Karen is in the car with the kids, and they are talking about vacation Bible school.
Gavin (7): When Jesus came back to life, he still had marks on his hands and feet.
Karen: He did?
Gavin: Yeah, but they didn’t hurt.
Karen: No?
Gavin: No, they were just boo-boos now.
Me: How was your first day of school? Did you learn anything?
Gavin (7): No, it was just school.
I’ve never doubted the love a father can feel for his children.
A portrait of me by Celeste.
I felt it when Celeste came screaming into my life nearly 11 years ago, and again when Gavin followed a few years later.
And I was reminded of it Sunday by a column in The Washington Post from T.J. Leyden, a father who left behind the hate-filled world of white supremacy because he wanted something better for his young children. He now spends his time making amends for 15 years of living a life of hate by talking to kids about his experience with the hope they do not enter that world of violence and racism.
His piece is a timely reaction to the shooting at the Wisconsin Sikh temple in which six people were killed by a man who shared the beliefs Leyden once held.
Leyden even asks if his former self could have committed such an act, if he could have been the shooter. “It makes me sick to say that I don’t know,” he wrote.
But Leyden escaped that world. As he explains in his story, the love he felt for his children overpowered the sense of belonging he felt in a world of hate. He wanted a better life for his children, so he turned his around.
I love Leyden’s story because he acknowledges the effect his children have on his life and he was willing to write about it in a prominent American newspaper. Few men choose to express themselves in a brave testament to the power of fatherhood. The world needs more dads who are willing to put themselves out there and share their stories of engaged fatherhood, and how children have affected their lives in a positive way.
And such a project is under way.
Dads Behaving Dadly is a project by two editors and fathers who are chronicling the fatherhood revolution by asking engaged fathers in America and Canada to share their stories. They want to put them together in a book to celebrate engaged fatherhood.
Their goals are worthy:
If you think you might have a story you’d like to tell, I encourage you to submit it for their consideration. I did, and they liked it enough to include it. Which story you ask? I’m not telling. You’ll have to wait to see if it makes the final cut then buy the book.
I pull out of the garage with the kids, and notice the grass needs mowing.
Me: Celeste! When are you going to mow the lawn?
Celeste (10): It’s not my job. Only boys mow lawns.
Gavin (7): No, only daddies do!
I love listening to Hair Nation on SiriusXM. I realize none of the music is original and the bands that fill its airwaves are better known for breaking laws and hotel lamps than musical barriers, but that’s not the point.
© Danilashik | Dreamstime.com
The songs I hear while visiting the land of Aqua Net and Spandex take me back to my younger days in the 1980s when life seemed so much simpler. A random Van Halen song often reminds me of hanging out with friends in the parking lot of the neighborhood Pizza Hut and melts away whatever stress I felt that day.
Memories are funny that way.
Anything can trigger them, whether it be a song, a smell, or a few words from a 6-year-old boy. In the instant a memory is triggered, we sometimes relive a day from decades ago in vivid detail and feel the emotions again as though they were new.
Other times the trigger reanimates just the outline of a memory’s shadow, and leaves you with a vague impression of a life-changing event.
That happened to me the other night as I was putting my 6-year-old son, Gavin, to bed. Karen had taken our 10-year-old daughter, Celeste, to New York for a girls’ weekend of “Mary Poppins,” shopping, and more.
That meant it was just Gavin and me for few days, and I planned to make the most of my time alone with him. Gavin’s mood ranged from good to melancholy, and it reached the bottom one night when he burst into tears without warning.
“What’s wrong, buddy?” I asked.
“I miss Mommy and Celeste!” he cried.
“Oh, I know you do, but I’m here,” I told him. “You have me, and you’re safe in bed.”
“I know that, but we’re supposed to be together! I want the family together,” he whined. “Me, you, Mommy, Celeste, and Obi. That’s the family.” (Obi is our cat.)
Gavin’s words struck me as surprisingly poignant for a 6-year-old, and choked me up because they triggered the impression of an echo bouncing around a memory I have involving my parents’ divorce and growing up fatherless.
My father left my mother and her four children when I was about Gavin’s age. It’s no understatement to say it was one of the defining moments of my life, and set me on a path of growing up fatherless.
I remember moments of days growing up with a single parent, and the difficulties my mother had in maintaining a healthy household, both financially and emotionally. But I have no actual memory of learning about my parents’ divorce, or my reaction to my family no longer being whole.
Was I stoic? Did I shrug, and simply accept as fact that families in the 1970s were destined for divorce? Could I even articulate what I felt?
I have no idea, but Gavin’s reaction to Karen and Celeste’s absence for a few days leads me to believe that I must have been devastated. After all, if Gavin is old enough to realize that family members belong together, I must have been old enough to realize the same and buried those feelings deep just to survive.
But they are obviously a part of me. Otherwise, Gavin’s reaction would not have affected me so much or rung so true.
I don’t think about my parents’ divorce every day. It’s simply become a piece of the fabric that makes me who I am. I’ve learned to live with it, much as an amputee must learn to live without a limb.
But fleeting thoughts of it enter my mind as I father my two children. I think of it more as Gavin reaches the age I was when my father left, and it stops me cold. I see the way he looks at, and up to, me.
The adulation in his eyes is as pure as the sun’s rays warming my face on a spring afternoon. I wonder if I ever looked up to my father that way, but I have no clue. No trigger has ever brought back such a memory. All I remember is absence, weekend visits, greeting cards, and phone calls.
I never thought I could remember so much, and yet so little, or feel so many complex emotions in the short time it took me to console my son that night. But that’s the floodgate his words tore open: “I want the family together. Me, you, Mommy, Celeste, and Obi. That’s the family.”
“We’ll all be together again in just a few days,” I told him. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
I’m frustrated I can’t remember more from my childhood, but perhaps I’ve been listening to the wrong music. Instead of driving around with cheesy, ’80s guitar riffs spewing from my speakers, I need to switch to the acoustic sounds of ’70s AM radio.
But I’d rather spend time with my son and soak up the adulation from his eyes.
This is a repost of a column that first appeared in The Gazette on Oct. 27, 2011.
I should know to phrase my questions better.
Me: Why don’t you guys go upstairs and take a shower?
Gavin (7): Because we don’t want to.
I love hearing the perspectives of other parents and how they teach their children life lessons.
Take money as an example.
A couple of years ago we decided to start teaching our then 9-year-old daughter Celeste about money. She wanted a Nintendo DS, but we wanted her to work for it, so she could appreciate the cost. (You can read about it here.)
A father I spoke with the other day took a different path to teach his son and money. I’ll call him Rob because, well, that’s what his parents named him.
Rob figured the time had come to teach his 6-year-old son about money, so he started paying him $7 a week as long as he did his chores. It worked well.
Junior, which is not his real name, was faithfully doing his chores and earning $7 a week. The only problem was that he wanted to go to Target the minute the money touched his hands. He’d burn through his allowance faster than I eat a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. (That’s pretty fast. Ask Celeste.)
So Rob tweaked his plan. “I wanted to teach him about saving money, so I started paying him 10 percent interest,” he said.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: 10 percent is a great return on savings, so you want to park your cash in the Bank of Rob. At least, if you’re like me that’s what you’re thinking, but forget it. The charter for the Bank of Rob has some silly rule that depositors have to be his offspring. Go figure.
His plan worked at first. Junior wasn’t spending a dime, and after some time was amassing quite the savings for a young boy. Nearly $40.
“Don’t you want to buy something?” Rob asked his son one day.
“Not yet,” Junior replied. “I want to save $70.”
“$70?” Rob asked. “Why so much?”
“Because at 10 percent interest I’ll earn $7 a week without doing any chores,” Junior said.
Rob cut his interest rate to 3 percent, but you have to admire Junior. Perhaps I should pick his brains for ways to lighten my workload.
Celeste has a wonderful innocence about money.
She knows what it is, of course, and that her mother and I work to earn it, but she has not fully developed the concept of the value of a dollar.
Celeste earns one of these, a DS dollar, for doing extra chores around the house.
She’s beginning to understand, though. For her birthday last year, she wanted an American Girl Doll. Karen and I had no intention of spending $100 on one doll, no matter how much we treasure our only daughter, but we wanted her to fully understand why.
We told her we could buy her the doll, but that would be her only gift and it wouldn’t come with any accessories. No extra clothes ($30), no furniture (who would pay $85 for a doll bed?), no baby stroller ($40). I don’t like spending $30 on a shirt for me, so I’m not about to spend that much on a doll.
If we bought an American Girl Doll for Celeste, that would be it, period. Or we could buy her an Our Generation Doll from Target ($30), a boatload of accessories (about $20 per packet), and some other gifts.
She picked the Target doll. Smart girl.
A trained eye could probably tell the difference between the two dolls, but I can’t and neither can Celeste. Nor does she care. She has more toys to play with for the same amount of money. That’s the value of a dollar.
When her 9th birthday came around last month, we asked Celeste what toys she would like to have as her presents. She answered without much hesitation: Nintendo DS, the handheld computer game that is all the rage among those who have lifetime memberships to the Justin Bieber fan club.
I admit the kid inside me is a little jealous because the handheld computer games I played with as a kid were a joke compared to today’s models. I remember spending many rainy Saturday afternoons taking turns with my friends and brothers playing a Mattel Electronics handheld computer football game. The screen was tiny, and it had just a few buttons that we pressed to direct little lines where to run on the field. The lines were supposed to be the players, but they more resembled little pieces of red rice that carried about like ants looking for their next meal.
I loved that game, and we would pretend to be real NFL teams squaring off in the Super Bowl. We even had little football helmets from 25-cent gumball machines to represent the teams. I’m sure the computer power it took to run that game would fit on the head of a pin today.
Karen and I have resisted buying Celeste a DS, but we are not surprised she wants one judging by the numbers of kids who have one. Part of the reason we have not bought her a DS is because of its passive nature of play. Kids today don’t need another toy that requires them to sit around and stare at a small screen. They need to move around, sweat, and get dirty.
Another reason we have resisted is the cost. The unit itself costs between $130 and $170, depending on the number of bells and whistles. It comes with a few basic games, but the ones kids really want to play are about $25 to $35 each. That’s birthday, Christmas and Valentine’s Day wrapped up in one little box there.
So when Celeste said she wanted a Nintendo DS for her birthday, Karen asked if she knew how much they cost. Celeste looked at her innocently (she has no other look, mind you) and said, “I don’t know, about $10.”
“No, sweetheart, it’s about $160.”
Celeste’s eyes widened as she quickly realized that we were not buying her a Nintendo DS for her birthday. “Oh,” she simply said, and didn’t ask about it again.
I’m proud she understands how expensive that toy is, but after thinking about it for a bit, I also realized she could learn another important lesson: pride in earning something.
So Karen and I decided she could work toward earning her Nintendo DS by helping around the house more than normal. I would pay her a dollar or two every time she helped me in the yard or garden or to clean up the basement, and she could save that money for her expensive toy.
But I didn’t want to keep small bills lying around the house. I find that I spend less money if I don’t carry it around, so I hardly ever have cash on me.
Instead, I created a “DS dollar.” I found a Web image of a Nintendo DS, and superimposed Celeste’s face on its screen. I can fit eight of them on a regular sheet of paper out of our printer, so whenever I feel she earned a DS dollar, I cut one out and give it to her.
When she’s earned 20 of them, I’ll exchange them for a real $20, and when she’s earned enough to buy a Nintendo DS, she can buy it with money she earned. At the rate she’s going, she’ll have that Nintendo DS by the time she’s married. OK, not that long, but it won’t be quick.
Of course, once Celeste earns her DS, we’ll have to limit the amount of time she spends on it, but she will have learned the value of working for something she wants. Not a bad trade off, especially if I can sneak in a game every now and then.
This is a re-post of a column that appeared in The Gazette on Oct. 7, 2010. Celeste has since earned her DS, as has her younger brother, Gavin. They both worked hard to earn it, and neither has not lost it (much to my surprise).
I have lots of jobs as a father, but three consistently rise to the top of the list: provider, protector, and teacher.
Providing for my two children is fairly easy as long as I have a decent-paying job, which I know isn’t a given these days.
Truth be told, it’s been a constant worry of mine since the onslaught of the recession four years ago, but I consider myself lucky. In January I walked away from a longtime job at a newspaper as a result of the recession, and found a good job fairly quickly.
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Protecting my children is also fairly easy in today’s world of bike helmets, knee pads and seat belts. We live in a decent neighborhood, so I don’t worry about them playing outside on their own as long as I know roughly where they are.
But I know I can’t protect my children against some dangers. I see no way in which I, or anyone for that matter, can offer any protection against someone intent on harming others in some horrific fashion.
The most I can do is teach them common sense, to be aware of their surroundings, make good decisions so they don’t put themselves in harm’s way, and trust their instincts.
But teaching my children is the most difficult job I have as a father, especially since the lessons are tougher as the years roll on. I no longer have to teach them to not stick foreign objects up their nose.
The lessons are much more nuanced. I have to teach them why; not just what.
I want them to become honorable and respectable adults, but sometimes find myself caught in the contradictions of adulthood.
I want them to be ferocious readers, but often find myself falling asleep on the couch before I turn the third page of whatever book I crack open.
I want them to be active, but often find myself with barely enough energy in the evening to walk around the house, let alone go out for a walk or ride a bike.
And I want them to be honest, but tell them an obese, bearded man wearing a red suit brings them toys on Dec. 25, and that some magical fairy leaves a dollar under their pillow every time they lose a tooth.
Yes, the contradictions of adulthood do not make my job easy.
I want Gavin to grow into the kind of man people look up to, someone they can turn to in times of need. I want Celeste to grow into a strong, confident woman who doesn’t let anyone push her around. And preferably, they’ll both have a little of each in them.
So all I have to do is teach Gavin to be an upstanding guy while teaching Celeste to stand up to a guy.
Yeah. Can we go back and review the lesson that foreign objects don’t belong in your nose?
Celeste and Gavin are eating soft ice cream at the carnival.
Celeste: Daddy, will you hold my ice cream when I go on the ride?
Me: You sure you trust me to not eat it?
Celeste: Mommy, will you hold my ice cream?
