Dispatches

These are dispatches from the front lines of everyday.

I’m the guy you see with his head swiveling in and out of traffic in the school drop off line, his daughter in the front seat next to him. He’s smiling. He’s chatting with the kid, but he’s thinking, “how does this end?” That’s me.

I’m the guy who works at that desk next to you (think of me as the same guy who works at every desk from Palo Alto, California to Bainbridge, Massachusetts) sucking my living off the internet, milking a paycheck from endless emails and IMs, living and dying from eye-chart spreadsheets and quarterly budgets. I complain about it. I do it. I threaten to leave. I do it some more. I dream of what I wanted to be and I swear that this is the last year before I make a move, and that was ten years ago. I love my kids. I hate the work. I love the money. I keep working. Love and hate. Hate and love. Just like you, I’m guessing.

I’m the father. You’re the father. We’re the fathers. We’ve got one kid, two kids, three kids … four. At some point it doesn’t matter. We’re all responsible for all of them. If childhood is a journey not a race, then fatherhood is the road our kids walk over when they put on their little backpacks to start that journey. I’m an American father with roots in the past and I’ve got farther to go before I finish my race.

At our age, we all seem to have come from the same place. Fifty, sixty years ago when we we’re born our grandfathers and fathers spoke to us with accents, added vowels to their words, dropped and broke their consonants, put a W where a V should be, turned a “three” into a “tree.” They stomped all over the soft spoken sounds coming from the America children we were – the American children we would someday father. They talked to us in languages scented with the sweat of Italy, Ireland, Germany, maybe Poland or Russia or France. But as good as they were, and as bad as they were, they are gone and going now. And we are left to translate their sketchy instructions and carry on the fathering with or without them and then to join them soon enough.

So there will be secrets and longings in these dispatches. Dreams and desires too. These don’t die just because you are in the last stretch of raising your children. On the contrary, they begin to well up with an intense pressure as you watch the last of your children stand and walk away on their own, pointing back at you smugly as you recede further and further into their distance. And the secrets are still strong too, but, honestly, they don’t feel much like secrets any longer. They may be dark, they may be laughable, they may not even be secrets to anyone except you, but they are now the only stories you really have to tell - the short one act plays you want to perform for the amusement and annoyance of your children – for the love of your past and the God that made.

These secrets and dreams and desires of my fathering are the dispatches I’ll send off to you …
I’m in the car riding with my father and he turns and smiles at me … or it’s me in the car riding with my daughter and I’m smiling at her … or I’ve just set the table with dinner, my wife is working late, and my first child (who is now a grown woman) will not eat; she falls to the floor screaming and crying and I fall on the floor alongside her and I begin crying too …. or I’m in a dark room alone, my wife has temporarily left me out of anger because I am still a scared child myself and will not yet give in and give her the children she wants … or I’m in another dark room alone and it’s 23 years later and my wife and grown daughters have left me for the day and I’m thinking about how miserable my life is going to be without the children I didn’t want to give my wife in the first place …

It goes on and on and on, and it will all be here, and together we will plot our course from these dispatches of our every day.