20 Favorite Quotes From Brain, Child Writers

Posted on June 3, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, General, Slider Content • Tagged Adrienne Jones, Catherine Newman, Cheryl Strayed, Jennifer Palmer, Jon Sponaas, Lauren Apfel, Lisa Heffernon, Molly Krause, motherhood, quotes, Robin Schoenthaler, Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser, Tracy Mayor • Leave a comment

Never Wish Happiness for Your Children
By Adrienne Jones

“The trouble with that kind of thinking is, a child is a person, not a soufflé, and ultimately we come to the place where we can’t control everything. Or anything. Our children are themselves.”

Brave Enough
By Jennifer Palmer

She was mine, this sweet baby girl, but she belonged to others, too.

Backstepping
By Robin Schoenthaler

Then along came adolescence, and my side-by-side parenting began to wane. I noticed it first at the mall, trailing behind the kids like a geisha. And every day it happens more: I find myself hanging back or stepping backwards, turning to move behind them, letting them go forward, out in front. I’m becoming a parent who pivots, scrambling to get out of the way.

The Richest Person in the World
By Adrienne Jones

Well, maybe he’s the second richest person in the world and I’m the richest, because I get to be his mom.

Open and Closed
By Catherine Newman

When they’re little, and you’re scraping them off of your leg at a party so you can refill your wine glass and metabolically transform four or five pounds of cheese into the milk that’s soaking through the front of your dress, you can’t wait for the kids to become separate from you. Thanks to your mind, as open as a flower-dotted meadow, you know that you will rise to any occasion of individuality.

Because I Will Always Do It Again
By Jon Sponaas

“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…”

The Days Are Long/The Years Are Short
By Lauren Apfel and Lisa Heffernan

With my nest soon completely empty, I face the day that has loomed before me from the moment I became a mother. I am facing three distinct losses, that of their childhood selves, of my identity as their mother and, most painfully, of the daily intimacy that was our life together.

Baby Weight
By Cheryl Strayed

There aren’t words to adequately describe the love I felt for my son. It was, by far, the most shocking thing that has ever happened to me. To love this way. To become, in an instant, a baby person.

This is Adolescence: 16
By Marcelle Soviero

Sixteen is full of paper thin promise, delicate due to the decisions I can’t make for her anymore, decisions that will determine what happens next.

How to Smoke Salmon
By Ann Hood

The sadness that comes from your first child leaving home is, of course, not the saddest thing of all. But the ache, the sense that something is missing, the way you keep looking up, expecting him to burst through the door in his size 13 shoes, it is real.

On Shame and Parenting
By Adrienne Jones

I did for them everything I believed a good mother would do for her children and clenched my teeth and prayed it was enough, or right, or that at the very least they would be OK in spite of the depth of my brokenness.

I’m Not Sorry for Yelling
By Jennifer Berney

Now that I’m a parent, I want my kids to know anger as a normal part of daily life.

Family Motto: More Love is More Love
By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser

While it’s really hard to explain adoption to a five-year-old—and at times, I fear what the conversations will be with a ten- or fifteen-year-old—the notion that guides me is this: more love is more love.

She loves Me She Loves Me Not
By Karen Dempsey

Liddy would cup my cheeks and pull my face to hers as if she were breathing me in. “Oh, my mommy,” she’d whisper. “I love that you be my mommy.”

Loving Kip
By Jamie Johnson

It’s because Kip isn’t a face, or a name, or a gender. Kip is a person. And it’s Kip, not the “he” or “she” that I love to death. His soul is still the same.

I Love you The Same But Different
By Rachel Pieh Jones

I love all my children the same. But I don’t love all my children the same. I love them all the same amount. Endlessly, to the moon and back, from Djibouti to Minnesota and back, forever and no matter what. But I don’t love them all in the same way. I don’t know why this realization surprised me. I mean, of course I don’t love them all in the same way. They are unique individuals and I have a unique, individual relationship with each one.

Bury My Son Before I Die
By Joanne De Simone

It goes against everything we believe about motherhood, but I’d rather bury my child than leave him behind.

Armageddon Mama:
By Tracy Mayor

Beyond that, in the spirit of planning for the worst while hoping for the best, I guess the most moral thing I can do right now as a parent is to raise my kids to be in some way part of a solution. Not just recyclers or composters or occasional car-campers, but innovators, problem-solvers, team players, good citizens of the world. Non-assholes.

MAMA: Mothers Against More Activities
By Francie Arenson Dickman

I’m not sure when doing nothing after school fell out of favor. As a kid, I was a pro at nothing. We all were.

Till Death Did They Part
By Molly Krause

When my dad came back after two decades of divorce, I wondered if my mom had somehow been waiting for him.

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

Understanding Our Kids’ Goofy Picture Face Phenomenon

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged fathers and daughters, funny faces, goofy picture face phenomenon, Jon Sponaas, parenthood • Leave a comment

“Hey you, there! Smile for your daddy!” You surprise your daughter with a camera pointed at her and, quicker than light and thought, a purity of joy erupts across her face and click—got it, happiness, digitized. How do they do that? I like to believe that it’s bigger than classical conditioning, stimulus and response, a camera equals time for a big fake smile. No. The little ones. I imagine them having a direct pipeline to unblemished joy, immediate access to the original thrill of Being, so when they see a camera, the veneer of their surface concerns immediately give way to a religious-like sense of aesthetic pleasure in the fact of just being little beings. Like tiny Zen Masters, they seem to gasp “AH!” and then chuckle wise and true. Here we are again. Little kids are the best subjects of pictures. Still happy about their relatively new status of being subjects at all, they revel in being photographed. They smile like ecstatic sunrises.

But then they turn 10 and who knows what the hell happens? Of course the age may differ for your kids (or it may never happen to your kids), but both my kids turned 10 and somehow lost their ability to summon instant access to a delighted face in the presence of a camera. Is 10 the year when self-consciousness reaches such a magnificent pitch that its hands wrap around their necks and choke them half to death the moment a camera flashes? Their tongues fly out, their eyes cross, and they even make goofy noises to underscore that this is a game they are no longer willing to play. Or is it a fall from grace? Do they perhaps themselves sense that their unencumbered path to unadulterated, spontaneous joy has, for reasons unknown, become blocked so that they, bewildered, make distorted and goofy faces to compensate for this loss?

Or are they maybe just trying to drive me insane? Smile, dammit! This picture is for your Nana!

Does their reasoning capacity, at age 10, reach a level of sophistication that realizes the flawed nature of our culture’s emphasis on physical appearance so, in a defiant effort to subvert this emphasis, they suddenly go all punk rock and ram their fingers up their noses? On another cultural note, there’s a traditional Native American aversion to being photographed due to the belief that their reproduction (either in a mirror or a photograph) produces a loss of soul. The soul is actually stolen by the image. Are the kids’ distorted and contorted faces maybe ways of shunning the activity of photography itself as a means to protect and cultivate their spiritual lives?

Then again, funny faces are just, you know, funny.

I remember being 10 and the precaution to look both ways before I crossed the street took on heightened importance. In fact, I began to look both ways twice! Anyway, what I’m driving at here is the possibility that the child’s grotesque face in the presence of the camera might in some way signify his or her more fully developed relationship to the fact that they will one day perish. This knowledge is certainly worthy of a really gross and twisted face.

Finally, maybe the goofy picture face phenomenon represents the child’s first real steps toward the direction of escaping who they are on the way to becoming who they’ll be. Until now, they have been satisfied with the roles of being our enthusiastic babies, hungry for our love, eager for our approval, and ready to smile every time we chime SMILE! But when middle school looms and they begin to sense that impossible place between childhood and adulthood, who can blame them for shunning the camera, closing their eyes, snarling, and sticking out their tongues? To thwart our desires by refusing to make the camera faces we crave and filling our scrapbooks with monsters and punk rockers is the way a self undoes itself on the path toward sketching the outlines of their own worldly countenance.

And to that I say cheese.

You’re Having a Baby

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, Highlights • Tagged babies, children and childhood, family, Jon Sponaas, parenthood • 2 Comments

What words of congratulations would you offer to friends soon having a baby?

My friends Wes and Harmoni will soon have a baby girl—no; Harmoni will have the baby; Wes will look like a cat in a bathtub—and I want to tell them things. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be horrible. I’m supposed to write beautiful things about the greatness and funny things about the horror, but none of it’s true because the whole thing, like everything, is a mess. Someone shot a white-winged Pegasus and it’s bleeding tropical punch. Like that.

This morning I read a little essay by Shunryu Suzuki about the way the white cloud is independent, though it nonetheless depends on the blue sky. I hope this makes Wes and Harmoni feel like they maybe understand something in the uncertain mist of a confused confusion, because exactly. Enjoy your baby.

I remember holding my daughter Lola in the hospital and retching like I was choking on a hairball. This is not a beautiful image. But what I know today is that the boundary of the self with whom I had always identified was cracking—I was hacking apart—and sort of, well, vomiting or spilling out to encompass Lola within the boundaries of that identification. I was now her. She was me. The experience of having a baby is akin to what mystics attempt to articulate as Ultimate Reality. I attempted to express this Reality with a metaphor about vomiting on the baby. I warned you. It’s messy.

There will come a day when you, exhausted, think “All I do is take care of this baby.” And there will come a day when you, elated, think “All I do is take care of this baby.” However, both these thoughts arise in relation to your small self. In both cases, forget your former self, hack up your hairball, and get the baby some juice. Just, with your whole heart, get the juice. No matter what you want or how you feel, the baby wants juice, like mountains and rivers, without end.

Once, my son Jaydn took off running like a mad laughing fool toward the street. Exploding into a sprint, I exploded as well into an atom bomb of math. If Jaydn is running X, I am running Y, and that car is moving at Z MPH, will the world end? Yes! The world’s about to end. I snagged him by the collar, the car honked, he wailed, and I screamed from some original place in the deep pit of my stomach where anger and joy are not yet sussed out into differentiated forms of screaming. Do you understand? I was saving myself. Clouds are clouds and skies are skies. Everything depends.

This, among other things, will probably happen. Wilco’s On and On and On will play in the background, down low, as your baby naps and you breathe without a sound. When you peek in the crib to check on her, something in the air and the music will collide—gasp, and your baby will appear, appear, appear—someone—against the profound background of possibly nothing; erupting, emerging in your eyes as irrefutable proof that this world is, yes, definitely something but—more than that—it means something too. This is significant. My god, you will think, silently. My god, my god, my god. Just this, with not a single word to say.

In addition to inducing speechless insights into the suchness of the world, the baby will also, at many turns, thwart your expectations. Vomit on your shirt. Cry all night. Freak out in restaurants. Essentially, the baby will intuitively detect what you want and act in direct opposition to all your desires. This is the baby’s way of completing you, making you whole, yinning your yang. Here is where I quote Carl Jung. “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or for worse.” So, yeah, when your baby contradicts, opposes, and spoils all your plans, she is actually channeling the forces of God, calling you beyond yourself, revealing to you the beauty that inheres in the deflation of ego and self-forgetting. It’s only a shirt.

Your baby will be a many faceted jewel that absorbs and reflects every form and color in this whole zany world. Cradled by the world, she supports the world. Everything that ever happened, and everything that will, conspire to be expressed in the simple magic of her appearance. Announced, a song, all of it, a wee baby girl. Congratulations.

Blending Families: When My Kids Met Her Kids

Posted on August 6, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts, General • Tagged blended families, blended family, family, Jon Sponaas, step parenting, step siblings, stepfamily, summer • Leave a comment

You know those swings at the carnival that spin around in mad, sickening circles? You get going so fast that you levitate and you fear, because of some basic laws of physics, that the chains will break and you’ll be hurled off in a straight line to the next county. But you never do. You remain somehow preserved in the rush of that circle, round and round and round. This is how things are.

Summer, as it did last year and the year before it, came again. Spring, if it had a mind to, could just as well launch us into some scary and unknown season, but it, dependably, never fails to slide seamlessly into summer. And with it, summer vacation, the sun, pools and the repetition of contradictory days, boring, fun—days that last forever and end in a blink.

Before this summer, I had met my girlfriend’s kids several times and she had met mine, but this summer brought a whole new experiment. We would for 3 days become a group of 6, going to the Field Museum in Chicago, Lincoln Park Zoo, Navy Pier, and kayaking. What could go wrong except everything?

So, we all wondered in the privacy of ourselves, how is this going to work? One thing is certain. The idea, the prospect of this meeting as an event that loomed in the future, was terrible for all of us. My girlfriend and I were of course concerned about the psychic well-being of our children. I mean, we’re firmly established as crazy in love but how fair is this to the kids? We’re lovers. We’re parents. But now these roles were about to collide into some undefined something and would they be okay? Would they like each other? Are they predisposed to despise each other? Even at the zoo? And even though the kids expressed a willingness to do this, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to surmise that, for them, this whole idea was icky and weird and confusing. The kids they were each about to meet: Who were they exactly in relation to them? I imagined them wondering Will I like them? and, of course, the question that never ceases to haunt us all: Will they like me?

But, as usual, nothing happened that resembled the hopes or fears the 6 of us brought to Chicago. It’s always something else, or maybe, in its own tricky way, it’s always all of it. Meeting new people is as predictable as the seasons. Nervous strangers slip into people with whom you are suddenly laughing and using chalk to draw pictures on the driveway.

At Navy Pier, we bought a 10-Ride Family Pass (awkward). All 6 of us rode the Ferris Wheel, around and around. From way up there, from that perspective, you can see the whole city and the very same city you spent the day walking through is now different and new. With only 4 tickets left, the kids ran toward the spinning swings. My girlfriend and I sat next to a fountain, waiting for them as they stood in the hot sun and long line. It was the first time our kids were gone, together. “I think we’re doing a pretty good job,” she said. I thought so too. The sky was so blue you might cry.

When we finally saw our kids running toward the ride, they had the option to sit in a single swing or a swing built for two. Our two young girls, 10 and 11, sat in a swing for couples. As it began its slow rotation, they looked nervous and by the time it was circling full speed, they were screaming with big frightened eyes. Their initial shrieks appeared to be genuine howls of terror but somewhere in the spinning, in that elusive seamless seam, the screams—like spring sliding into summer—became laughter, though it sounded much the same.

Photo credit: Instagram @mhook

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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Swinging Lola

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts, General • Tagged child, daughters, fathers, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas • 1 Comment

When you were pushing your daughter on the swing, you forgot about the rent. You forgot about your taxes and your credit cards and the broken towel rack in the bathroom and the hangnail on your right index finger. You forgot about work and working out and the bad dreams you’ve been having about a wicked pack of oil slicked witches chasing you through an endless concrete maze lacking both entrance and exit. From a pop psychological perspective, you were not a symptom of your issues. You were not abandoned. You were not the victim of a God fashioned after the constraints imposed by your drunk and raving stepdad. Your inner child was not wounded. You were not hounded by the sense that you’re not okay or good enough or worthy of love. Nor did you smother yourself with positive self-talk about all your admirable qualities and the good things you deserve. You did not obsess about, or feel compelled, to have a drink—just one drink, to take the edge off. Indeed, you forgot you had an edge. From a less conventional perspective of our psychopathologies, you were not possessed by demons or haunted by ghosts and you weren’t the numinous vessel through which bloodthirsty gods of war erupted, blindly seeking power and vengeance. You forgot to worry about the future’s uncertainty. You forgot to dwell in the muck of the past. You even forgot to remember that your car was low on gas.

Come to think of it, when you were pushing your daughter on the swing, you forgot about yourself entirely and, in the ecstatic release of this blessing, you forgot you were even a you at all, that such an odd little thing called you existed. Where did you go? Pay attention. Because here’s where it gets interesting and twisted. When you were pushing your daughter on the swing, some vaster You, the great big You that, indeed, contains you and everything else, but frequently—too frequently—gets imprisoned by your persistent identification with It, freed Itself from your unusually imperial dominance to inhabit the perspective of your daughter and, as a result, you forgot yourself in the service of this You that loves only to wander through the exotic forests of otherness.

And you were swinging! As the chains binding you to the swing set moaned with their predictable creaking like the bones of the very old, you were swinging, wildly to and fro, screaming Higher, Daddy, higher, screaming WHOO, and laughing. You were swinging and your long yellow hair sailed behind you like a superhero’s cape and the big yellow sun hung in the perfectly blue sky like a painting that sought only to explore the magic of juxtaposing a vivid yellow circle on a vast blue canvas. You forgot that math was hard and that school was a drag and that it’s becoming more and more difficult to navigate school’s social demands. Some girls are mean. Some girls are nice. Who are you? You forgot that your parents are divorced and how confusing it is to somehow be a member of the same family while blurring into the scenes of two new families. You forgot about your big brother, how much you admire and despise him. You forgot that your dad always goes to those meetings and you don’t really understand why but you’re glad he does. You forgot you spilled mustard on your blue dress and that you can’t find your hairbrush under your bed or anywhere and you even forgot that your braces make your whole mouth sore.

Come to think of it, when you were swinging, you forgot about yourself entirely and, in the ecstatic release of this blessing, you forgot you were even a you at all, that such an odd little thing called you existed. Where did you go? To the mountains! As you reached the highest point of your backward arc, you swooped forward and, freed from yourself into some vaster You, you were a bird launching into the air and flapping your wings, trafficking with airplanes and clouds, thinking big thoughts as big as the sky. Look at you! You can fly anywhere, anywhere at all, but the city and all its cold angled concrete and people bore you to death so you fly to the mountains where the rock is red and yellow and as constant as hope. You belong in the mountains. The mountains are home. For only in the mountains do you fit like a carefully built nest in the branches of a humble tree. You feel free in the mountains. There, you can finally relax and sing and, unafraid of men with guns and other predators, forget yourself. Come to think of it, as the idea of yourself as a bird gives way and blurs into your surroundings, you yourself are the entire range of red mountains covered in blue sky and we, too, are all of this.

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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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Straightening Things Out, With the People You Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Tell Me Something Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Little Fire in Her Dark

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged children and childhood, Dad, daughters, emotions, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas, parenting, promises • 1 Comment

Stop the presses and close the doors and play all the slow songs about promises and memory. The leaves are on the ground, dusted with snow. All the people walk away. Planes take off and there’s nothing to do but watch. You can’t see the moon tonight. No one is home. The stores are all closed and the letters were either lost or not written. The building’s abandoned, the window is broken, and no one in this whole wide world gets long division.

I broke your heart tonight.

We were sitting in an Italian restaurant and the tablecloth was red and white. Maybe, somewhere, an old woman wrote a poem, a collage of memories that would otherwise disappear forever. I said, “I saw your report card. What’s going on with you? Since when do you get such poor marks?” and two big tears raced down your cheeks and splashed in your bowl of spaghetti and meatballs.

When you were born, after your mother fell asleep, I cradled you in my arms and whispered promises to your stunned pink face. I like to imagine that my hushed words started a little fire in the darkest dark from whence you came and that you might one day hear them again when you were cold and needed warm hands and good thoughts. I will protect you. I will protect you. I will protect you.

But who am I—how can I possibly stack up—next to this concrete world of broken promises, lifeless pink bunnies, and long division? Long division is hard, man. It doesn’t make sense. What makes sense when you’re 9-years-old? I mean, what’s it even MEAN to ask how many times this goes into that? How many 3’s go into 18? Falling leaves and slot machines? One handful of jelly beans? More to the picture—not what it seems.

I promised to protect you but then banished you to a world where they do long division, where pet fish die, where everything’s conditioned by the ebb and flow of ceaseless flux, and there are boys. And then, tonight, with just a couple callous questions, I broke your heart and made you cry in a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. It’s hard to keep the path through the forest after dark. Are we on the right one? Or are we even on a path at all? It happens so easily and quick to lose one’s way in the weeds and thicket. And my God it’s cold.

But if you keep walking, slowly, with your hands out in front of you so as to avoid smashing into a tree, I believe that eventually your pupils will constrict on the distant flicker of a tiny little fire that, by virtue of its being an orange smear on the dark, will seem to say Over here! Over here! And as you walk toward it, your muscles will slacken, you will begin to relax, and your hands—your defenses—will drop because you will then be able to see the trees and they too will seem to wave you in and cry Welcome!

And now, too, the clouds will have parted and you will once again see the moon.

The fire, a hub, reveals many paths in all directions and you’ll be able to choose your way home in the morning. But, for now, sit by the fire and get yourself warm again. Stick out your hands; let it lick your fingers. Do you hear that? The way the fire cracks, pops, and hisses. Relax. This is how it whispers. Welcome to the world, little one. I’ve been waiting for you. I have always waited for you. The world is big and scary and easy to get lost in but I promise you that I will stay here, burning, in the very core of the darkest things and the most broken hearts, to keep you warm and light your way. I will protect you. I will protect you. I will protect you.

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

A Real Fantasy With My Daughter About Imagination

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged boredom, children and childhood, daughters, fathers, fathers and daughters, imagination, Jon Sponaas, parenting • Leave a comment

“I’m bored. So bored. I’m going to die of boredation,” she said in her bed. All the birds, perturbed and concerned, stopped singing.

A door’s slow creak gained in momentum and slammed.

Not a door in the house nor a door in my head, but rather a door between worlds. The kind of door that, when open, confuses things with the clarity of some largeness that confounds. Do you follow? Please do. Come along and don’t worry. We’ll leave a trail of breadcrumbs or popcorn or pearls.

A big orange flower, not yet wilted, is drooping. The dream animals, lost in the desert, are dying of thirst. My little girl is bored. She dangles precariously on the precipice of a reified world of inanimate, impersonal matter.

“Want some candy?” I ask her and hand her a red and white lollipop. There isn’t much time. I check my watch but it’s not on my wrist. No matter. To hell with chronology.

“There’s always time. No rush. No rush,” the turtle mumbles in a slow deep voice as he lumbers lumberingly through the door. “Climb aboard.” We hop on the turtle’s shell, a maze of yellow and brown wherein it’s easy to get lost. We don’t know where we’re going. Nobody does.

I remember you, Lola Blue, on your stomach, straining the just barely able muscles in your neck to lift your wobbly head. I marveled at how you were able, already, to focus and direct all your baby energies into one concentrated act. And why? Why did you so tenaciously will your head off the pillow?

To see. Driven only by the wonder and thrill of the ability to see and all that might be seen.

“Look! It’s raining lemon drops and gummy bears from pink and blue clouds of cotton candy!” she screams, and the turtle sighs. Taking cover, slowly, he heads toward a cave on the side of a mountain as Lola catches candy on her tongue.

The mountain, to put things in perspective, is actually an irritated blemish on the back of a Cosmic Yellow Dog who is said to devour each moment in his voracious maw. It is not known if the Cosmic Yellow Dog is God’s tame pet or if he is wild and incorrigible.

Inside the mountain, the turtle, whose name was Martin, was soon gone. We found ourselves on a playground upon which a gentle snow fell. Lola listened as I stood atop the tall red slide and recited Dylan Thomas. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age.” The poetry made us feel weird, like we were dreaming, enchanted by the spell of some rhythmic witch.

“Daddy,” she said, “This isn’t real, is it?” The snow turned to tiny pink and yellow flowers that fell in slow motion, twirling humbly to the earth. I felt empty with longing. I wanted to argue about truth and beauty and justice with ancient Greek philosophers. I wanted to keep the door open and stoke the fire.

“Of course it’s real, little girl,” I replied and did a cartwheel.

“But none of this is happening. Not really. Not even this conversation. It’s make believe.”

“But, baby, here we are, you and me—talking.”

“No, Daddy. Not really.” She shook her head but her eyes were wide with hoping.

“Then why do you keep answering me?”

The question caught her off guard and she thought about it. She shook tiny flowers from her yellow hair and thought some more before saying the magic words: “I don’t know.” A choir began to sing. All the prisoners escaped from jail. Reunited lovers embraced and kissed, celebrating ignorance.

“We are strange and mysterious creatures, little girl,” I lectured. “Thrown into the world against our wills—here—there is so much to see and eat and dream. There’s no time. No time for boredom. Boredom begins where your imagination ends. There are too many books to read to possibly be bored. Too much music. Too many poems. Too many worlds waiting to be born, waiting to happen, waiting for you.”

As she became interested in her boredom, the door creaked open. Inside her clenched fist she found a magic silver key. “It’s the secret,” she said, “the secret to everything.” And, without hesitation, she gave it to you.

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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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Why She Turns

Posted on September 24, 2013 by Jon Sponaas • Posted in Blog • Tagged Dad, daughters, emotions, fathers, fathers and daughters, Jon Sponaas, parenting • 1 Comment

So she slams the car door, says “Bye, daddy,” and starts running to the house. Halfway there and suddenly, she stops.

Sure, I write to remember, of course, but I also write to wonder, to poke certain memories with a stick in order to see, in and through language, what they reveal. And also to create a documented memorial to memory, for the minutia, for those fleeting things, so sly, that frequently slip by into the unspeakable realm of forgotten things. So maybe she can one day read them too, a woman, perusing tombstones of her childhood, things her daddy thought.

And it’s all in the stopping. When she stopped. Stop.

What, spinning on dimes, changes our minds? For instance, you’ve decided with certainty that you want the carrot cake, you close the menu, sip your coffee, wait. But when the waitress comes and solicits your decision, you hear yourself order the crÃ¨me brulee. It’s like that, no? Someone else emerges through you and you, from some quirky 3^rd person perspective, hear them trump your carrot cake with crÃ¨me brulee and you’re like ‘What?’ But then you quickly adjust to the thought that it was your idea because the spooky alternative lacks coherence and, besides, the crÃ¨me brulee? It was delicious.

And she turns.

One of the first paintings I ever loved was Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Because, though ambiguously, she—a static image—wants to move and she does in your firing imagination. She’s turning. But away from you? Or toward you? And what’s the deal with the expression on her face? Is she longing for her lover? Mourning? Startled? It was the first painting that ever filled me with confused wonder that, far from irritating, lit me on fire with awe and questions. I wanted to know her but I knew I never would, that her story would always both beckon and elude me. I remember the last day I saw my best friend. He walked away as I wondered if he would stop and turn around. I remember my rum soaked step-dad walking down the hall as I wondered if he would stop and turn around.

The sky is so blue that it could make you cry if you thought about it too hard and the sun smashes through like a baseball shattering a window. And there she is, wearing a purple dress. Stopped, turned, and now standing on the white sidewalk. So present, she owns the space she occupies and the palms lean in. She has such a keen draw on my attention that she often forces me to imagine that the vast interconnection of all the things of this world are all thus locked in an effort to continue producing her, permitting her to erupt into the world with her mischievous smile and long yellow hair. What does she want? Why is she standing there?

When you closely observe, in the midst of a conversation, how fast we talk, how quickly the words come up our throats and off our tongues, it becomes easy to doubt that there’s a process by which we first think of words and then say them. Rather, language sometimes, especially when we “say things we don’t mean,” seems to have a mind of its own, as if perhaps Language itself is speaking and merely using people in the way we tend to believe that we use art supplies. Can you imagine? We use paint and brushes to paint landscapes. What if Language uses us to speak its mind? It’s just a thought. But whose?

“I LOVE YOU, DADDY!”

It startles us both. Because it’s more than the declaration of a 9-year-old girl. It was as if something grabbed her, stopped her, and spun her around. And then, wild and blue-eyed, she yelled it. A man walking his dog stops to make sense of the scene. There is a yellow fire hydrant and yellow flowers waving in the wind. And I, so often perplexed by issues of meaning and worth, feel as if the world just opened its front door and invited me in.

How separate are we? Is there such a thing as alone? What, besides ideas, stands between me and you and the infinite riches of the treasure house? She runs back to the car, leans in the window, and gives me a kiss. “I love you too, little girl,” I reply and she turns once again to run to the house without looking back. And I drive away, cruising the city’s streets as everything—cars, park benches, litter and debris—come alive and smile at me.

Art: Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, 1665

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.