, but because he’s really, really funny. He’ll shave the whiskers off his face, wipe himself, and, because the sun will hit him just right and create a perspective much more broad and encompassing than that of your immediate concerns, you’ll think My God I have loved participating in the process of your becoming a man. Who are you? Where did you go, Little Boy? If I… could put time… in a bottle…

But these lofty bird’s eye reflections will soon give way to your entry into the small concert venue and the dissonance of being at a rock concert with your son. Dissonance, because you go to concerts with your outlaw friends where the music is loud, the message is defiant, and the atmosphere fosters chaos—the delightfully scary knowledge that anything goes and everything is permitted. But your son? You chase him as he runs toward the street. You tell him to say no to drugs and to use condoms—that is, only, of course, IF he’s having sex. (Is he having sex?!?) You make him eat vegetables and do homework and listen to his mother. But music—loud good music, no matter what it says, always says “WAHHHHHHHH, YEAHHH BAYBAYYYYY. KICK KICK snare drum drum DRUM—CRASH!!! YOUR DAD IS… DUMBBBBBBBBB. He’s an ASS ASS ASS.” Or what have you. And it is here, at the crossroads of this contradiction, where the essence of my conflict as a father finds its expression.

I despise authority. I am the authority. To hell with me! Better listen to me! And on and on until I just kind of cancel myself out and either the ebb ebbs or the flow flows and all I do is notice my son tapping his foot and nodding his head. And he’s smiling, but not in a simple happy kind of way. It’s more akin to a deeply satisfied smile that has just now stumbled into the realm of a very old and precious secret. A drummer himself, he’s watching the drummer and nodding his head with every thump and crash. The drummer—he’s hitting the drums so hard that I wonder if he’s up to something more than making music. Somewhere, way beyond the song, he’s fighting an old fight inside himself, breaking down the walls of a jail that can’t hold him, and, like the rest of us, always, becoming someone else.

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The Humility of Fatherhood

Posted on June 13, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged adoption, confidence, fatherhood, fathers, humility, Jon Sponaas, parenting • Leave a comment

I wasn’t nervous because I was worried he might show up to contest the adoption proceedings. I knew he wouldn’t. He had his own thing and his own reasons and I don’t pretend to understand him or judge him. We have made peace. Nonetheless I was still nervous—for reasons that circled around identity and fate and a few other big things that matter in the grand scheme of big things that matter. This was one of those days in your life, few and far between, when who you are is about to change in every imaginable way. Sure, we change a little bit every single day as each moment chisels away at who we will become, but on this day I woke up a particular man and would go to bed a completely someone else. The bailiff, as the law requires, called his name once, and then twice, and finally—much louder—a third time. Silence. Silence. Silence. And it was done. I was a father and I had a 3-year-old son. But I didn’t feel very different. And neither did my son. He asked for some juice.

Was that Father’s Day? Or had Father’s Day already come and gone? Maybe I became a father the first time he called me Dada, a year earlier, or the first time I changed a diaper. I had been around since the day he was born, doing stuff that looked suspiciously father-like and yet I still identified as a guy who merely lived with his girlfriend and her son. This is very much like walking in the rain and not being wet, but this is often the way stories unfold in my life. I am usually the last one to know the truth about me. The day is done. It’s time for bed. But I never check my watch and jabber with the moon.

I suppose I always thought that I would one day feel like a father, which implied to me that I would one day have it all figured out and, having accomplished the noble end of all that industrious figuring, I would be ready to pass the torch and transmit the substance of all my hard won it. How could I have possibly known that, just behind the thin screen of my own parents seeming to have it all together, the center faced the constant threat of not holding and everything always lingered on the verge of coming apart—indeed, even coming apart a little and often in ways I was too young to notice and coming back together just before I did. How little we all know about just about everything. I thought it would get better. I believed the prerequisite for fatherhood was feeling and being more confident about my place in the world.

However, I discovered the truth about where fathering begins—180 degrees away from confidence—at the birth of my daughter. Birth is one of those events where the concept is in no way equipped to remotely represent what actually happens. What I mean is, yeah, you can understand that, of course, women give birth to children but knowing this is actually a barrier against what really happens when you witness a woman giving birth to your child. What I mean is that what you think you know about what’s going to happen gets completely exploded by what happens. Scratch that. What I mean is that everything you think you know about everything gets completely exploded when you see your child being born. Like, imagine that everything you think you know is a warehouse full of hand grenades and dynamite and the birth of your child is a lit match tossed in…

What am I talking about? Well, there’s before—and that includes all things before, including the whole delivery process—and then there’s after—and “after” means after that point when you actually see a baby—your baby—who is, like, 2 or 3 seconds old.

So I was this person, right? It’s super hard to explain. There’s this kind of naÃ¯ve consciousness that has, like, the basics of how the world works down and takes it for granted, you know? Lots of times, people like this call themselves “Realists,” because they consider themselves down to earth, in the know, and/or real. So I’m kind of like that, this person in the world who’s doing okay or whatever—okay, that is, until I saw my daughter just after she was nothing.

So she wasn’t here and then she was and, for me, the world kind of quivered, got wavy, and went voop voop voop, which is the sound the world makes when there’s a rip in its fabric and all the necessary assumptions for a world to be a world turn into hand grenades and dynamite and explode. Because, really, what the hell? If a baby—your baby—can just, for forever, not be here, and then, KABOOM, be here, isn’t that essentially an expression of the quirky little fact that ANYTHING might HAPPEN maybe ALL THE TIME?!? And how you can be the same after that? How can you take anything for granted after that? How can you be sure of anything after that? And now you’re supposed to raise a baby?

My genuine emergence into fatherhood occurred when a baby gave birth to my ignorance. This ignorance is the mirror of a more genuine humble confidence. It had always been raining.

Showing Lola Brain, Child

Posted on May 29, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged brain, child, Child Magazine, children and childhood, fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas, parenting, teen/tween, teens, writing • Leave a comment

“Come upstairs, Lola Blue. I have something for you.”

“WHAT?!?”

“Well no don’t um—get all excited about it. I mean, it’s for you and all, but it’s the kind of something that you just sort of keep and put away and maybe look at from time to time like your purple volcano stones from Maui.”

“Cool! Let’s see!”

Upstairs, Lola sat on my bed and I handed her a copy of Brain, Child, Volume 16, Issue 2, a literary magazine for thinking mothers. On the cover was an animated image of two young people from behind, holding hands, and they both have cell phones in their pockets. (If, by chance, you wanted to ORDER this magazine, you could click here and we could definitely make that happen.) Lola did her best to feign interest in the magazine but it was a far cry from purple volcano stones from Maui.

“Just—uh—you know, flip through the pages a little bit,” I instructed. “Figured there might be something in there you might find interesting.”

She leafed through the pages, humming, skimming titles and checking out the art work (was that what she was supposed to find interesting? who knows? dad’s not being especially direct with this particular “something special”) until page 54 stopped her cold in stunned recognition. What the hell? It was her.

“It’s me!” she exclaimed on the border of a question, looking at me, amazed, and then back again at the full page black and white image of herself in a magazine. “The Poetry of Math?” she read the title, wondering what it meant, “And it’s by you! You, Daddy, in a magazine! And me!”

“Yeah,” I said and sat next to her. “I write about you and your brother on the Internet all the time, but this is different, hey? Here we are, out in the world, in print. Is that pretty cool or is that pretty cool?”

“It’s way pretty cool!” She smiled, turned the page, and read “{OUR KIDS} + (the FUTURE) = Anything. You write so crazy, Daddy. What’s that even supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know, little girl. I just scribble things down about you kids and hope that maybe one day you’ll check them out—like when you’re 20 or something—and maybe they’ll mean something to you. And then, maybe when you’re 30 or 40, they might mean something else. Hell, I’m not even sure half the time if I know what they mean and I’m the guy who writes it. But I do know this much for sure. Sometimes, you kids mean more to me than anything I could ever tell you. I could never explain. So I just try to write it down and see what happens.”

“Like how?”

“Like how what?”

“Like how do me and Jay-Jay mean things you can’t explain?”

“Sweetheart. I just explained to you that I can’t explain and that’s why I write—”

“But, Daddy, this IS writing. It’s not like we’re having a real conversation. This is an essay on the Internet.”

I felt weird. Dizzy. Like drugs, or colors. “Whoa,” I said, “this conversation just went all meta-essay. Do you know what that means?”

“That the writing no longer seeks to deceive the reader by representing a transparent reality but, rather, becomes conscious of itself as writing while exploring and articulating its limitations.”

“Yeah. You’re pretty bright for a 10-year-old girl.”

“I have a really strange dad. So, anyway, how? How do me and Jay-Jay mean things you can’t explain?”

“Okay, it’s like this. Sometimes you and your brother will just… DO something. Like, anything. And I can’t just say ‘Wow, Lola, that was really awesome the way you brushed your hair,’ because, even though that’s what you did, that’s not what it meant. See? What it meant is what I can’t explain.”

“Well, what did it mean?”

“Are you even listening to me? I don’t know. Nothing, maybe? It’s like there’s this world, you know, and it’s spinning in a circle and whirling around the sun, in circles, going nowhere, and there’s all this war and sex and reality television and people—it’s the people, I think—the way we’re trapped inside the narratives of our own stories as if they’re, like, realer than they really are and I’m the same way, just living my life, oblivious, consumed, selfish, and then all of a sudden—WHAM—you’re brushing your hair or Jaydn opens a window and I can’t believe there’s such a thing as any of this or you and I get—like—stunned without a tongue so I write things like ‘Lola brushed her hair free of tangles and rubies as Jaydn opened the window to get some fresh dreams. My children are made of tulips and stardust. Nothing in the world is what anything seems.’ Do you see? I can’t explain. I can’t—”

“Shhhh,” she spared my lips. “Hey, Daddy? Can I keep this? The magazine?”

“Of course you can—yes. I wrote it for you.”

“You will always be the candles on my eyes’ windowsills.”

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How Our Kids Become Who They Are

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged fatherhood, fathers, Jon Sponaas, parenting, parenting teens, teen/tween, teens • Leave a comment

My 15-year-old son, up until very recently, dreamt of pursuing a career developing video games, a dream no doubt created in part by the delusion that his job would consist mostly of playing video games and eating potato chips as opposed to laboring day in and day out over frustratingly buggy code. But far be it from me to trample on what appears to be a silly dream. I am, after all, a writer and, when I’m alone, an indy rock god with an acoustic guitar performing for small crowds of 300 or so because only a select few really, really understand me.

But the other day, in the same Italian restaurant where we always eat penne with pesto at a very stable table, me the father, he the son, relaxed and comfortable in all this steady self-sameness, he did that thing the world will often do when—in a blink—everything is revealed for what it always really is: constantly maybe not what it is on the way to being something else that it, too, might not be.

From nowhere (indeed, from where else?), he just up and says, “I’m pretty sure I’m going to UCLA to become a chemist.” And just like that, in a blink, the video game developer gave way to a chemist.

Anything could happen all the time. Like, right now! Or… now! Or… Right now too! You never know, do you? Blink. Someone stole your car. Blink. You lost your leg in a carnival accident. Blink. You’re dead. It’s really not conducive to the ongoing production of anxiety-free ordinary days to dwell overmuch on what might happen when you blink. I mean, any number of horrible things could go down. Blink. Check your wallet.

Oh sure, of course, it’s in the realm of possibility, too, that good things might happen in the blink of an eye, but such sudden—blink—change tends to evoke a sense of dread in this worry wart because it seems to me that stability itself is the good thing I’m crossing my fingers for from blink to blink to blink. Blink—still here. Blink—still here. Blink—is my car gone? My leg? What about my wallet? Still in my pocket? Nice! And so on.

How interesting it is to think that—in spite of this craving for stability and fear of sudden death—a big long history of silver tongued mystics and goofy quantum physicists generally agree that the world possesses absolutely no substance, no abiding this-this-this that remains that-that-that. As Brahma creates the world—blink—Shiva destroys it—blink—and on and on and on, and Hakuun Yasutani once preached that our bodies undergo a sophisticated process of creative emergence and destruction 6,400,099,980 times a day! And what’s the deal with quantum physics and the notion of substance as a kind of dense energy that tends to repeatedly explode in patterns that vibrate on the same frequency for awhile until they don’t? It’s like a thing—or you and me—are puddles of water that constantly freeze and melt in all kinds of ways until everything evaporates. Or maybe not. It’s no easy task to articulate adequate metaphors that serve to illuminate the weirdness of all this unstable thingliness.

Now, with the backing of such esoteric authority, the basic terrifying fact of our (not) lives takes on a whole new aura of magic, wonder, and possibility. We are not the reified entities we tend to represent to ourselves as the solidified what of who we think we are and, at the end of the day, or on the other side of this moment, we could maybe possibly might be anything. Sometimes I’ll just stare at something—a pitcher of water, a tree, a bus, whatever—and wonder how in the world it can possibly just sit there, remaining what it is as opposed to just vanishing into nothing or morphing into a bowl of fruit or a green mamba or whatever thing an anything might be.

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to UCLA to become a chemist,” he said and—blinking again—I saw the future erupt around him as if it was merely the words themselves that made things so: glass beakers, Bunsen burners, a white lab coat. And me in reverie about mystics, physics, and the enduring substance of tables and pasta from blink to blink and the mysterious who of who we are and are and are some more.

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Reflections on Raising a Frog-Donkey: Adolescence

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged children and childhood, family, fatherhood, fathers and sons, Jon Sponaas, teen/tween • Leave a comment

As my 15-year-old son clumsily navigates his way through these treacherous middle zones where childhood and adulthood are smudged out in a smeared blur of identities—most aptly represented by some zany creature in mythology with, say, the body of a frog and a donkey’s head, which is to say utterly perplexing—I often find myself confused and angry and frightfully overjoyed, which is to say utterly perplexed. I mean, seriously. Who the hell is this frog-donkey?

So much of parenting young children mimics the careful maintenance of something you merely care a whole lot about. I don’t mean to completely diminish small children to the status of mere “things” in an absolute way but, let’s face it, they don’t exactly hold up their end of deep fulfilling interpersonal relationships. You just love them like crazy and take care of them. You carry them around, you strap them in car seats, you get them juice when they chime juice! and, generally, make sure they don’t die. But you don’t discuss whether or not Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism invalidates the profundity of his insight with them; you don’t ponder the insidious presence of misogyny in culture and film with them; and you don’t process your complicated feelings of respect and resentment for your boss with them either. You just try to get them to eat something because, for crying out loud, the only reason they’re so cranky is their glucose is crashing. What I’m driving at here is that, consumed by the practical tasks of meeting his needs, I’m afraid that I never got around to conceiving of my son as, like, a real person or something. Who had the time?

But during the last couple years, as he began to develop some higher level rational functioning, engaging in prolonged reflections that evolved into opinions (above and beyond some strong feelings about this or that Pokémon), it has slowly dawned on me that what I was caring for, what I was cultivating with all that concern and grape juice, would one day be a wholly autonomous human being, just like me.

Hold up now. Just like me?

This insight, though it of course carries the potential, on the surface, to fill a parent with chest swelling pride, does not strike me as an intrinsically fantastic thing. For starters, I’m on my way to being out of a job—a job that, in spite of its numerous tragedies of wailing and vomit, fills me with a great sense of purpose. Being a dad, taking care of and protecting a child, is pretty damn cool. And then he grows up a little and suddenly gets it in his head that he’s going to become his own man? I’m calling a foul. Go to your room.

But what really throws me is what the revelation that he is “just like me” reveals. The revelation points to obfuscation. It reveals a necessary concealing. Just like me in relation to my dad, my son—in order to endure and conquer that smeared blur between child and man—must create a shroud of secrecy in which to experience himself as a self as opposed to merely the object of my care. It’s absolutely essential that he defy me and lie to me. And good for him but he better not. My job, it appears, is to be torn in half.

It’s an urgent need, I think, for a lot of parents to, in relation to these ideas, think not my kid, so I’ll just talk about my own blossoming liar. The little guy needs his own world. And, in spite of the fact that I just wrote a sentence—just now! the sentence before this one!—that declared my son’s need for his own world, it’s still my sovereign duty as “the dad” to define and enforce (with his mother) the limits of his world—the boundaries we define as necessary to keep him healthy and whole and free of harm. Do your homework. Don’t drink. Never give out your personal information to strangers on the internet. And the frog body part of him craves that direction and loves it; my God he loves to make us proud.

But I also remember my crazy ass donkey head, too. Don’t you? My dad just doesn’t get it. Who does he think he is? Pshaw. And then? All those supposedly dumb ass thoughts led me to the most delicious realization I’ve ever had before or since: I can do whatever… I… want. From there I was just one step away from Faust’s untrodden, untreadable regions, crossing the line, transgression, on my way to who I would become. And to know that my son is right there, ready to explode into the shelter of himself makes me giddy with terror. I need to keep him warm and safe; he needs to play with fire. And there is room in this perplexity for joy.

Photo by Anders Sandberg

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The Power of Speech and Texts

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas, parenting, teen/tween, texts • 1 Comment

Before you could talk I used to stare at you a lot and wonder where you lived. In what kind of world? I confess to being somewhat addicted to the Linguistic Turn in Western philosophy—the counterintuitive notion that it is language itself that constitutes the things around us as opposed to words merely being labels we stick on pre-existing things.

Huh?

Okay. Either a chair is just, um, there—as the thing people sit on—and then, eventually, we learn the word for it: “chair.” Simple enough. OR… it’s the word itself—chair—that gives rise to the thing upon which people sit. Calls it into being, so to speak, so the world we live in is only as large as our vocabulary.

I like modern art and poetry and destructive philosophy that teases the logic of common sense so it’s probably no surprise to you that the latter relationship between language and thinghood appeals to my taste.

Which brings me back to the curiosity that got this essay rolling. In what kind of world were you before you could speak? A sloppy swirly soup of color and form, I imagined, like a trippy Jackson Pollock movie. No wonder you cried all the time, swimming around in such chaotic flux. But sometimes you stared right back into my eyes, seemingly unafraid and perhaps even defiant, which was weird. And then you’d smile all gums as if mocking my world among reified things.

I waited and waited for your first word—that first thing upon which your world would stand and against which everything else would contrast, not being that, being something else until the whole wide world would snap into place. Chairs. Owls. Snowmobiles.

It was cracker. Out of chaos you called forth a cracker, which was actually a Cheerio, but I think you really just meant food, an expansive word that of course embraces crackers, cheerios, and Peking duck. By what monstrous act of mentation do we cull our first signifier in isolation from all others? It’s impossible. It resists explanation. But after your first great leap, you soon distinguished kitty from cracker and, from there, you never shut your flapping yappus. You were one of us. It was amazing.

And as you spoke and continued to speak, naming and constituting a world of things, something equally—perhaps even more—mysterious evolved in conjunction with this eruption of external reality. An inner life. The thing we call you. It grew and grew and grew in rooms of thought and memory and I have never stopped wondering who you are. Did your acquisition of language bring us closer together or cleave us apart? Hard to say. And isn’t that—what is hard to say being hard to say—precisely the problem?

Who are you? Where did you go? What’s on your mind as you gaze out the window?

* * *

You turned 10 a few days ago and got an iPhone. I wasn’t thrilled by the plan but, more important than the fact all your friends have them, your activities and travels around town are beginning to expand and you’re finding yourself in more and more situations where a phone is just practical.

It’s easy to get swept away by the negative critique of “you damn kids today,” your mobile devices, social media, the end of grammar, the death of spelling, and the corrosion of the ability to form deep and meaningful relationships. Narcissists! Sociopaths! Brain Cancer!

But I have to confess that, in spite of the end of the world as we know it, I have been delightfully surprised and charmed by the way you’ve so intuitively embraced and used the text message.

“BOO! I love you daddy :)”

You will probably never know how often I think about you, imagine you, wonder about you, and hope for you. And this device, this supposed blemish on our crumbling civilization, has granted us access into each other’s lives whenever we want from wherever we are.

“Tell me something good,” I type and hit send.

“I made 2 new friends :)”

And then, late, I’m reading in bed and drifting in and out of sleep when my phone beep beeps.

“Im supposed to be asleep, daddy hee hee. I love you goodnight :)”

* * *

Tonight, you’re flying to Washington, DC, and we’ve promised to stay in touch. I’ve assigned you the mission of finding a statue of Abraham Lincoln and sending me a picture. I will sneak attack you with declarations of love and flowers and butterflies and cupcakes. And in this minimal amount of time, exploring these new ways that a father and daughter can appear to one another in language, I can’t help but wonder about the power of the text message. In what way—how—can it utilize and possibly extend those original magic powers of the word to call forth crackers and kitties? The text message spans the distance and closes the gap. Speaks love and so it is. In new ways? In ways that alter the reach and shape of love? Perhaps. Hard to say.

“Fly home soon, Lola Blue. I miss you. You are the cool breeze blowing through the window. xo”

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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.

The Valentine Paradox: Advice For My Son

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged fatherhood, fathers, Jon Sponaas, love, parenting, sons, teen/tween • 2 Comments

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, son, and the trick to nabbing a valentine is to seriously up your game, player. However, the trick to upping your game is tricky because it’s all about not having a game or any tricks. I’m sorry, but all the best things are paradoxes.

To construe romantic love as a game is to lose before it begins and you’ll inevitably lose afterwards too because there’s no escaping that part where you’re clutching your heart like Reverend Dimmesdale with snot all over your face and hair and your friends will have no choice but to shake their heads at your incoherent babble between all the cataclysmic sobs. It will end badly. Like everything. But no worries, young man. There’s a deep optimism beneath the surface of pessimism. I told you, man, paradoxes.

This is the part where I tell you to just be yourself. But does such a thing exist when you’re 15? To thine own self be true, Laertes. But what’s that even mean? And what in the world does it have to do with valentines?

What it has to with valentines is another paradox. Seek a valentine and she is nowhere to be found. A valentine never appears until you don’t need her. Being yourself, being true to your complicated self, and just doing what you love, however, is a valentine magnet. But, to contradict myself (only seemingly), playing video games all the time is not very attractive. That’s because—I’m sorry—playing video games is not what you really love. Not at all. It’s a distraction from what you love, like looking for valentines. What you love will call you like a vocation, which is actually, of course, a goddess singing to you with her arms wide open in a gale of black chaos. Embrace her. Hear her song. I’d sing it for you but I don’t know the words and neither do you. That’s why I told you to hear her song. Are you even listening? Get over there and embrace the goddess!

It could be anything. You might love to write or paint or play the drums or fix cars or build log cabins or compete in triathlons or read big fat books about Being or wars or wizards and dwarves. But you’ll know it when you find it because it’ll be love and you’ll lose yourself and you won’t need anything else to make you feel whole because you’ll already be empty, gone, lost in what you love, which—paradoxically—is the substance of fullness.

And then—when you are completely satisfied—that’s when you’ll be swarmed by valentines. Be wary, though, of people attracted to the power of your love who seek to be its object. These are vampires whose thirsts your blood will never quench and soon you’ll be arguing about money, the color of towels, and other incomprehensible matters. Rather, your valentine, also attracted by the force with which you love, will love and protect your love, and you too will love and protect what she loves for only those in the throes of the goddess’ song can recognize and love one another.

The desire to play video games will vanish. You’ll look upon your valentine with no small amount of discomfort because your whole body will vibrate with a million things to say but you, in a dazed and blinky stupor, will be dumfounded, speechless, conked by lust. It is at precisely this moment, when what resolutely resists articulation insists on being said, that you will be called to pull up your chair to the table of poetry. Here, don’t waste your metaphors on her physical appearance, on the pearls of her teeth or the crashing ocean wave from her waist to hip. Stay true to love. Make no sense. She is a book in a thunderstorm, a map of fire, a key to the house of ashes and forgotten songs. Like that. Confuse her. Real lovers will find comfort in confusion, joy in ambiguity, and home in the rotation of seasons.

Seriously, write her poems. I’m giving you all my heat.

And this above all: Be kind. Figure out what kindness means to her and be exactly that. Imagine all your conflicts from her perspective, see yourself with her eyes, and be for her everything she desires. Forget yourself. Unflinchingly, unceasingly, with complete abandon. Chase away every thought about getting or not getting the love you want. Just be the love you want and you will find in so doing a paradox about which the very wise do not dare to speak unless it’s the gentle rain on the silent mountain.

Raising Feminist Kids

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged fatherhood, fathers, feminism, Jon Sponaas, parenting • 21 Comments

Feminism is a word that represents such a vast (and often conflicting) array of meanings, that, no matter how much you’ve read, it’s hard to know what you’re thinking and talking about when you’re thinking and talking about Feminism. And I should say it straight up in the first paragraph that I’m certainly no expert in terms of the many and varied nuances of feminist theory. I mean, hey, I like to think of myself as open-minded (who doesn’t?) but it’s often made clear to me that, as a result of my lifelong vision of the world from the perspective of white male privilege, I suffer from blind spots that make it either impossible or extremely difficult for me to imagine or understand the phenomenology of being a woman and/or any other victim of systematic social oppression. Now that insight doesn’t always occur to me as easily as I just typed it. When confronted by new insights, I get defensive, I resist, I stew, and I grimace until I’m finally able to see that I can’t see, that dwelling in privilege necessarily occurs on a foundation of blindness that is never magically cured by good intentions.

With that said, I have good intentions. I have a son and a daughter and a responsibility to wonder: How can I raise these kids with an eye toward a world that is kinder to women? Some of my kneejerk responses are that I should instill within my son a conscious respect for women, based in the awareness that being a woman entails experiences and struggles to which boys and men are never subjected and scarcely aware, and to teach my daughter that she’s beautiful no matter what, that how she looks need not be measured against unrealistic cultural constructs of beauty. Good starts, maybe, but there is further to go.

Being a man with a son, certainly, I’d like to raise him in such a way that he is sensitive to women’s issues and willing to play a part in the creation of a world in which women are confronted by less and less hostility. However, I’d also like to see the inverse of his kindness toward women manifest itself as outright activism when it comes to other men and our attitudes toward women. Above and beyond a revolution in our own sensibilities regarding women, men must up the ante by demanding the same in other men and by raising sons who are willing to make the same demands. This might mean something as simple as informing a friend that it’s totally not cool to call a woman a bitch. It could also mean the willingness to risk the use of force to put a stop to a sexual assault in progress. What I’m talking about is the exact opposite of the longstanding male tradition of looking away from misogyny and getting right up in its face. The logical extension of our “enlightened” views and good intentions is to risk our good standing among our fellows and demand some changes.

But what could possibly be wrong with celebrating my daughter’s beauty with no regard for its proximity to our culture’s twisted ideal of beauty? Well, what’s wrong with emphasizing our daughters as beautiful (no matter what) is that it overlooks and blocks us off from a pressing question about how we’re inclined to see women in the first place. Why is it that, as we nobly hope to revise what beautiful means, beauty remains, entrenched and unquestioned, the lens through which we apprehend women? Imagine the freedom we could reveal for our daughters if, instead of building more expansive prisons of beauty (“Everyone’s beautiful!”; “We’re beautiful in our own way!”; “We’re pretty on the inside!”), we knocked down the walls and granted them escape entirely from the shackles of this torturous adjective.

Our daughters deserve better adjectives. This is to say that we need nothing short of a revolution in consciousness in terms of the way we see and understand women. Think not? Observe for yourself for a single day what constitutes the first, the highest, and most frequent form of compliment doled out to women (indeed, from men and women alike) on television, in print, social media, and your day to day life. You’re beautiful. So pretty. Radiant. Gorgeous. Hottie. Love that dress. OMG your hair! Etc. Our damn near singular relationship to women as such is via their appearance and how their appearance shores up with beauty.

Our daughters deserve better adjectives. New modes from which to appear. Feminism as that which frees the female from a primarily seen and assessed object. But then what would she be? Sure, intelligent, funny, yeah, okay. But, further, adjectives personal to her, individual, that articulate her singular coming forth to girl in the world, not measured with scales of beauty, but apprehended as an expression of the unique explosion of forces that she was called to announce.

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The Butterfly Effect

Posted on January 27, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged Elizabeth Maria Naranjo, family, fatherhood, fathers, fathers and sons, husbands • 1 Comment

By Elizabeth Maria Naranjo
I like to imagine I can trace my son’s birth through the lineage of his father’s past—mapping out every choice, every move, every step my husband thought was a mistake, that made my son’s life possible. It’s like visualizing the butterfly effect, resonating and sounding within one man’s heart. Of course, creating life takes two hearts. But I already know my story.

This is his story:

A black-haired boy stares at the doors of a restaurant, then pushes his way inside. He’s holding hands with a beautiful blonde, his dark brown wrist crossing boldly over her white one. The migrant workers behind the counter eye him warily, envious. It is summer in Tucson, Arizona. The year is 1970.

This boy, who is not really a boy but not quite a man, stills the tremor in his voice as he asks to see the owner. He sweeps his gaze over the adobe walls, the bare, wooden rafters, and the unique cement sculptures twisted with wire that adorn the archway. He has heard of these sculptures, inspired by the ancient Mayan artwork of Mexico. He has come to meet the artist. He grips the woman’s hand, and she squeezes back. They’ve planned the wedding for August.

The owner appears, a sturdy-looking man with a gray-swept beard and serious eyes. He sees the couple, stops and raises a hand to his chest. The hand falls away, and he closes the distance, embracing the son he has not seen in thirteen years.

Father and son waste no time filling the chasm; they simply jump it and move forward. The boy is the youngest of five; he has the shortest memory, and sees nothing to forgive. It was only out of loyalty to his mother that he adopted his brothers’ vows to refrain from seeking out the man who deserted them. Barely six at the time, his sharpest memory remains the one where he watched the tail lights fade, and ran after them, crying out, “Hey, Dad! Hey, Dad!” But no corners of this boy’s heart are dark enough to house bitterness. He’s always known the moment the calendar marked him free, at eighteen, he would find his father, and know him.

The father, Jesus, gives his son a job at Tia Elena, washing dishes. The son, Alex, is a fast learner; he is spirited and ambitious. Within a year, he is managing the kitchen. Within two, he speaks fluent Spanish, a language silenced and purged from him long ago by his school teachers. Like a chameleon he absorbs his father’s world, but reflects it with his own shape and colors. Though he won’t judge, he knows when his own son arrives, he will never leave him.

Alex and his bride work hard for this son. They make love with all the hope and abandon of newlyweds dreaming of babies. Maybe a girl will come first; it doesn’t matter. They choose the names. The faces they see in endless combinations: her eyes, his hair, his eyes, her hair, skin a shade of caramel that falls between them. They have time. When Jesus retires, they take over the restaurant. Alex continues to learn from his father: masonry, adobe-making; he becomes an artist in his own right, fashioning jewelry from silver and turquoise, and creating beautiful stained-glass windows.

But years pass, and there are no children. Alex and his wife see doctors, and learn there will probably never be children. He loses himself in the restaurant; he drinks too much. His wife begins making frequent trips to her hometown. The dull ache of infertility settles between them, and the marriage fails.

Alex shoves aside his losses and holds on to the restaurant. He builds a lounge, where soon he’ll dance nights away with a new wife, and new hopes. She is stunning, big-breasted and doe-eyed, tall and blonde, with passions that match his. Together, their passions fuel a sense of fearlessness and indestructibility. They will have a child, of course they will, and until then they will drink and dance and pour money into the restaurant, because they cannot fail.

Ten years later, there are still no children, and now there is no money. The restaurant folds. The divorce papers are drawn up. Alex loses his father. He loses everything.

Just north of the slow quiet skies of Tucson, a valley cradled among mountains blazes with sprawling growth. It is here, in Phoenix, that a man can lose himself in the bright noise and blurred speed of the city. His brothers have built a business in commercial painting, and Alex joins them, spending his days taping and brushing, trimming and spraying, and listening to the smooth familiar drone of his older brothers’ teasing. They contract with a preschool, and paint the walls in glossy reds and greens and yellows and blues. Alex, now in his forties, accepts that this brightly colored world is probably beyond his reach. He meets a woman with children of her own, teenagers, and they cautiously begin to know each other. She is done having children, and he is fine with that. Not every man is meant to be a father.

Another decade passes, and he begins to think not every man is meant to be a husband. He jokes about his marriages and his bad luck with blondes, but he never disparages the women, or himself. Well into his fifties now, the silver threads through his black hair, and his weathered skin bears the marks of the desert, though his heart remains unchanged. The narrow focus of his optimism and the strength of his vitality push him forward, always forward. He puts his skills to use at a hospital, repairing walls, broken beds, faulty electrical wires, damaged pipes. At home, he tears down walls and builds new ones. Sometimes he thinks about his father, and the cries of “Hey, Dad! Hey, Dad!” and watching the tail lights fade. Sometimes, he thinks he hears the voice calling to him, as if he were the one leaving. But when he imagines this, he is always walking toward the sound, not away from it.

Maybe it was the moment his first wife left him. Maybe it was the moment he walked away from Tucson. Maybe it was the moment he chose a job closer to home. Probably it was all of these moments that fell in a slow cascade that leads him through the path of a nurse on the second floor. Inexplicably, she tells him she’s been waiting for him, that she believes they belong together. But she’s too young, he thinks. She has brown hair. She carries a thermos plastered with pictures of her little girl. He tells her he can’t have children; she tells him she’s fine with the one she has. He tells her it would be unfair, that he may only have twenty years; she tells him she’ll take what she can get.

He thinks about the time he first walked into Tia Elena, every muscle in his body taut with a thrilling anxiety of the unknown, every nerve charged with dazzling, confident hope. He knows his future will never feel like that again. But he remembers something else; he remembers tracing the arc of his father’s sculptures: crushed rock and water, aggregate and wire, formed and bound into works of art. He remembers thinking how sometimes the unlikeliest ideas can produce something strangely beautiful.

Four months later she hands him a plastic stick with two pink lines. In another two months they learn it’s a boy. And when Alex holds his son for the first time, when the first cries echo through his heart like a distant flutter of wings, I imagine he feels like his life is just beginning.

Elizabeth lives in Tempe, Arizona with her husband Alex, son Gabriel (6) and daughter Abigail (11). Links to Elizabeth’s fictions and creative nonfiction can be found on her website http://www.elizabethmarianaranjo.com/

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Checkmate

Posted on January 22, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, From The Archives • Tagged chess, children and childhood, Craig Cox, fatherhood, fathers, parenting, sports • Leave a comment

By Craig Cox

The boy got up uncharacteristically early last Saturday, but he’ll do that when he’s excited about something. And he was pretty excited about the competition looming over at Minnehaha Academy’s north campus, where he was about to join three hundred other kids from around the Twin Cities in the Student Chess Association’s fall tournament. He even combed his hair.

The parking lot was full, so I eased the Oldsmobile up against the curb on the south side of the school, and we followed the other bleary-eyed parents with kids in tow. The entrance was marked by a piece of paper taped to the window. Inside, there were more parents—and even more kids—wandering the hallways and talking on cell phones. The parents looked remarkably unconcerned about the prospect of spending an entire afternoon watching their brood hunch over a checkered board and move sculptured plastic pieces from square to square in a game designed for ninth-century noblemen with time on their hands.

We clambered down the red and black bleachers onto the gym floor, which was covered with a brownish plastic tarp. I felt the familiar slight buzz of adrenaline; at one time it had coursed through my body whenever I set foot on a basketball court. If the tarp had been removed, the long lunch tables pushed into a corner, the baskets lowered from their perch near the ceiling, and a basketball placed there on the sidelines, I would have buried a couple of fifteen-foot jump shots—just like the old days. Instead, The Boy spied the registration tables over in the corner under the big Redhawks sign, I ponied up fourteen dollars, and we set off to find his team.

The West Chess crew, which represented several school chess clubs along with my son’s homeschool one, Checkmate, was holed up in a second-floor classroom, getting ready for the contest ahead. Three coaches, each resplendent in a red t-shirt bearing the team’s logo with his first name on the back, counseled the kids on various moves. The head coach, a young man whose jersey identified him as Matt, was working through scenarios with a boy of about eight who carried his right arm in a sling. For a fleeting moment it occurred to me that maybe this game is a little rougher than advertised.

Later that day, I found myself planted on the hard plastic bleachers alongside another Checkmate parent. Her son, Zeke, was having a tough go of it in the early rounds. Zeke was out there, about at the free throw line, doing his best to checkmate a sixth-grade opponent, who appeared from our vantage point to be yanking large chunks of hair from his head.

The Boy was farther up court, almost across the center line, the place where a good defense might bring a second guard over to trap the guy with the ball and try to force a turnover and an easy fast-break bucket. He was facing the bleachers, his fourteen-year-old face implacable as usual, as his opponent, a baseball-capped teen in Jordans and saggy basketball shorts, leaned back in his chair as if he had a double-digit lead deep into the fourth quarter.

Because I have been known to occasionally recognize irony when it slaps me in the face, I realized then that any middle-age delusions I had about reclaiming my jock-spent youth through the exploits of my son were probably not going to be nurtured in this particular high school gymnasium on this particular Saturday afternoon. And as I swam for a moment in one side of this curious epiphany and out the other, I noticed that, across the court, The Boy’s opponent had risen from his chair and shuffled nonchalantly down the long table to converse with some other players.

“Can he do that?” I asked The Girl, who had come to cheer her brother on in a rare demonstration of sibling sports solidarity.

She didn’t know, of course. And there seemed little to be gained by tromping out onto the court to argue with the officials, since I spotted no striped shirts and whistles in the building. I could’ve made like Bobby Knight and flung a chair, I suppose, but at whom?

Besides, The Boy didn’t seem to be bothered. And every time the baseball-capped kid returned to his seat, he seemed a bit stumped. Maybe The Boy had trotted out some exotic gambit or castled his knights in a brilliant display of Grand Mastership for which Mr. Nonchalant had no answer.

Then, suddenly, it was over. The Boy extended his small hand across the table in a show of sportsmanship that made me smile, and the two foes gathered up the board and pieces and ambled over to the scorer’s table to report the outcome.

I caught his eye as he skipped up the bleacher steps toward the West Chess locker room. “Did you win?”

“No.”

I followed him upstairs, where Coach Matt was blaring out pieces of an old Doors song (“People are strange, when you’re a stranger…”) and reciting lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Boy’s friend Zeke fired back with some Weird Al Yankovic (“Why did you have to go and get me so con-sti-pay-ted . . .”). The Boy reported the results and sat across the board as Matt, still smiling, went through the moves. Baseball-cap Guy had thrown the Queen’s Gambit at The Boy—the first time he’d seen it—and the coach patiently explained how to counter it.

My son took it all in and happily retired to a corner of the room, where he would throw it all at Zeke—who, despite a disappointing day (he’s one of the best players in the club), kept the Weird Al schtick running full blast. Nobody appeared the least bit annoyed, though Matt complained that he was beginning to lose his voice and was worried about his audition tomorrow.

Somebody asked him what he’s auditioning for.

“Jesus Christ Superstar,” he said.

* * *

It’s after four when we finally shuffle out of the gym. The Boy finishes the day with two wins (one by forfeit), three losses, and no trophies. He’s pretty beat by the time we get home.

But later that night, we’re sitting across a chess board from one another and he’s doing the Weird Al thing as he gleefully destroys his old man in three straight matches.

I can feel the old adrenaline surging, the competitive juices flowing, but he just laughs and wipes out another bishop, a wayward knight on his way to a quick and humbling checkmate.

We shake hands. “You know, you shouldn’t be so smug,” I say, utterly demolished.

He looks at me, momentarily stymied, this guileless teen who never took to Little League or soccer but loves to climb trees and roller blade and tumble on trampolines. “But, Dad,” he says. “This is supposed to be fun.”

Author’s Note: I’d never been to a chess tournament before the one I describe above, and the fact that the games took place on a basketball court really sparked for me the disconnect between my own dream of athletic excellence and my son’s lack of interest in organized sports. Whether we admit it or not, most dads want to cheer their sons on through the kinds of sporting challenges we all faced as kids. In the end, though, Martin has a much more mature outlook on the sporting world than I did at his age. He doesn’t dream of playing shortstop for the Minnesota Twins or corner- back for the Vikings. He is perfectly happy doing what he’s doing in the moment, and for that I am very grateful. (My daughter, by the way, is a pretty good soccer player!)

Craig Cox is the editor and publisher of The Minneapolis Observer, a monthly journal of local news, opinion, and populist culture. This essay originally appeared in the December 2004 issue of The Minneapolis Observer.

Art by Oliver Weiss

Brain, Child (Summer 2005)

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Juxtapositions: The Blended Family

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged blended families, family, fatherhood, fathers, Jon Sponaas, parenting, relationships • 2 Comments

Next in our What is Family? blog series. Your favorite bloggers write about what family means to them. Come back tomorrow for the next post in the series.

I wrote an unpublished novel in which one of the central events is a group of people jumping in a freezing lake in February. That’s my philosophy.

I love that weird jolt I get when I don’t get it. Calls me to attention. Slows me down. When things don’t make sense, they force me to make sense. So wait. People jump in a lake and what’s his philosophy? Exactly. It doesn’t matter what’s on your mind when you trip and fall. Money? Unrequited love? Fundamental ontology? Nope. Just stick out your hands stick out your hands stick out your hands. Brace yourself and protect your face.

As a young man, I was overjoyed when my studies collided with the likes of Dada and Surrealism. These art movements spoke my language; I felt as if they validated the operations of my mind. I’ll never forget where I was when I read Pierre Reverdy on the poetic image: “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality…” Just 24-years-old, I was sitting on a mushroom in a black dream forest and I wept and wept and wept.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m in love with a woman in Chicago, Illinois. Two more or less distant realities. She has two kids. I have two kids. The plot thickens. Say it with me: juxtapositions.

Shall we insert here right near the middle that I make no claims for prudence or being a good parent? I have no idea if I can be what the people call a “positive influence” on my kids. Right now, my 15-year-old son, grounded from all technology for failing Computer Science, is reading the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Confederacy of Dunces and my 9-year-daughter is flapping her arms and screaming that she’s a bird. They’re interesting little creatures. They are, by most standards, very good people but I’m uncertain as to what that has to do with me. My best guess is that they will go through an early adult phase of resenting me for being cool and distant and, as people do, will eventually learn to love me for my flaws through the lenses of their own. Or perhaps they will go to prison because, you see, I don’t understand how these things work because I shunned all the parenting books. However, for now, my daughter is a damn good bird.

Because I’m an English teacher and Gwen, my girlfriend, is a high school librarian, we both have the summers off. Do you see where this is going? Are you sure? Gwen is made of sugar, shattered glass, and David Mitchell novels. And my philosophy is jump in cold lakes. Stick out your hands. Protect your face.

So, yeah, we’re mulling over the potential image—the strength and emotional power—created by the juxtaposition of our more or less distant realities. In other words, living together, mixing our kids into a foursome of pseudo-siblings, and exploring that poetic reality for a summer. How would that be, we wonder, for the kids? Undoubtedly terrible. Inescapably so. And yet still, before August expires, perhaps beautiful, as “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

“It doesn’t terrify you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “But in the best possible way. Do your daughters like birds?”

When I was a very young boy, my mom married a man who had two adolescent sons. They were not nice boys. My dad remarried and I eventually had two half-sisters. They confused me, but I intuitively knew that I loved them. Later, I developed a taste for bourbon and dangerous philosophy. These sentences aren’t linked by causation; they are pure creations of the mind, knocking together to make some sparks.

Gwen grew up in the jungles of Borneo. The water was not cold. There were alligators in the river and cobras on the path. When I imagine her mind, I see a giant chess board and all the pieces’ potential moves in a flash of neurotransmission. We’re an evocative juxtaposition. Distant and true. A car crash. The bliss of collision. What we decide to do next summer will not be found in a book written by experts but rather discovered in a blind leap informed by intuitive vision. Build a fire and look up. Look for shooting stars.

Our two young girls have yellow hair and are separated in age by less than a year. The most curious thing to me? When their eyes meet. Who will they see? And then juxtaposed, distant and true, who? Who will they be?

Art: René Magritte, The Lovers, 1928

When Pictures Ache To Be Songs

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas, pictures, songs • Leave a comment

My daughter, just the other day, gave me her 4^th Grade school picture and I got that feeling. You know how when you want to say something about rivers, the intangibility of memory, and a fork slicing through a piece of blueberry pie? It’s like that. But only for a second and then it’s not.

It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Because that feeling? It’s made of images but those images themselves are only symbols for water that slips right through your fingers when you try to grab it. Sometimes the content of the feeling veers away from imagery and seeks to announce itself in sound. I mean, it erupts into words but it yearns rather to be heard as opposed to dwelling in what the words mean. Like, for me, it seems to most often be about the conversation between long e’s. I want to stand on a chair or atop a tall building and yell something like She’s calm seas and bumble bees and the breeze through trees on a Japanese puzzle box. But I never do. And so that feeling stays lodged in my chest, caught in my throat, restless, urgent, waiting to explode.

In the end, there’s something strangely and tantalizingly lacking in the reach of what words are able to say. Often, in relation to that feeling and its expression, I discover that it pushes and kicks at its boundaries in an effort to be a song. I hear the fast rippling notes of an acoustic guitar that come and go like a waterfall and the lyrics drip like syrup in a foreign language that belongs not to another country, but dreams. None of it makes any sense and, it seems to me, that it’s this inability to decipher that feeling in a way that secures meaning that ultimately secures its mysterious and unfathomable beauty.

It’s just a 5X7 and—yes—it’s the rectangular limit of the picture, the boundary it erects between the image and everything else that initially stirs that feeling into being because it evokes an immediate contradiction. She is in the picture. But she’s more than the picture. This contradiction creates sparks that flicker into imagery, poetry, and music. And there she is, frozen in a blink of time, well lit, smiling, wearing a purple leopard-skinned top and a light blue sweater peppered with the silhouettes of dachshunds. And I get that feeling. That jagged inhalation. The ancient aesthetic gasp. Because—yes—she’s beautiful and—yes—pictures are great and wonderful things to preserve bits of stasis in an otherwise relentless world of fluid and flowing flux, but it’s this stasis that refuses, even in imagery, to stay put.

There she is, a 9-year-old 4^th Grade girl, trapped in a rectangle but, like a song, she pushes and kicks at the boundaries, dripping like syrup into the past and the future. She was my baby, a speck of pink flesh in tiny pajamas (with zebras), and I rocked her to sleep night after night to the tune of Lou Reed crooning Pale Blue Eyes. And, still dripping from the picture, she will one day be an old woman with wise eyes that seem to float in a calm sea of memory and wisdom. Pictures accrue meaning from their befores and afters and it’s all the time that erupts from the blink of the moment—flash—that gets lodged in my chest and caught in my throat, that feeling urging itself into being more, into strangely juxtaposed images, the assonance of poetry, and the opaque familiarity of the songs that haunt our dreams.

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One in 1.3 Billion

Posted on August 14, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, From The Archives • Tagged adoption, child, Dad, fatherhood, multicultural • 1 Comment

By Chris Huntington

Our family endures a weird celebrity. It doesn’t come from being unusually good-looking or accomplished, but just from being odd to look at. My wife, Shasta, has eyes the color of faded denim. She’s four foot ten and only weighs about a hundred pounds. Her tiny hands are pale as eggshells; sunlight is something she likes to read about. On the other hand, because my maternal grandparents emigrated from Guangzhou and my paternal grandparents were Hoosiers, I have a thin, vaguely mongrel appearance one might associate with the Tajik people or the Uzbeks. Shasta’s grandmother, a true New Englander, once asked her why I was so swarthy. Our son, on the other hand, is the color of milk chocolate. He was born outside Addis Ababa and is one member of a new generation of Ethiopians raised abroad. Together, we are an odd trio.

Dagim is a happy human cannonball, a three-year-old lion with a tiny Afro. He spins like a dervish with his fingers fluttering to music only he hears. Some days, he says he’s going to stay little like his mommy. Some days he wants to get big like me. A month ago, we were walking to a hill we could see in the distance, and he wanted to know if I could carry it home for him. He seemed surprised when I said no. He climbs me like a tree; this morning he declared he was cold and tunneled his forehead into my neck. He let me carry him to our back door. His eyes were closed against my chest, and I felt fragile with happiness.

Yesterday, one of my new co-workers came by the apartment. His wife, who is expecting, rubbed her waist and told Dag she had a baby inside. “We’re going to give our son a baby sister,” she said.

Dag repeated this story five times after the couple and their boy left. He also told one of his stuffed animals, “I don’t have sisters. I just have friends.” I could see Dag’s brain considering the new possibilities. He wanted to know if he had ever been behind his mommy’s belly button. He was wondering if he was going to get a baby sister. The words for the questions were lining up to come out, though they never quite made it. I could see Shasta doing calculations of her own. She was preparing her voice, her sad eyes rehearsing; she doesn’t want to sound sad when she answers. I want to interrupt them both, stop the conversation. I want to tell a different story of our family. One that doesn’t start with the word “No.”

One time in the airport, we passed a husband and wife and their four kids, all of whom had beautiful teeth and golden Viking hair. Shasta said, “That family looks like a chess set designed by Abercrombie and Fitch.”

“What are we?” I said.

“We’re not a chess set,” she said. “We’re action figures.”

I was forty years old when I became a father. Shasta was thirty-two. We had tried for years to make a baby the old-fashioned way. High school guidance counselors always warn that it’s horribly easy to get pregnant. But it wasn’t easy for us. We discovered that, unlike the rest of our species, our particular DNA was completely uninterested in preserving itself. We applied to adopt from China. Half my family came from there; I felt a kind of invisible connection—a red thread around the world—but then, that didn’t work, either. We were put on a list that was at least five years long. I borrowed money from my parents, and we saw a fertility expert, a skinny man who once walked past me without a glance as if I were an empty armchair in his waiting room. And then we found this little boy living in an orphanage in Addis Ababa. He didn’t have anyone. He needed us. We needed him.

Until recently, we lived in Indianapolis, and we stood out a bit there. We now live four hundred miles north of Hong Kong where we stand out even more. I took a job teaching in Xiamen, one of the fifty or so Chinese cities with more than two million people. (A friend of mine is fond of saying, “You know that guy who’s one in a million? Well, there are a thousand guys like him in China.”) We moved to Xiamen for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that I was suddenly unemployed in a recession. My wife and I also thought that maybe it would be good for Dag if he weren’t the only one who felt different when we walked down the street. If all three of us were equally unlike our neighbors, our three-year-old wouldn’t have to bear the weight of it all by himself. In retrospect, we might have misjudged what it would mean to stand out in a place where the buses are filled window to window with shiny, straight black hair.

We’ve had strangers here step forward to ask if Dagim is our son. If Shasta’s alone, the stranger will ask, “But his father is black, right?”

Shasta always smiles, “No, not really,” or, “Well, he likes Sade.” Then she continues grocery shopping or whatever she’s doing.

I hesitate when I’m asked if Dagim’s mother is black, not wanting to disrespect either my wife or Dagim’s birth parents. But I usually say no, his mother is white. After all, we’re a family, and Shasta is his mother. But sometimes people follow up with the comment, “But his face is not like yours” and wait for an explanation.

I’m not sure what kind of explanation they expect. Do they expect me to act surprised? To say my wife has cheated on me? To announce that Dagim is an experiment? I stare back, and people smile and blink. Without guile. They’re not trying to hurt my feelings. These are old women who sweep the street with tree branch brooms. Or they’re young people who have no idea that their T-shirts are nonsense (“Bad Groundwater” or “Big Onion Boy”). Or they’re men who lived through the Cultural Revolution only to turn fifty and find the NBA logo on their Tsingtao beer. I think we get asked questions because people are honestly perplexed. One person told me that because many Chinese have heard that Barack Obama had a white mother, the idea has spread that black people can be born to white people. From their perspective, they are suddenly standing on the bus next to a thirty-five-pound Kobe Bryant. Can I explain it?

We hardly know how to explain it to ourselves. We’ve told Dagim the simplest version of the story. Adoption experts have told us that when Dagim asks about his birth family, we should tell him how his birth mother loved him so much, she gave him up. She wanted to keep him, but she was too poor, in one of the poorest countries on earth. There just wasn’t enough money or food to go around. But it seems to us that someday Dag is going to say, “People don’t give up things they love. You love me, and you’re not giving me up,” or he’s going to look at Time magazine and see pictures of poor people clutching babies in floods or wars and instead of feeling compassion, he’ll feel hurt that someone who looks like him let him go.

We’ve been told that if he ever wishes he could have been a baby inside my wife or wishes he was the same color as us, we should say something along the lines of, “We don’t wish that because then you wouldn’t be you, and we love you the way you are—which is perfect.” But the fact is, sometimes I look at him sleeping and I wish my skin were the same beautiful brown. I don’t like being different from him. I wish he could look up and see his face in mine. I wish that we could walk into an Indiana Denny’s together and he would not be the only person of color outside of the kitchen. Sometimes I feel as if this hurt, this longing, is something we need to share. Other times, I think I should just keep it to myself. But why do Chinese people on the bus think I want to talk to them about it?

When we were preparing to move to China, family and friends constantly joked about how we were sure to come home with a little girl, as if Chinese babies were stacked like bags of rice in giant warehouses. Americans associate China with adoption, but Chinese people themselves don’t. In a country of 1.3 billion people, the loss of some six thousand orphans a year is not immediately visible. My Chinese teacher, who has worked in the expat community for years, was ready to argue when I said that a lot of Chinese girls were adopted into American families. When I opened a website, she pulled the laptop from my hands. “Lucky girls,” she said finally, handing it back. It was a ridiculous thing to say about abandoned children, but to be fair: My teacher was taken by surprise. In China, grandparents may raise grandkids while parents work in factories, but adoption, especially from Africa, is not something normal people do. They’re not allowed. There wasn’t even a legal statute for domestic adoption until 1992, and this required that the adopting parents be over thirty-five years old and have no other children. The common observation is that the Chinese government has suppressed its domestic adoption because it believes if couples are allowed to give up girls for adoption (in order to try again for a boy), this will undermine the population control policy. My wife and I struggled to expand our family, but for over a billion people living around us, it’s apparently so easy that the government made one child the legal limit for each couple. Childless families here struggle in their own ways, but they do not turn to adoption the way Americans do.

Adoption here is essentially impossible except perhaps in a paperless way by extended family. Our Chinese neighbors must know or suspect Dagim is adopted, but the knowledge is uncertain and mysterious because a Chinese version of our family could not exist. I don’t think there is a single Chinese family who has adopted from Ethiopia. We’re treated at times as though we came from another world, but I suppose we did.

After moving from our house in Indiana to an apartment in Xiamen, Dagim struck up a friendship with the neighbor’s blackbird. The bird greets anyone on our porch with either dead-on mimicry of the neighbor clearing his throat or the words “Ni Hao!” That’s about all the Chinese Dagim knows; it means “hello.” Dagim thinks of China as “where pandas live” and “the Great Wall.” He sees China as endless bowls of noodles and busy chopsticks and rice. Some days, Dagim likes kung pao chicken. Some days, he doesn’t. For Dagim, China is also a place where strangers approach him on the bus to pinch his kinky hair. Ever since we got here, Shasta and I have promised ourselves that we would show Dagim a China that he can love.?A colleague told me that he was going to take some people to see panda bears. “Take us,” I said.

I’m not a naturalist at heart. I love the world, but I haven’t slept outdoors much since I became an adult. I knew, however, that there were fewer than a thousand panda bears left in the world. I wanted to show Dagim some pandas from a few feet away. A part of me felt that if I could do that, then maybe someday Dagim’s children would look at him like he’d touched a dinosaur. I wanted to give him that, just in case everything else about moving to China turned out to have been a mistake.

When we arrived at the preserve, the Chinese officials in charge insisted we watch a documentary about the animals we were about to see. We learned that pandas are solitary, spending most of the year without even seeing another panda, and when they come together to mate, they are spectacularly unsuccessful, even in the wild. The documentary went into great detail about the artificial insemination that scientists used to keep the species alive in captivity. “Hmm,” my wife said. “I like pandas. They’re a lot like us. They’re ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?”

“Well, they make easy things hard for themselves, but they don’t bother anybody.”

“The easy way,” I said, and I rolled my eyes. “Who would want to do things the easy way?”

“Right,” my wife said. We watched some more of the video. The pandas, unlike every other bear, limit their diet to bamboo, which means they need to eat about forty-five pounds of the plant every day. Shasta laughed. “Oh, come on. They’re impossible!”

“They’re beautiful. They’re black and white and live in China,” I said. “They’re absolutely us.”

This is what I want to tell Dagim when he asks about a pregnant woman’s waist. “Anyone can make a family that way,” I want to tell him. “Anybody. Except us. And panda bears. And stars. Stars just appear. Sometimes they fall to earth. That’s our family, Dagim. That’s absolutely us.”

Author’s Note: After I wrote this essay, my family, by chance, shared a Chinese taxi with a woman of color from South Africa. She asked Dagim about himself, and he spontaneously told her he was born in Ethiopia and that we’d adopted him when he was little. I’d never heard him tell the story before; he was leaning off his seat, overflowing with happiness. As we said goodbye, Dagim raised his fist and said, “AMANDLA!” just like Nelson Mandela, and the woman rushed forward to kiss him. “How did you learn that?” she repeated, and I was blind with pride.

Brain, Child (Summer 2011)

Chris Huntington taught in the American prison system for ten years before moving to China with his family. His is the author of the novel, Mike Tyson Slept Here. His essays about family and adoption have been anthologized in Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting and This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women. His website is chrishuntingtononline.com.

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A Ride of Our Own

Posted on August 12, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged Dad, fatherhood, parenting, relationships, teen/tween, teens • Leave a comment

By Aaron E. Black

“But you promised!” I stare up at the huge twisted sculpture of engineering ingenuity, vaguely wishing my son Adam was talking to somebody else. He loves roller coasters. I mean, LOVES them. He spouts off roller coaster statistics like Phil Rizzuto talked baseball.

This one goes so fast, is so tall, has so many loops, and won this or that award. Adam is 13-years-old today. For his birthday present, we drove several hundred miles to this large, Midwestern amusement park. And now here we are, just the two of us with hot asphalt, bird shit, sunscreen, adolescent screams, steamy thick air, damp money, the smell of fried food, and metal. Lots and lots of metal.

Yes, I promised.

I understand the roller coaster’s appeal, intellectually at least. It creates an illusion of risk taking, with a curious blend of fear and excitement. While I see the attraction, I’ve never really appreciated the roller coaster as a metaphor. It’s true that, like a roller coaster, life has its “ups” and “downs” (though Buddhists have something cautionary to say about that) but this is a superficial likeness at best. The roller coaster, unlike life, is controlled and predict- able; it delivers to the rider a sense of unearned bravery. Once strapped into the seat, the machine takes over. There are no choices to be made. No ambiguities to interpret. What could be less lifelike? Some people try to live this way, I suppose. Passively. For me, passivity is irritating and boring. I guess I prefer a personally determined narrative.

“Okay,” I reply, and immediately Adam makes for the entrance, with its long, creeping line of anxious, overheated riders.

As my body moves to follow, I have thoughts about the potential physical effects of the ride. I wonder if I will feel sick to my stomach. Could I pass out? Did I remember to take my blood pressure medication? How pathetic is it that I am even wondering about such things? Will Adam think less of me if I’m physically unable to handle the ride? He seems totally fine with the ride, trusting the adults who built it. But I know better. Is this a turning point in our relationship, where my age starts to yield to the growing strength of his youth?

As we wait, a unique, frustrating monotony sets in. The whooshing sounds of the car on the tracks, coupled with the rider’s screams, the pulsating heat rising from the asphalt, and the chronic desire for water, all give me the feeling of participating in some strange athletic event where the only victory is endurance itself. We are just standing, after all. Yet anxious anticipation in this sort of hyper-organized way leaves me depleted, craving shade, and fantasizing about soap and water. And air conditioning. Periodically, Adam and I compete for my cell phone. I’m looking for email, news, weather, pretty much anything to distract me from my worries. He plays games. I suspect he is doing the same thing.

“Can you believe we are going to do this?” he asks.

“No, I can’t believe it. Are you sure you still want to?” I respond, hoping that this is not a rhetorical question.

“Daaaaaaaaad,” he replies with a roll of his eyes.

When he was a few years younger, I could count on him to profess interest in a roller coaster only to bail out at the last minute when confronted with the reality of actually riding it. That was perfect. I could provide an emphatic, unambiguous “YES!” to his request, knowing a reprieve would soon follow. I’d even help him find a face-saving way to back out—the wait was too long, it was time to go home, we should go eat something. Not anymore. His desires have gathered weight and direction, a trajectory, located in time and space, not just in his mind. Whereas in the past, I heard his expressions of want almost as questions more than statements, now there was clarity and certainty. Confidence even. He seems to have a firmer grip on what he wants because he is starting to know more about who, exactly, is doing the wanting. His self-possession highlights what I have always known, and sought to deny: He belongs to himself. Not to me. He never really belonged to me.

Maybe being his father is just a step in a long process of custodial relation- ships he will experience. First, parent. Then, babysitter. Grandparent. Teacher. Coach. Academic advisor. Professor. Girlfriend. Mentor. Boss. Parole officer (God forbid). Spouse. Therapist. Perhaps another spouse. In each instance, a person will have a kind of responsibility for and to him, and like me, will never possess him. If it is true that I am no more “molding” him than one “wills” the sun to rise, then is it my duty simply to teach him how to be a pliable, if not gratifying, ward of these future custodians? To help him learn how to cooperate with people who have something valuable to offer, who can help him along the way, and to teach him how to reciprocate—so that one day, when he himself is the custodian, he will know what to do?

I see that the line is closing in on the area where passengers board.

“Dad, do ya want to wait longer so we can get into the front row?” he says, his excitement palpable.

“Sure,” I respond. “We’ve waited this long, right? What are a few more minutes to get the front row?”

We are now finally in the shade near the track itself. I watch people shifting back and forth, some sitting on the railing, as they wait their turn.

“Are you nervous?” he whispers. “Yes,” I reply.

“Me too,” he says, and adds, “But I bet it is going to be awesome!”

I smile. “I’m sure you are right.” I wrap my sweaty arm around his neck.

We used to joke, when he was younger, that whatever occupied his mind would soon be coming out of his mouth. It was as if he had no private emotional world. Remarkably, he didn’t start talking until just after his second birthday. Well, that’s not exactly true. From about 16 months to his second birthday, he invariably responded the same way to the following question: “Adam, what’s your name?” “Elmo,” he would reply. It wasn’t clear if he was joking. No amount of cajoling could get him to say his real name. Elmo was his only response, his only word, for a long time. Soon after he turned two, the words started coming faster and faster, until he was about the most talkative child I had ever met. He would tell me absolutely everything. What he did on the bus. Who said what to whom at school. Which professional football team he was planning to play for someday. He offered opinions about movies, dinner, and the book he was reading. Not so anymore.

Without my even knowing it, a barrier had been erected, some psychological curtain had been drawn. In the last year, Adam’s internal life had become more difficult to know, as if he was claiming himself for himself. Now, there are mysterious, unfamiliar rules about how I gain access to this private place. Simply asking questions doesn’t work anymore. I remember once, when he was little, like three or four, he climbed into bed with us at 3:00 a.m. during a thunderstorm. As always, despite the hour, he was interested in talking. He told me he was scared of thunder and lightning, but that he wasn’t frightened anymore, being in our bed, head resting on my shoulder. I asked why he wasn’t afraid, and he said, “cause you make the thunder go away, Daddy.” That was the kind of access and influence I used to have. I could make thunder go away, even as it boomed all around us. Back then, I had magical powers. Now, I ask about what happened in school, and he says, “You know, nothing special.” No, I don’t know. In helping me “not know,” he creates a space apart from me. Sometimes our separateness feels like sitting outside a medieval castle with 100 foot high stone walls and a moat. I am his magician no longer.

Finally, more than an hour after we entered the queue, we’re up. I watch him in front of me, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet in anticipation. He cracks his knuckles.

As the tram pulls in, he turns and says, “Dad, you really might want to hold onto your sunglasses . . . .”

“It will be okay,” I say, as we step into the front of a series of connected cars, each containing four riders.

We will be in the front two seats. At his request, I go in first. The seat fits a human body exactly, like a perfectly tailored suit. A metal bar with an attached seat belt has to be pulled over my lap. As I attach the bar, I notice that I have to insert the seat belt into a locking mechanism. I panic momentarily as I struggle to get the belt to click into place. It seems too short. Or am I too big? Either way, visibly struggling is not the sort of attention I am seeking at the moment. After applying extra pres- sure, the belt snaps into place. Now, free to look around, I see the woman in the control booth. She determines when each tram begins to ascend the first, very high mountain of steel. What is she, like 18 years old at best? The other attendants appear even younger than that. I am literally placing my life into the hands of a bunch of teenagers. Excellent. Just what I was hoping for.

There is a pause of a minute or so as the attendants check and re-check to see that the riders are secured in place. “Riders ready? Okay, then. Have a great ride!” the woman in the control booth shouts into the sound system. I love that she says this. The ride is exactly the same every time, of course, but she invites the rider to consider that he might have something to do with whether or not the ride is “great” or something less than great. Right now, I’m thinking my ride will be less than great, given the sweat breaking through my T-shirt, the tension in my stomach, and my recollections of an article on the effects of terminal velocity on the human brain. Whatever I am feeling, we are now clearly going to go. The deliberations are over. We are here.

Then Adam looks over at me, his enormous brown eyes opened wide, as if inviting my mind to be more open too. He slips his left hand into mine. I notice that his hand is nearly as large as my own. Thirteen years ago, I remember holding him, wrapped in that blue and white blanket hospitals favor. His mother required extra medical attention after his birth. There was blood on the floor. The nurses let me hold him first. He was so attentive. No crying. He just stared at me, directly and purposely. I slipped my pinky into his hand, this same hand, and his fingers barely curled all the way around. His grip was strong. I talked to him about how happy I was to meet him and how I thought that the University of Michigan would make an excellent college choice. That made the nurses laugh. I wonder if the anxiety I felt then was anything like the anxiety I feel now. As I recall standing, holding him in the delivery room, I think about my initial worries about becoming a father. By the time the nurse took him and handed him to his exhausted mother, I felt this sort of inner calm settle in. “I got this,” some part of me seemed to say. And when it comes to him, that feeling never really left. I am by no means a flawless parent. But in the most important ways, that feeling of long ago was right: I got this.

We’re moving now, slowly at first. Directly ahead is the moving chain that will drag our car up to a peak, he tells me, of 390 feet. Then we will travel, literally, straight down, reaching 90 mph, and into the first loop. That is taller than a foot- ball field is long. I feel his hand grip mine with greater force. I squeeze back. The ride sits alongside a beautiful, large lake to my left. A short distance from us, I see what appears to be a father and son fishing, their boat bobbing gently on the greenish water. Maybe I should have encouraged Boy Scouts? Then, he and I could be fishing and talking and fishing some more. A quiet lunch floating on the water doing manly things with my son. That sounds MUCH better than this. As we ascend, the most soothing thought I have is – there’s nothing to do now – just go with it. As the car reaches the arch, Adam pulls away his hand suddenly, knowing that it is better to grasp the safety bar in front of him than it is to hold onto me.

When we let go of each other I realize that we won’t really have this ride together. The woman in the control booth was right. He will have his ride, and I will have mine, sitting side-by-side. Everything technically will be the same for both of us, certainly, but we will each have the ride that we have. No matter how much I love him. No matter that I would give my life for his. There is nothing I can do to help him, to alter or change him, to “fix it” if he has a problem. If his seat belt fails. If the car leaves the track. There is nothing I can do. At all. I am completely helpless in this moment when it comes to him. When it comes to nearly everything actually. I can hold onto my sunglasses. That I can do. And I can grab the safety bar. My ride will be my ride. His ride will be his ride.

The whole thing takes about 120 seconds. It’s remarkable. The initial drop hurtles completely straight down at the ground below. Being in the first car gives us a particularly intense feeling that we are about to kiss concrete at a very high rate of speed. But we don’t. The feeling of falling, of being suspended like an astronaut in zero gravity, is exhilarating. After the first loop, I get those black dots in front of my eyes, but it lasts only a few seconds and then they disappear like the sea gulls circling the track overhead. The rest of the ride is brilliant. It ends with a long, sideways loop to the right, before settling down on magnetic brakes just before the passenger loading area.

I hear his laughter before I see his face.

“THAT! WAS! AWESOME!!!” he keeps shouting.

He is giggling and rocking back and forth, just like the toddler that I would lift and pretend to drop, only to slow his fall almost immediately. Uncontrolled, unselfconscious, piercing joy. Over and over again we would do this, until my arms hurt. I turn and take in his radiant, flushed face. I see that the bangs of his hair have been blown skyward by the rushing air, like some kind, powerful hand was caressing his forehead for the last two minutes.

As we climb out of the tram, I rethink my criticism of the roller coaster metaphor. I was wrong. It’s perfect actually. The ride with Adam represents what is unpredictable; it captures the joy, fear, and helplessness of being his father. Riding next to this boy whom I love so much, reminds me that the only thing I can do is be by his side. That’s it. Everything else is merely wishful thinking. I can just be with him. I hope he feels that I am.

As we make our way down the long, meandering exit ramp, he says over his shoulder, “Dad, can we please do that again? The line looks a lot shorter now.”

I stare skeptically at the completely filled maze in which we were just standing for what seemed like for- ever. The line starts at least 30 yards beyond where we entered the last time. Incredibly, the day has become even hotter and muggier.

“Absolutely,” I say. “Absolutely.”

Author’s Note: Being an attentive parent sometimes means engaging in a noxious activity just to be with your child. But to really “be” with your child, you have to find a way to enjoy it with them. This story evolved from my attempt to find the beauty in the relation- ship with my son, while doing something that I find anything but beautiful.

Aaron Black, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice. His work as a psychotherapist is rooted in the attachment theory, which holds that emotional contact with others is the building block for all human development. He has published numerous professional articles; however, this is his first published essay. He lives in Pittsford, New York with his wife Lara, and sons Adam and Noah.

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The Consequences Of Losing Bunny

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged children and childhood, fatherhood, fathers and daughters, imagination, loss • 7 Comments

“As truths are the fictions of the rational, so fictions are the truths of the imaginal.” —James Hillman

When my daughter, 9, recently unpacked her suitcase and discovered that she had left her oldest friend, a pink bunny named Bunny, 9, in a San Diego hotel room, she lost her mind. Here, I choose my words carefully. She lost her mind. Or a big part of it. The rich, important part.

I once caught her talking to her bike. “You are a very good bike, you know? Yeah. Uh-huh. Of course I will ride you. A good bike makes little girls happy and happy girls love to ride good bikes. I like your horn. Are you hungry? I will ask my daddy for a treat and then we’ll go for a ride. Okay? I will be right back but don’t you dare go riding without me because that would be silly. Okay? Good!”

And once, after gulping down a refreshing glass of red juice on a very hot day, she exhaled with a satisfied Ahhhh, held the purple cup to her face, and said with solemn sincerity, “Thank you, cup.”

I’m not relaying these stories as cute little anecdotes about the whimsical nature of childhood. Rather, I want to assert with the same solemn sincerity my daughter uses when talking to cups that the imagination is real. Without going into lengthy investigations into the history of ontology (the philosophy of what things are) and religion, allow me for the sake of brevity to point out that, at some catastrophic point in our pasts (both cultural and personal), the imagination, once an aspect of our experience as viable as any other, was demoted to being the opposite of what’s real as opposed to being a part of what’s real.

Everything speaks to us, yearning to be heard.

But it’s just our imagination, right? You see how we do that? We say it’s “just” our imagination. And when our children talk to bikes and cups and form intimate relationships with stuffed animals and invisible friends, we smile and chuckle because it’s “just” their imagination. But the imagination hasn’t always been thus degraded by being “just” so much nonsense in comparison to what’s reallier real. It was once collectively considered JUST as real as the scientifically measured stuff that monopolizes reality today.

And to what end? Well watch the news. Take a look outside. And ask yourself this: If we all believed, and acted as if, the myriad things that inhabit our lives were sentient; that our bikes and cups did talk to us, not through audible waves that vibrated our ear drums, but through our newly restored and esteemed imagination; that we genuinely do hear the whispers of our dead friends and relatives; that the whole world, all of it, was as alive as you and me; that, indeed, you and me were but lively voices in this enormous choir of liveliness; and we crowned it all off, this big teeming lively thing, with some fancy word like psyche or anima or soul or God—again, if we believed all this and acted as if it were true, how then would the world appear when we looked outside? Of what then would the news consist?

Put more simply, what if we were as kind to each other and the things of this world as my little girl is to her bicycle? Is racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental crisis, etc. and so on, even conceivable in a world where we feel sincere gratitude for the cup that provides our refreshing red juice?

Can you imagine?

These ideas would be certifiably insane (indeed, what is insanity but a way to label and marginalize an imagination that won’t cooperate?) if we didn’t have constant everyday proof of their reality parading right before our eyes in the children we’re raising. They are living examples of the way things really and truly are until those ways are stamped out of us by the tyranny of growing up.

And that’s precisely why my daughter lost her mind when she lost her bunny. I don’t want to minimize my daughter’s living relationship with Bunny by abstracting it into some deeper issue, so let me be clear. Her relationship with Bunny is real and it’s the primary thing. They’ve grown up together, shared all their nights together, and they’ve maintained a lively dialogue since the days my daughter first emerged into the evocative power of language. However, because she is 9 and approaching the appalling threshold where rationality begins to assume its imperial dominance (in our culture), the loss of Bunny amounted to nothing short of my daughter losing one of her last portals to a vital world where imagination retains its airy substance and becoming trapped in the rigid adult world of the way things are. And she lost her mind. She couldn’t sleep. She was inconsolable. Just like us, back when the reality of the imaginal vanished into being just our imagination.

On a happier note, Bunny has been discovered asleep beneath the hotel bed in San Diego. She is right now flying home, first class, where a raucous tea party will be had with a caterpillar, a guitar, and the ghost of my dead friend, Skip.

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Because I Will Always Do It Again

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged addiction, alcoholism, fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters • Leave a comment

For me it’s never been about here or there; it’s all in the movement from and to, the freezing and, my oldest love, the melting.

Though I can’t, in a general way, believe much of anything, I especially couldn’t believe that you were IN your mom’s tummy, floating around in that complicated liquid. I would squint at her belly and imagine—because you were not yet steeped in discursive thought and unable to distinguish yourself from otherness—that you were somehow the liquid or the liquid was somehow you or that you and the liquid dwelled seamlessly together in a place ontologically prior to your distinction, and I loved you with an abandon that bordered on madness.

The first time I drank I blacked out and remembered oblivion. Swallowed, lost myself, in the passage of time.

Chan master Furong said “The blue mountains are constantly walking.” David Foster Wallace said it was within our power to experience things “as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.” And Adam Duritz, when referring to a black-haired flamenco dancer, sang “She’s suddenly beautiful / Well, we all want something beautiful / Man, I wish I was beautiful.” You may not understand why I juxtaposed those three quotes in the same paragraph and that’s okay. Not knowing is part of it. Not knowing is how I know I will do it again. Because I always do it again.

Ever since you could not be distinguished from liquid—and probably before—you mattered. It’s more than I can fathom to imagine you melting. Now if you’re reading this closely enough, you’ll say “But Dad, a contradiction—” and, yes, that’s right, because you are sacred and beautiful and it’s illogical, yet possible, to love someone with the same force that made the stars and to simultaneously be so, so sorry. I am never not sorry.

I have watched you meet people and matter to them. They see you, smile, say hello, and—from there—from not knowing each other and crossing the bridge to mattering, you begin to mean something to one another. You change each other. Melt a little. Become mountains that walk. It’s during these times that I remember the idea of you inside your mom’s belly and yet, here you are, mattering in the world, and a tension twists my skin and my heart is a piece of ice that pines for the sea. I love you. I love to melt. Man, I wish I was beautiful.

There is something about you, little girl, that commands my attention and paying attention is a giving of one’s self and, in this giving, an inquisitive mind might find the bones for a definition of love. I become absorbed in your laughter. I lose myself in the rambling narrative of your animated storytelling. Where does the time go? You make me wonder about the blurry place between (or prior to?) my eyes and you, where one of us ends and the other begins. It’s bedtime. You are reading me a story and I marvel at the strange reality of your eyes as they skim just ahead of the sound of your chirpy voice, fluently. The story happens. But we’re in your bed, two ice cubes floating in your room. The world outside throbs with innumerable manifestations of the same old stories. People coagulate into the matter of love. Others melt away in the confusion of tears. Mountains crowd the sidewalks. Between places, in taxis that blow rude horns, people reflect on themselves and wish they were beautiful. Somewhere, a drunk looks up, beside himself, and speaks to the moon. Candles burn in mysterious windows. Wax melts. And so do we, you and me, melting into the story you read. There’s a castle, a princess, and something difficult and urgent that must at all costs be done. In spite of a great big world that relentlessly happens and happens on fire with the same force that made the stars, we’re lost in our story, swallowed in the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

And then you, gone, lost at sea, are sleeping. I sneak out the front door, sorry, to do it again. I always do it again.

Ear Buds At The Opera: On My Daughter Turning 13

Posted on July 9, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Blog • Tagged Dad, fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters, parenting, teen/tween • Leave a comment

By Vincent O’Keefe
“How’s it feel to be a teenager?” I asked my firstborn from the front seat. It was the morning of her 13th birthday.

Silence from the back seat. When I glanced in the rearview mirror, I saw the reason: ear buds. That’s how it feels for both of us! We are now one degree further separated from each other, I thought to myself. I made a mental note to pierce the fog a bit later with a text message reading “Look up n answer ur father plz.” That usually works (and annoys her in the process).

As for most parents, my oldest child turning 13 has been bittersweet for me. We seem thrust into the middle of so many endings and beginnings. Especially as a stay-at-home father, I lament that our ears are not the buddies they used to be. There is less talk of card games and bike rides, more talk of make-up and what not to wear.

I know our bond remains strong, however, even if it may need to hibernate for a while. I also acknowledge that after many years of at-home parenting, the exhausted part of me has longed for this day. Speaking of exhaustion, one of my daughter’s friends perfectly captured the contradictory nature of thirteenhood when she commented on the girls’ odd trend of wearing mismatched socks (or not wearing matching socks, I guess): “Wow, I must have been really tired this morning. My socks actually match.”

Turning 13 has also brought my daughter closer to her mom, as all those body questions have inevitably arisen. Recently at the dinner table, I listened politely for a while to their talk of various feminine products but eventually tried to change the subject. At that point, my ten-year-old daughter cackled, “Dad, you’d make a horrible mom!” Given how many times I’ve been dubbed “Mr. Mom” or its emasculating equivalent, I welcomed such mockery of my maternal skills.

One of the most gratifying moments I’ve experienced since my daughter turned 13 was when she learned how to play a song on the piano from her parents’ wedding years ago. I do not read music, so it was already a thrill to watch my daughter surpass my knowledge in this area. But when she learned “All I Ask of You” from The Phantom of the Opera, my wife and I had to hold it together. Life had come full circle; what more could we ask of her? That earned her a few sleepovers.

The most dramatic line from the song reads: “Anywhere you go, let me go too.” Hearing that line decades since a date with my future wife in Toronto, I couldn’t help seeing the paradox. When my daughter followed me around the house as a toddler, that could have been her anthem. When my teen now leaves the house, a small voice inside me echoes the line. Well, not every minute–I’m no helicopter–but more times than I thought I would.

Another of my daughter’s friends recently quoted Dr. Seuss in her 8th grade graduation speech: “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” I think every parent in the audience fought a lump in their throats for a moment.

Before going to bed on my daughter’s 13th birthday, I noticed my first grey eyebrow hair. What the pluck? Coincidence? I think not. My mustache has started with the grey outliers, but I was hoping the rest would take more time. Alas, there is no magic formula to stop the turning of the world, our kids’ ages, or the color of our hair. Well, there is that formula for grey hair, but I’d look ridiculous (and further embarrass my teenager).

Vincent O’Keefe is a writer and stay-at-home father with a Ph. D. in American literature. His writing has appeared in The Huffington Post and The New York Times’ “Motherlode” blog, among other venues. He is finishing a humorous memoir about a decade of at-home parenting. A chapter on colic is currently titled “Take This Onesie and Shove It.” Read more of his work at www.vincentokeefe.com or follow him on Twitter @VincentAOKeefe.

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What’s A Girl For?

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged Dad, emotions, fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas • 4 Comments

“Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad.” This is how my daughter gathers up my scattered attention into one focused lump. “Watch!” She runs toward the pool, jumps, transforms from a 9-year-old girl into a cannonball, and makes a huge SPLASH! Wet old people grimace. The sun continues to hurl 100+ temps at the valley. The earth spins on its axis, devoted. Anxious traffic crawls and honks. My daughter emerges from beneath the water, smiles at me, and swims away, a happy little fish with yellow hair. My God how I love her.

In order to avoid thinking, a lot of fathers immediately inhabit an outworn stereotype when someone mentions the prospect of boys eventually dating their daughters. They become caricatures of anger and make wisecracks about running boys off with guns or keeping their daughters locked up until some ridiculous age. But I’m curiously warm to the idea of my daughter going on dates someday. Mostly because I think she’s really cool and falling in love is a wonderful thing to do between broken hearts.

“Are you looking for Gate B-8, sir?”

“Indeed,” I reply.

“Nonstop flight to Chicago?”

“How did you know?”

“Because that’s exactly where I’m headed,” she beams, “Climb aboard!” She’s too small to climb aboard—I would crush her—so I latch my hands on her shoulders and follow her around the room. Her arms are outstretched. She’s a little airplane in a yellow dress. The clouds are fat and happy ghosts that haunt, lazily, as if from big celestial hammocks, the fearless blue sky. I listen to the drone of propellers and Bob Dylan. My daughter offers me honey roasted peanuts and a diet Coke. My eyes hone in on a suburb of 100s of tiny houses below and I dream about the various dramas occurring simultaneously and ignorant of one another. A man is yelling something about a wet dog and an open door. Another one hopelessly pays the bills. A woman paints her toenails blue and remembers what the boy said on the playground years ago. A door slams. Somewhere, two people have sex as if the fate of the world depended on that frantic brutal deed.

As she grows up, as the boys and men inevitably gaze at her more and more from that perspective of apprehending her only as an object with which to have sex, it will become increasingly important for her to not permit those gazes to construct the woman she sees in the mirror, to refuse becoming a prisoner of that perspective. In this regard, I consider it an essential responsibility of my fatherhood to provide my daughter with an endless supply of avenues to otherness, keys out of the jail of certainty and the stasis of identity. Which means taking her to modern art museums, constantly using the words or and maybe, and celebrating the myriad ways she girls in the world. There are as many ways to be as there are stars in the sky and more. Of course a sexual being will be one way for her to understand herself, indeed a wonderful way, but in the end only one facet of numberless ways to shine.

“Tick… tick… tick,” my daughter is hiding beneath my desk and tapping my ankle and ticking. I’m trying to write this essay. People are dying in the war. People are dying in the street. My neighbor is in jail for selling methamphetamine. There is more than just our story. We are more than who we are. “Tick… tick… tick… Guess what I am, daddy. Guess what I am.”

“A clock,” I guess, thinking about deadlines.

“Nope,” she grins, “I’m a bomb—KABOOOOOOOOM!”

One of my biggest hopes for my daughter is that she never sells herself short in terms of what a girl’s for. What’s a girl for? A girl’s not for anything. Nothing. Not a single thing. A girl is for holding the space between, for or. And only from this space between, from nothing, can she ever and continually participate in the groundless potential of anything. She’s everything. My daughter is a cannonball, a fish, an airplane, and more—may she never stop exploding.

Auspicious Signs

Posted on June 17, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Highlights • Tagged cultures, daughters, fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters, fertility • Leave a comment

By Jesse Cheng

My afternoon visit with Mom was approaching that inevitable moment when she’d ask how soon before I’d provide her a grandchild. Since marrying two years before, I had learned, like many men before me, that the best counterstrategy couples the Preemptive Dodge with its natural companion, the Convenient Exit. I edged toward the doorway emitting a stream of chatter about the sick guava tree my wife and I were nursing, then the cute jujube sapling we’d just bought, before somehow letting loose a remark about the pair of doves nesting in the back of our house.

My mother clutched the sleeve by my elbow. “Doves? Where? Where did they build that nest?”

I kicked myself, wondering how the frontal lobe let that one slip through. The top of a patio light fixture was where the birds had constructed their home, a patchwork affair of twigs, dried grass, and evergreen branches tucked into the wooden frame encasing the bulb.

“Ohh, the patio outside your bedroom.” She leaned back, nodding. “That’s good. That’s very good.” And she uttered nary another word about it for the next several weeks.

I suppose it was reasonable to read a felicitous birth omen into the appearance of mating birds. Still, Mom’s silence seemed a touch too content—smug, even. I suspected some time-honored belief supported by the weight of venerable cultural authority; and so, like any good American-born, culturally challenged child of Asian immigrants, I started to look online.

There, I discovered that to our native Taiwanese, the nearby presence of birds is indeed an auspicious sign. Good luck, though, seemed to me something of a stretch from the promise of procreation. I also learned that in some Asian cultures, mandarin ducks are traditional representations of lifelong marital accord. It happens that my wife’s Vietnamese name derives from the Chinese word for that very type of bird. Nevertheless, any etymologist will confirm that fidelity is not synonymous with fertility—and our new tenants were landlubbing doves, not waterfowl.

What did my mother know that I didn’t? For several days I observed the birds perched on their roost. They certainly appeared worthy of immortalization in cultural folklore. While one of the doves tended to the egg, the other kept tender watch from the rafters a few feet away. I imagined a legend about forbidden lovers reincarnated in aviary form, weaving the nest for their child atop the silk-covered rim of an imperial lantern.

Back in real life, I read that the Chinese believe bird’s nest soup—a delicacy that involves an actual bird’s nest, boiled—to aid the reproductive function. Progress! But further study revealed the magic ingredient to be the saliva of another species, the swiftlet … and my mother never did say our guests’ home was intended for consumption. This was fortunate, since my wife and I were becoming quite protective of the critters.

It was with some feeling of loss, then, that after returning home from a long vacation, I’d poked my head out the back porch door to find the nest empty. The birds were a full-fledged family now, all three taken to the skies. As I drove to visit my mother, I wondered how she’d handle the news. But then, the bombshell: three new nests at her house—doves on the eaves under the side porch, thrush cuckoos in the backyard bush, and a to-be-identified species in the tree on the front lawn!

“This is good,” Mom said. “This is very, very good.”

By now, I accepted her prognosis must be justified in some culture’s historical lore somewhere in the world. And, as it turned out, modern Western medical technology would follow up with its own bombshell not long after: positive! My mother was pleased, albeit none too surprised.

But the issue remained of what to do with that abandoned nest back home—I just didn’t have the heart to take it down. Happily, one last bit of online research was in order. According to multiple sources, the same pair of birds (doves, like mandarin ducks, tend toward monogamy) may come looking for their nest the next year, and possibly many more seasons after that. And so it remains.

“You haven’t taken down that nest, have you?” Mom asked the other day.

I transferred baby Amie to my wife’s arms, shaking my head. “No, Mom. The nest is still there.”

“Oh, good.” My mother crossed her arms, smiling. “Oh, that’s very good.”

If some cultural authority out there has its say, our little girl may one day point up and tell a sibling all about it.

Jesse Cheng is from Southern California. His website is jesse-cheng.com.

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Reconciling The Past By Looking Into The Future

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged Dad, Father's Day, fatherhood, fathers, fathers and daughters, parenting, relationships • 2 Comments

LIVING WITH MY PAST: WRITING AN IMAGINARY FATHER’S DAY LETTER TO MYSELF IN THE FUTURE FROM MY DAUGHTER, LOLA, AGE 35

You were either oxygen or Saturn and, like you, I have developed a taste for the jarring juxtaposition of opaque metaphors. “Make them wonder,” you used to tell me back when I was 9, writing incomplete story after story in green and yellow notebooks, motivated by a blurry mess of loving language and loving the way you loved me when I dared to imagine. “If you get bored, don’t finish and just start a new one,” you instructed, “All the wildest culture and coolest philosophy is unearthed in fragments, pieces, ambiguity. Leave a trail of incomplete pieces. It’s a way of showing respect for your reader. Make them wonder.” I stared at you like poets get drunk on the moon, wondering what you meant, trying to be bigger. “How do you spell tomorrow,” I asked.

Your black guitar.

Oxygen because you were so often there, in my face, and Saturn because you so often weren’t. There were times, Dad, when I felt utterly submerged in your attention, an extension of your presence, with no doubts, unquestionably there and granted like grass and clouds and the illusion of safety. And other times, sitting in your lap with my arms draped around your neck, it was as if you were no less than 746 million miles away, gone, lost in some thought or desire or world in which I didn’t exist. It wasn’t easy being your daughter, but I don’t hold that against you. It’s not easy being anything.

The broken coffee pot.

You were a piece of trash in the wind, a mad scientist, a ghost—you had no time for toast, a blue ribbon, a bomb, and you exploded with the belief that everything was a metaphor for everything. “Two unlike things,” you’d say, pacing, arms flailing, crazy-eyed, “with nothing at all in common but then you think and wonder and bang your head against them until a bridge spans the space between, informs them, and makes meaning. Everything is everything and bridges—bridges are metaphors for metaphors.” You were a fire. You got out of hand.

Reading books aloud. Stopping to wonder.

I want to wish you a happy Father’s Day, Dad, and I want to wish you a terrible Father’s Day, Dad, and the only way I can contain and express the way I feel about you is to imagine that I am two—maybe more—people and we, all my mes, have these simultaneous and conflicting perspectives of you. And maybe, when all these angles collide, you are a Picasso or a Braque, a beautiful calamity of cubes and a mad riot of color or, maybe, all these conflicting perspectives of you embrace and, like something whispered in Sanskrit, they cancel each other out and you are a library. A dead end road. Zero, infinity, or both.

The pink hat from Kate. Was it worth what we paid?

I don’t know. But, because I am your daughter and because bridges span the spaces, no matter how the pieces of me cohere or don’t or what they signify, I want, on Father’s Day, to love all of you. The empty bottles. The home you broke. The way your enthusiasm and attention created me line by line like a little poem that revealed the worlding of a world with the girling of a girl. All of you. All of us. Because you’re my dad, yes, and it’s Father’s Day, too, but also for me, your daughter, a metaphor for you, weeping blue flowers, big yellow stars that howl in the dark like coyotes, juggling clowns, everything.

I love you,

Lola Blue

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A Year at the Lake

Posted on June 5, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, From The Archives • Tagged emotions, fatherhood, Green Beret, loss, mothering, parenting • Leave a comment

By Jenny Fiore

The night before my husband deployed to Kuwait, I stood in our living room–vast, unpainted, still not feeling like home–and kept an ear open to our baby monitor. Our daughter, Elizabeth, then nineteen months old, was just starting to put together small sentences. I couldn’t make them out over the scratch of the white-noise machine in her room. Something about owl babies?

For many days, we’d been preparing her for this moment, for the fifteen months that lay ahead. “Daddy loves you,” I heard my husband say. “I have to go bye-bye for a long time.” There was no reply, only the rocking chair’s creaking rhythm, going so much faster than usual.

My husband, Brian, doesn’t cry. He is a Green Beret. But he likes to garden. He likes to cook. He drinks with his bent pinky raised, delicate and effeminate–a medical condition called clindactyly. He became a Green Beret not in spite of his personality but because of it. He doesn’t care what people do in their bedrooms, in their politics, in their religion. I have never heard him raise his voice. He is kind and musical and brilliant and has as much fun hanging out at my lesbian sister’s gatherings as he does with his salt-of-the-earth friends from the row houses of his Baltimore childhood. He really gets old people, especially his ninety-three-year-old grandmother, who doesn’t know he’s going. She’ll think he’s still doing skin biopsies and mole removals in the dermatology practice where he works. ” Nan gets confused,” my husband’s mother insisted when we told her about the military orders. “She’ll worry herself sick if she knows.”

When he comes to the bottom of the stairs, Brian’s skin looks fit for embalming. “That was some sad shit,” he exhales. His mouth is a squiggle. The lines around his eyes are curved a new way, like parentheses. I realize several months later, when watching the Peanuts Christmas special, that it’s Charlie Brown’s worried expression he has. I don’t know what to do. We’re such jokesters, my husband and I, the sort who’d make the other laugh in the face of chemotherapy, bankruptcy, anal fissures, an earthquake. Or so I’d imagined. Now we fall into each other’s arms in a weird place in the hallway, not quite the hallway, not quite a room, and we sob and we hug and we can’t believe this is happening to us.

Two months later, we repeat this excruciating exercise. Brian makes a five-day visit home between his Guard unit’s mobilization in Mississippi–where he’d been hit by the twirling hem of Hurricane Katrina–and his actual deployment to Kuwait. The trial separation has hardened us the two of us a bit. Adrift in the air of our home, which I’d been painting room by room to surprise him when he returned, there is the heavy, unspoken understanding that we’re not going to blubber this time. Instead we take Elizabeth to the zoo and for ice cream and French fries and to a petting farm and a Jewish deli equipped with a garish carousel that makes her scream in delight at every revolution. We have sex during her naptime and after her bedtime and, once, in the middle of the night like college kids. We make big breakfasts with too much butter and big dinners with too much wine. I save my tears for the last moment, when we’re driving into the airport parking garage. Brian holds my hand and, knowing there’s nothing to say, says nothing.

On the way home, I realize it’s gotten cold out. It’s dawn, and the streets are gray and empty. A Wisconsin winter is coming, and I feel small. Oscar Mayer’s drab, prison-like packing plant towers over me at an intersection, and as I wait for the light to turn green, I think of what Brian’s quarters will be like in Kuwait. Like a jail cell. It is for him that my heart is breaking. The year ahead stretches out before me like one of the Great Lakes. I know the other side is that-a-way, right over the horizon. I just can’t see it. Pulling into my driveway, I have already laid down a half-dozen mental stepping-stones: Thanksgiving, Elizabeth’s second birthday, Christmas, a trip to Maryland, a trip to Arizona. Each month, I’ll have something to keep me going. My parents will take Elizabeth one day each week. Our new home is just two blocks from my sister. We’re going to be okay.

Okay is a relative term. Within days, I begin to realize it doesn’t apply to us. At night, after Elizabeth has gone to sleep, I look back at the life Brian and I once had–when I was a working editor, and he was getting his medical training, and we moved around the country as best friends and lovers and hadn’t yet arrived to godforsaken Wisconsin to have a baby with colic who barely slept for a year, creating a rift in our marriage that we’d only recently begun to mend–and I have to admit that things aren’t going well at all. We are in trouble.

It’s not like we never talk. Brian calls every three or four days. But there’s always the transatlantic delay between our sentences, or the transatlantic echo, or both. Elizabeth gradually learns to do more than nod at the phone, but the delays and the echoes confuse her. Sometimes she hands the phone back to me just as Brian’s answering her, or worse, saying, “I miss you.” The words fall out of the phone and into the air, sounding so small.

We have email and video recorders, too. Brian makes her a virtual TV show from his quarters. His room does look like a prison cell. Behind him is a gray locker and a porcelain basin surrounded by taped-up finger-paint pictures and snapshots of Elizabeth and me. How does he know how to talk to her? I think. How to make her laugh? He’s amazingly like Mr. Rogers, but with an electric guitar. Watching him croon the alphabet song, I feel more love for him than I have ever felt–more than on our wedding day, more than when Elizabeth was born.

“How about we sing some songs?” he says, as he tunes the guitar. “What song do you want to hear?” He waits, and she answers. “Twinkle, Twinkle? I like that song, too!” I have fed him data. I have told him the books and songs and characters she loves. It’s almost like they’re really talking to each other. “How about we do some dancing?” he says. “YES!” Elizabeth screams. Brian pretends to shuffle through CDs at his feet. “What song do you want?” he asks. “We Got the Beat!” Elizabeth screams. “We Got the Beat?” he says. “I like that song, too.” He leans in to a boom box by the sink and pushes a button. Then he goes ape-shit dancing to the Go-Go’s. I imagine the soldiers in the rooms around him wondering what all the banging is. He hops and twirls. He leaps from one side of the screen to the other. He does the monkey, and some weird gyrating move no child should ever see her dad doing, but it doesn’t matter. It’s so perfect. I’m so grateful for it, and yet mad that it’s all we can do.

While Brian is gone, the following things happen: Elizabeth learns to speak in full sentences. She invents an imaginary rhino named Gertrude. She learns to ride a tricycle. She learns to ride a bike with training wheels. Our friend is killed in Iraq while intercepting a suicide bomber. His wife attempts to kill herself. Brian’s grandmother begins to get dementia. Elizabeth goes through several shoe sizes. She grows six inches. She moves to a big-girl bed. She moves to a twin bed. She potty trains herself. She regresses. She pees in the floor vents and draws on the walls. She learns the alphabet and how to count to twenty. An old friend is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. We have a blizzard, two of them. I learn that, even when spent, if I’m angry, I can hurl a whole snowblower several feet. And then coldly stare down my neighbor who has sat by watching me struggle with the thing for twenty minutes. I cut my hair short, like a boy. We plant gladiolas and dahlias. They bloom and die. I get a crush on the construction worker across the street. I drink too much when Elizabeth goes to her grandparents’ house. I don’t even think about masturbating, not once. I keep having to regroup, to remember where it was this family was going just a year ago when I wasn’t a single mom. Treading water is hard. Sometimes you just want to stop.

At every turn, I feel the absence of my husband. There is a photograph of me in a party hat at Elizabeth’s second birthday, singing with her on my lap as she prepares to blow out the candles on the elaborate cake I’ve made. In it, I’m wondering where my video camera is, wondering if anyone’s getting this for Brian. My sweater is a bright happy green like the color of a sports drink, making me look that much more weathered. Which I am. It’s been four months, and already I’m run-down by having to memorialize it all for my husband. By having to do it all for our daughter. By not being able to sit back and enjoy. By that cold fucking lake that goes on forever in front of me. Every time the camera clicks, or the camcorder beeps, I know we’re not really living our life.

More than halfway into the deployment, Elizabeth and I are at a local gym for toddler playtime, complete with foam pits and trampolines and five-foot play forms in the shapes of O’s. Elizabeth hates leaving, and I know it will end in a theatrical mess, but I go anyway. I go because I need it. More than she does, I need the gym. I need the zoo. I need the petting farm. I need the pet store and the playgrounds and the children’s museum and the wading pool and the toy store. I need Culver’s Frozen Custard and the garish carousel at Ella’s Deli so badly it hurts. I need the flowers to bloom and bugs to haunt our house. I need these in order to keep my child happy enough, occupied enough to not become the straw that breaks this camel’s back.

But when open gym ends, Elizabeth becomes that straw. Screaming and kicking in my arms, she clamps onto a fistful of my hair, even the tender ones along the hairline, and my stress and anger boil over into a wrath so fierce that it scares me. I am harsh with her in front of strangers. I get in her face and shake my finger so close to the tip of her nose that I can feel her breathing. I growl that she will never come back to this gym again. NEVER. During the drive home, I scream terrible things. She laughs. She sings. I feel like a freight train barreling forward, out of control. I have no brakes. I tell her to shut up. I fantasize about slapping her. I think I want to make her cry, to show me that she gets it, or maybe to make me stop what I’m doing.

At home, I send her to the bottom of the stairs, to the “naughty step,” and I go into the bathroom and splash water on my face. I look old. I don’t think I’ve brushed my teeth for days. I scrunch up my face to see how I look when I’m furious, to see what Elizabeth just saw. Such a feeling of self loathing comes over me that I want to punch the mirror. I think of my daughter’s small body in my arms six weeks before Brian deployed, of the way I cried when I nursed her that last time, not wanting her to go through weaning while her daddy was gone, not thinking she could take so much loss at once. I knew then that I would always have to love her in a context beyond my control, in an imperfect world that deals us difficult choices that sometimes feel not like choices at all. But I had no idea it would be like this.

When I go to her, I know she’s been crying. She is red-faced and snot-nosed and so much smaller than she’d seemed just an hour before. I sit on the naughty step with her, where I belong, and tell her I’m sorry. I try to explain, even though there’s no way to explain. She is only two and a half. She needs to throw tantrums. It’s her right to laugh when mom gets mad. She’s supposed to draw on the walls and forget how to use the potty. “I always love you,” I tell her. “Even when you’re naughty. Even when I’m naughty. I always, always love you.”

We sit for a while holding hands and look out at that cold lake ahead of us, me knowing we are running out of stepping-stones and her, somehow still trusting when I say that the other side is out there. And that we’re really almost to it.

Jenny Fiore lives and writes in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, two children, five hens, and a tomcat. She is the author of After Birth: Unconventional Writings from the Mommylands (Possibilities Publishing, March 2013) and currently blogs at www.themomplex.net. “A Year at the Lake” garnered her a Pushcart Prize Special Mention for creative nonfiction.

Brain, Child (Winter 2007)

Telling Addy

Posted on June 3, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged divorce, emotions, fatherhood, fathers and daughters, homosexuality, parenting, teen/tween, teens • Leave a comment

By Joseph Freitas
Every family has an agitator, a provocateur who is always ready to call attention to the embarrassing moment, the underlying motive, or the simple fact that things are not as wonderful as everyone would like to believe.

Addy was that dissident voice in our family. Peering through her teenage insolence, she seemed to understand that things were not okay. Despite the fact that I moved as carefully as possible between the big house and the pool house where I had been sleeping separately from my wife for several months, tiptoeing across the yard after all the lights were out, and despite the fact that Jamie and I had been working on the words we would use to describe our situation to the kids, Addy found a way to preempt any and all our timelines. Like that August three years before – when she stole the car and brought Jamie and me to our life-changing conversation – she was now a constant reminder that we could no longer wait to take action.

During our last few months of life together as a family, Addy took advantage of our preoccupation. And why wouldn’t she? Jamie and I were so engrossed in our impending separation that we barely monitored her schoolwork; we asked her very few questions; and we accepted implausible explanations for her whereabouts. When we actually stopped to focus, she was always well armed.

One night in early October she asked if I would drive her new boyfriend Nick home. He was 17, two years older than Addy, and had dropped out of high school the year before.

Nick sat in the backseat looking dully out the side window while Addy sat in the front punching music out of the radio, barely letting a single note register before shifting again to the next station. I didn’t even try to make conversation.

“That’s it,” Addy said. She pointed to a small bungalow up on the left.

I pulled over and Nick got out with a quick, “Thanks.”

Addy opened her door and approached him. I could see their hips through the passenger window as she walked up close. I turned and looked straight ahead like a dignified chauffeur. A few moments later she climbed back into the car.

We were quiet for a while and then I asked: “Is Nick going back to school?”

She began fiddling with the radio again. “I don’t know,” she said.

“What does he do all day?”

Her sigh was audible even over the music. She settled on a song and sat back.

“What’s going on with you and Mom?” she asked.

The counterattack was perfectly planned. It was a square hit. With a single question she managed to switch our roles. I moved from protective father figure to guilt-ridden teenager. What did she know about Jamie and me? Had she caught me sneaking in and out of the pool house? Was she aware of my life on the Internet? For an instant I felt afraid – afraid that I would have to reveal everything at that very moment. I looked over; she was staring straight ahead. Both of her hands were held up close to her mouth, and she was biting the nail of her left index finger. I regrouped and spoke.

“I ask you what Nick does during the day and that’s your answer?”

She ran her fingers through her hair with dramatic exasperation. “He’s looking for work. I’ve told you that a million times. What do you do all day?”

Good question. Even I had to admit that. What did I do all day?

There was a time when I could answer that question without even thinking. I took the train to work. I went to meetings. I reviewed big budgets. I got things done. And now, well, I wrote. I floated in the pool. I talked to men online. I worried about the future. I worried that Addy might actually know what I did all day.

One of my contract goals was to tell the kids about our separation, but I didn’t have the language down yet. And even though I had nearly completed my so-called screenplay, it was clear that I had been working on the wrong script.

I ignored her last question and focused instead on the first: What was going on with Jamie and me? Should I give Addy some information, warn her of what was to come? And more important: Was this the time to have the talk?

I looked over; she had turned her head away from me. As I made the final turn on to our street, the lamplight trapped both of our reflections on her window. Our eyes inadvertently met. And suddenly a memory – the one of the Caribbean – came rushing back again.

This time I remembered that the kids were in the back seat when Jamie said, “We’re lost.”

“How can we be lost on five square miles?” I asked.

Evan, who must have been eight years old, began to jump up and down with excitement.

“We’re lost!” he shouted into Addy’s face. “I love being lost!”

Addy pushed him away from her. “No we’re not! Daddy, are we lost?” Peering into the rear view mirror I could see her beginning to panic. The painted beads at the end of each of her braids rattled around her head.

I gave Jamie a look. “No, Addy, we are not lost.”

“But where’s the hotel?”

Our eyes locked in the rear view mirror again, but this time I tried to hold her attention as if my reflection could cup her small, tanned face. “It’s very close, honey,” I said.

She kept an eye on me in the mirror. And then I smiled. “Yup,” I said. “Here we are. There’s the little market.”

“Shoot!” Evan sat back and looked out the window, dejected, like the air had been unplugged from the source of his excitement.

“See?” Addy said to her brother. “I told you we weren’t lost!”

I pulled into our driveway and stopped the car. I wanted to be that father again. The one who reassured her, the one who set her mind and heart at ease. But I no longer had that power. Besides, I had no idea where that little girl in the braids had gone – the one afraid to be lost. Where was she?

I pulled the keys out and turned my whole body toward her. Out of reflex more than anything, she looked at me. She twisted a strand of hair in her hand; I could see the chipped blue nail polish on her fingertips. And though her jaw was set and her eyes were filled with an angry determination, she seemed more lost than she had ever been before. I wanted so much to make it better.

“Your mom and I are having some problems,” I said. It was a lousy open- ing and I regretted it as soon as I uttered the words.

“No shit,” she said. “It’s so obvious that you don’t want to be together.”

She looked at me in the darkness. It had become rare for us to share any pro- longed eye contact. The outside light dropped an uneven shadow on her face but her eyes stayed fixed, ready for my response. I could feel her breathing, waiting, her underlying unhappiness and dissatisfaction almost palpable. Would these new revelations make her situation worse? Would the eventual knowledge of my homosexuality make her even more rebellious, more difficult to deal with, more disappointed with the sorry lot she called her parents?

I sat there trying to imagine the impact our separation would have on her – and Evan. But she and her brother were both so different that it seemed as if the discussions – though filled with the same content – were a diametrically opposed set of problems that I had yet to overcome.

I looked at her and felt so deeply sad that our relationship had become more like an unpleasant truce. And though there had been a time when she stood at the doorway waving goodbye as I headed to work, left her drawings on the pillow for me, and wept when I left on yet another business trip, I knew that our bond had been damaged.

Still, despite the armor she had constructed around herself, I knew I had to continue trying to reach her, to bring her along as best I could.

“Addy,” I said finally. “Your mom and I aren’t sure what we’re going to do.”

“Just get a divorce.”

She said it as if she were tired of the whole thing. She started to open the door but then turned back, waiting for my response.

I looked into her eyes, trying to transmit all of my feelings to her – as if there were some sort of telepathy that could intervene and help me communicate.

“Whatever we do,” I said, “we love each other and we love you.”

“Whatever,” she said and got out of the car.

I watched as she rushed up the porch steps and into the house, and I wondered whether our problems were as clear to everyone else as they seemed to be to Addy.

Author’s Note: “Addy” is a chapter from my forthcoming memoir, An American Dad, which tells the story of coming out: to my wife of 20 years, our children, family, and closest friends. Despite its challenges and heartbreak, being a father continues to be my greatest joy.

Joseph Freitas is the father of two children. He taught memoir writing at the Westport Writers’ Workshop in Westport, Connecticut. He and his partner own and run 141 Bedford Natural Market in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they have lived for the past two years. Joe is currently completing work on his memoir, An American Dad.

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Saying Goodbye to a Father Figure

Posted on April 8, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged family, father figures, fatherhood, fathers, Joseph Freitas • 1 Comment

By Joseph Freitas

In 1955, when I was four years old, my Aunt Addie fell in love with Roger Haugen. I never knew my father—a migrant farm worker from Mexico—and so Roger immediately held an important place in my life. He became the role model for what I believe a man should be: patient, fair, and unselfish. Roger was all that.

Uncle Roger and Aunt Addie were the cornerstones of my childhood. They were young and in love and I felt lucky to be with them. Even after they got married, they continued to include me in their daily lives as much as possible. And I was never happier than when I was with the two of them.

Today as I think of Roger, I realize that though I have many memories of him, there are three I treasure most.

The first, is a blur of long car rides, driving home from Grandma and Grandpa’s in the late evening or the middle of the night. Aunts and cousins are tumbled together in the back seat—but I’m always sandwiched in the front seat between Roger and Addie for the two-hour ride home. As soon as we get out of town, the radio goes on and we all sing. After a while, one by one, everyone drifts to sleep. And for the last hour Roger and I sing with and without the radio. Everything from Frank Sinatra and Bobby Rydell to the Shirelles.

Every once in a while Roger turns from the wheel and says, “You sure can sing, Joey. We’ve got to get you on TV!”

I sing away always keeping one eye on the clock, the other on the intermittent lights from the rural highway. Because I know that as soon as the bright city road signs begin to flood the car, we are nearly home, and I will be kissing everyone goodbye. Feeling sleepy and sad I give Uncle Roger a hug good night.

The second memory is just a brief image. A beautiful summer morning—very early—6 a.m. I’m 8 or 9. Roger picks me up to go golfing. We’re singing along to The Four Seasons’ “Candy Girl” as we pull into the parking lot of the golf course.

Roger meets up with his friends and introduces me, “Joey’s my caddy.” As we walk the course, he explains the difference between a four and a five iron, what the angle on a club means. He points to the shifting sun, the trees and the rough, and I feel like a regular kid out with his dad. Just golfing.

The third memory is November 29, 1980. The day I got married. Aunt Addie had died a month before. The wedding was at a friend’s house, and we were all running around making the last minute adjustments. There was still so much to do. But Roger came up to me in the backyard. He had gotten in late the night before and he looked tired.

“Let me buy you breakfast,” he said. “The groom has got to eat!”

I knew that he was still in deep mourning, but he wanted this day to be a happy one for me.

Over some eggs and coffee we talked about the wedding.

“I’m not sure what kind of advice to give you,” he said. “What do I know? I just wanted to make sure someone was taking you out for breakfast today. I’m glad it was me.”

“Me, too,” I said.

We tried to look to the future, but we were both missing Addie.

“You probably won’t see me much the rest of the day,” he said.

I started to object.

“No,” he said. “You’re going to get busy with everyone. That’s ok. I just want you to know I’m here. And I love you.”

He gave me a big hug and we walked back to the house.

He was right. We didn’t get a chance to talk again that day. And after the wedding, I moved to New York and we didn’t see much of each other again. But I often thought of my Uncle Roger with great affection.

Before he died last month, I was able to speak with him one last time. He lay dying, his family by his side, his breath labored. And though weakened by his illness, his voice still held the same tone of kindness, a gentle inflection up at the end of each sentence that I had always known.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Everyone’s here. I’m a lucky man.”

I knew we would not be able to speak long. But I had something to tell him. I couldn’t believe I had never said it. And I didn’t understand why—even at this moment—it seemed so difficult for me. But I knew this would be my last chance. And so I spoke.

“I love you, Roger,” I said. “You were the father I never had. Thank you.”

He took a deep breath before speaking. I could hear the wheezing in his throat. “You were a great kid, Joey,” he said. “You were easy to love.”

We said our final goodbye and after I hung up I turned to my partner, Chris, and just sobbed.

As I sit here on Cape Cod—a million moments away from the time I shared with Aunt Addie and Uncle Roger, a longing for their presence overwhelms me. Knowing that they are here—but not here—there—but not there—provides little comfort. Selfishly, I want more. Missing the ones you love is an honor.

Joseph Freitas is the father of two children, and former memoir writing instructor at the Westport Writers’ Workshop in Westport, Connecticut. Joe is currently completing work on his memoir, An American Dad.