This Kid

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters

who I remember he was."  

Anne Sexton

He’s a kid who took a needle out of his arms to hold a child in his hands. This kid is the son of an immigrant’s grandson, living in a converted storage room behind his mother’s garage, holding sober to a night job at a takeout window and staying painfully awake as others live the American dream. After 23 years alive on this earth, this kid is not that much better off then when he began, when he couldn’t feed himself or wipe his own ass. And except for the fact that he has a daughter of his own and except for the fact that he is a father now - unmarried but still a father now - he would surely trade all of those 23 years for enough dope to stop his world from spinning.

You might think you know this kid as that 19 year old mixed race kid in your neighborhood who is doing the right thing by no longer breaking into his neighbors’ houses to steal their possessions having now enlisted in the army; the one who’s sending back his pay from Iraq to his grandmother so she can help his older sister through rehab.

Or maybe you recognize this kid as the WASP son of some son-of-a-bitch that you work with, a sullen kid with a distant father who made it all the way through college selling drugs to students and faculty until the feds scared him straight with three months time served for transporting over state lines – anyway, look at him now, you think, working honestly in the same office as you; it does your heart good to see him owning up to his life in this way even if you don’t care for his old man.

Then again, you might see this kid with the child as your cousin, or your brother’s boy or your best friend’s youngest son, all of whom have gotten themselves into piles of trouble at an early age, any of whom have too few survival skills (and too little pay to help them in any case), but each of whom is now hanging on to a righteous life with as much might and wisdom as god will give him in exchange for the promises they have made.

And we would understand why you might think you know this kid as those kids – being as all those kids are young men that we wouldn’t have bet a fart would have made it this far alive. And if seeing those kids as this kid helps you relate to this kid that’s fine. Except that those kids are not this kid. Keep that in mind. None of those stories are this story. Because this kid is a father and this story has a baby in it that this kid cares for and that makes this story an uncommon miracle.

Still - for all this kid’s willingness to try and stand up strong to be a father - this kid is not a perfect kid or a pleasant kid. Nobody would mistake this kid with the baby for an overly nice guy with a nice word to say about anyone. In fact, this kid truly seems to hate most people. He’s a practiced cynic with a chip on his shoulder and if you bring up someone you know in conversation with this kid that someone is probably going to get slammed. That’s just the way it is with this kid. For now, you can always figure that he’ll say something unkind about you. But don’t bring up his baby and expect a bad word about her because that’s not going to happen. How could you ever say something cruel about someone that’s given you back your reason to live?

Yesterday was a Thursday, and as usual this kid slept through his alarm. He doesn’t sleep well now that he’s been clean for nine months and he usually falls asleep just before dawn after which a tornado behind an earthquake behind a bombing run over his house couldn’t wake him. When he did get up he realized that he was going to be late again for the business class he’s taking at the community college but that didn’t stop him from slapping on last night’s work clothes and running a couple of yellow lights to get to the class 30 minutes late. The teacher, however, doesn’t like the looks of this kid – doesn’t understand what he’s trying to do or why he’s dirtying up his classroom in this way – so this kid got a another in a series of condescending looks which he ignored as he took his seat and tried to catch up on what he had missed. Still, when the class ended, this kid got up from his seat, lit a cigarette before he got all the way out the exit door and then blew smoke in cynical puffs up and into a breeze that he calculated would push it right into the face of the fat-assed teacher.

When he finally got to see his baby after class and before work it was past three o’clock. You see his car had run out of gas at the convenience store where he had left the motor running when he bumped into a old dealer friend of his who he talked with for over an hour before realizing that the dealer had nothing left that he really wanted and before getting back to find that the car had nothing left to give him either. So this kid walked six blocks to a Raceway gas station where they loaned him a can for ten bucks after which he walked back and got the car running again. By then it was well after three and when he did finally pull up to the house where his daughter lives with his ex-girlfriend and her mother, he knew his ex girlfriend would be pissed. But he didn’t care – he had long since stopped caring about what she thought. Somehow he had managed to his keep his angry and mocking tongue in his mouth long enough to make permanent arrangements with his ex-girlfriend about when he could visit with his daughter (each afternoon from three to five and every other Saturday all day) and now that the girl had agreed to that he was done caring what she thought. As long as he could be with his daughter. As long as he could see and love his baby.

This kid doesn’t even quite know himself why he wants to care for his daughter as much as he does. He has other friends and acquaintances in the fallow Northeastern city where he lives who ignore the babies they have made and in some cases even pretend that these offspring are simply an aberration on the part of their mothers. This almost seems to be expected in this place when you’ve still got your good looks and there are new girls everyday who seem to want you no matter how much of an asshole you may be. But as he straps his daughter into the car seat he bought second hand at a Salvation Army thrift shop, and as he pulls up to the park where he will spread a blanket under a tree to feed her and tickle her and tell her about himself, this kid knows why he wants to care for her. He doesn’t know it in his brain; he knows it in his gut. This tiny sweet-pea is smiling at him now as he lies next to her in the shade and makes chirping noises in her ear, and when he whispers the songs to her about the rainbow and the stars he means every word in that he would die now if she did not let him give her these things.

As always, he has to tear himself from his daughter when he drops her back at the mother’s house, although it is a bittersweet separation as these things can be. And the rest of this kid’s day is really not worth commenting on now that the baby is gone for another 24 hours, except for this. After this kid leaves his daughter and before he goes to his job he stops at an old church on Route 18, a rundown Methodist house with more cars in the parking lot than you’d expect for a late Thursday afternoon. In a low ceilinged basement meeting room of this poor church about 25 people are sitting in folding chairs and the smell of tarred coffee, menthol cigarettes and body odor is enough to make you want to go upstairs and pray. But this kid finds a folding chair anyway and when it comes his turn to say something he not only says who he is and what he is, he stands and finds a way to deliver himself without cynicism or mockery to this crowd of sinners. And that’s just the way it is these days for this kid, and he knows that this is what it will be for the rest of his life, day after day, one day at a time, meeting after meeting until the end of his time when his daughter will carry on for him.

So, you may be asking yourself, who is this kid? Is he real or did I create him from the whole cloth of our world’s lower depths? Does it matter?

Those fathers among us who have had our path to fatherhood paved with good education and a loving woman, with decent jobs and the hundreds of other piece of good luck that it takes to get it right – we cannot come close to understanding this kid. And if we live to be three or four times his age we will never be half the man he is when he holds that baby in his arms and protects her from the world with nothing more than naked nerve and a belief that all will be well if he simply wills it to be. Some fathers among us might look at this kid with scorn and derision; we might pity his fathering or shun him in a crowd. But if you think that when you see this kid (and you will see him), remember that this kid is the holy man disguised as a beggar; this kid is one of the saints walking among us as the lowliest of men. That’s who this kid is.

Stumbling in the dark across jagged terrain with nothing but his instincts to guide him, this kid is the truest manifestation of what a father is. Without the push and pull of external obligations to hold him in place, this kid is the raw bone of fathering, taking it on alone faith that this is what he should be. In years to come his anger will slowly drain and he will learn to be kind whether kindness or pain be upon him. He will prosper just enough to take the edge off, and he will learn to live without the needle and that fly-away desire that will, nonetheless, call him daily. But the one thing this kid will not have to learn is how to be a father. He’s already got that down cold because he sees what some of our richer and more powerful brothers may never see. He sees that when he gave life to his child, his child gave life back to him again.

We Amazing Fathers Who Blog (And Those Sad, Unfortunate Dads Who Need Us)

Sometimes I look at the thousands of dads out there who are blogging and I have to admit that I don’t know what our readers would do without us. We fathers who blog are an overwhelmingly wise and witty bunch who are (let’s face it) writing some of the world’s greatest prose on fatherhood. As grueling as it may be for us, we struggle to find just the right words for all the issues of fatherhood, baring our souls and our problems, telling our incredibly embarrassing stories, because we know that our readers – and especially all those other unfortunate fathers who don’t blog - would not be able to face another day if we were not there to guide and educate them. Sometimes we fathers who blog get together in an undisclosed location (so we won’t be mobbed by our fans) and when we are finished laughing and crying over the profound statements we’ve made about fatherhood and brotherhood and manhood (as well as many other types of ‘hoods’), we hug each other and whisper in each other’s ears, “We really are national treasures, aren’t we?”

You may ask, why we offer our advice and tell our problems to hundreds or thousands of strangers who never asked for it in the first place. Well what if we didn’t? What if Picasso didn’t paint … if Shakespeare didn’t write … if Phil Collins didn’t sing? The truth is we blog because we must – because our readers need us as much as they need beauty, as much as they need truth, as much as they need to hear a mediocre, electronically-enhanced singing voice backed up by a heavy-handed, amateurish drum beat. It really is an awesome responsibility we have (and to tell you the truth it really helps me relate to Pablo, Bill and Phil a whole lot better).

The problem is that sometimes our readers need us a little too much. Some of them even go so far as to send us emails and IMs begging us to address their problems. “Dear Dad Man Talking, Please address my problem,” they write. “I won’t know how to handle my child or my wife until I hear from you.” Personally I have a very hard time keeping up my correspondence with this clamoring throng of readers.

And frankly - after months of doing this - I’m getting a little tired of being the voice for my generation of fathers. I also personally know that all the other fathers out there who blog are getting just as tired of it. I mean how much can one group of men give to another group of men who won’t face or fix their problems in the honest and soul searching ways that we do. We write giving our tips on how to become the world’s sexiest dad and - even though we dads who blog will be unbelievably sexual and fully potent well into our 80s and 90s - those non-blogging fathers out there still fail to fulfill their wives. Over and over and over again we give our personal top 10 rules for being a great father and a real man’s man but still there are millions of children out there laughing at their fathers who don’t blog and wishing that we blogging fathers were their dads (I can’t say I blame them, back in the 60s and 70s my own father never blogged and I still resent him for it to this day). Day in and day out we fathers who blog tell the stories of our newborns, our teenagers, of the fights we have with our wives and the hidden and incredibly personal secrets that really should stay private. And even though we have no shame or dignity, is that good enough for our readers? No. Do they listen to us? No. Do they fix their problems? No. They go on expecting us to do it all for them. We’ll I’ll tell you something, we dad’s who blog can’t continue to take on these issues by ourselves – it’s just too much to ask. We are just men after all, no matter how extraordinarily sexy, powerful and wise we may be.

So that’s why starting today, I only want fathers and other readers who are seriously considering becoming bloggers themselves to read my blogs. That’s right, all the rest of you have to stop reading now. Go on, go away – yes, you with the tear in your eye, I mean you too.

Okay, I know, I’m being tough on you. But that’s the kind of dad I am. If you were able to continue reading my blog you’d know that. But you can’t any more, can you, because you’re just a sad little man who doesn’t blog and who will never be able to really face yourself until you do.

You see, we dads who blog care for you our readers. And we know what’s best for you. More than that, we know what’s best for the world. Each day we father’s who blog turn our backs on real people to give our valuable insights to a group of cyber-people who we will never meet, and we do it unselfishly because we know that people (real or not) will never truly be safe and secure – wars won’t be stopped, poverty won’t be ended, the energy crisis won’t be solved - until the whole world becomes a virtual community who can only touch and feel each other through the perfect computers that will set us free.

This Brother of My Father is My Father Too

Brothers with children become uncles. And those uncles can show us the fathers we never had. Your mother’s brother might be your guide to places unknown: he might be a bridge to your mother’s past or a small hint of who you will become when you are old. And aunts can be our other mothers, sweet and unburdened without the weight of our lives upon them. But a father’s brother is a character unto himself – no one else in your life will ever be like him because he is your hidden father, the sides of your father you might never have gotten to see without him.

An uncle of mine died one week ago today. He was both my father’s brother and my godfather, and his passing has pressed me squarely up against a wall of hard, clear memories – forcing me to think about the role that these fatherly uncles play in our lives. It’s a role which starts as soon as your uncle recognizes your father as his brother.

I have seen many brothers. There is my brother, and there are the brothers of my friends, my wife’s brothers and the hundreds of other brothers I have met in my everyday strolls through life. And with each of these brothers I have noticed one striking thing. All of these men seem to be the reverse of each other. Where one brother is tough-talking and stern, the other is playful and smooth with his words. If one brother is the guy with the money, the other brother is the one without. One brother loves his wife and is devoted to his children and the other has abandoned them all to live as a perpetual child with a never ending series of girlfriends and playthings. It was the same with my father and his brother, my uncle who was my godfather and who was, in many ways, my bad father.

You may question whether the difference between brothers is always this striking. Well perhaps it’s not as pronounced in all cases, but look closely around your own life and see if it isn’t just a little true. Sisters may be different from each other and even opposites in their own ways. But sisters don’t really compete in the same way as their male counterparts who seem to be determined to find a way to end up on the other side of the mirror from that one they call their brother. It may be survival – each boy to have his own unique place in the family, to offer something completely different from the other and so to be loved for himself and himself alone. It may be a man’s ego which seems to be bigger than a woman’s and which instinctually moves him toward that which will get him the most recognition: if my brother has brains, I will have brawn; if my brother is cautious with his money, I will make an art out of giving it all away. No matter how it comes about, it does seem to come about, and when these brothers become our uncles we often see the negatives from which our fathers were printed.

And so it was with my father and his brother, the one who just left us, the one who opened a crater when he died that took the rest of my father with him. This man was the closest brother my father had in age and his exact opposite in temperament and in the choices by which he lived his life. This uncle was a passionate, large, thick-headed man who could steal from others as much as he could give to them, and that’s what I loved about him. He was my father with the rough edges left on and he helped me see my father more smoothly because of it. I miss my father more today than I did on the day he died over 25 years ago. And I owe it all to my uncle.

My uncle’s ability to put a knife in his teeth and dive off a cliff to save a friend got me to see the bravery that I know must have been buried inside of my overly cautious, risk adverse father. The crimes my uncle committed in the name of family and foe showed me the larcenous jailbird my father might have become if only a couple of the cards on the table had fallen differently. The loquacious, black sense of humor that my uncle used to narrate his every fortune and misfortune (self-inflicted or not) told me that somehow, somewhere my much quieter father had what it took to be both wise and foolish about life. These two men came from two sides of the same family, my father could have been my uncle and my uncle could have been my father, and I’m damn sure that I would never have been able to love one of them without embracing both of them.

In Roman times, your father's brother was given nearly the same power and status as your father. There are even different words in Latin for the brother of your father and the brother of your mother. Your father’s brother was “patrue". You’re mother’s brother was "avunculus". It’s easy to think that the Roman’s did this because a father’s brother might need to stand in for that father at a moment’s notice. In an era of easy death and conquering armies, this was only practical. But we also know that the Romans, to the very root of their name, were romantics. So I like to think that the Roman’s awarded this power to a father’s brother not just to protect a child, but to help that child to see the poetry and the irony in the relationship between these men. The Romans were saying that your father’s brother is just the other side of your father. They were saying that this brother of your father is your father too.

King Kong and Fay Wray

You’ve got to keep your kids hungry. You’ve got to push them into the cold water to find out if they can swim. Sometimes, you’ve just got to become King Kong and let them be Fay Wray. Sometimes.

I’ve got friends of mine that give their kids everything just because they can. Other folks I know tip toe around their children, not wanting to get in their way, actually a little afraid of the full blown humans they’ve created. There are those who I’ve encountered who want to protect their kids from every Tom, Dick and hairy situation. And a few (God help them) even want to be their kids’ friends.

Look, my love for my kids is unbreakable; it’s death-defying and even deeply religious - I actually see my kids as my ticket to a world without end (amen). But just because I’d die for them and someday will be more content to die because of them, I still never forget that this love for my children has to take the shape and outline of no other love I will ever give.

Love for our children is not romantic love. It is not the love of friendship. It is not the love of money or objects given or received. It is not the love of a job or hobby or the social issue you’d fight over, nor is it the love of someone you respect because of age or position leading you to keep your own ideas to yourself out of reverence or esteem. This love for our kids has to be as cold and calculating as it is warm and tender-hearted. It has to be bold and smart and as sharp as a well cut diamond. It has to contain a view of the distance as far as you can see so you can keep your eyes on the race you know your kids will have to run and the fights you figure they’ll need to win. Sometimes, you have to use this love to take away as much as you give and sometimes – to save your children - this love has to be as terrifying as you can stand it to be.

Give your kids video games, personal computers and cell phones the day that preschool starts along with the keys to their own car the minute they get their license and watch them start to slowly resent you for your wealth because they have no idea how hard it is to get it. Let your kids sit on the couch all day eating from your fridge and watching professional wrestling and on-demand repeats of American Idol because you are too tired to stop them, and you’ll see them keep their dreams forever locked in their heads or, worse, in that screen above the DVR. Try to keep your kids from the monster in the closet, the bully next door or any of the true pain in the world, and they’ll be looking for somebody to take care of them for the rest of their lives. Be your kids’ friends and treat them like your buddy or your girlfriend and when you have to step in to protect them from themselves they’ll likely tell you to go to hell, leaving you to stare at the car wreck or addiction or flailing, unhappy soul you’ve created.

Who am I to give such arrogant advice? I’m a guy who’s fathered through many of the above mistakes and then watched those mistakes bloom into flowers of regret. I’ve spoiled my kids with freedom and friendship and the objects of their desires just enough to know that spoiling these children made them anxious children; in the end they had no idea what to do with the power that came from those wishes that had been granted to them. I learned fast enough to let my kids earn what they got and to make sure they were ready for it when they did because if I spoiled them, the world was going to un-spoil them fast enough in any case. And I figured out that if you are not more powerful and resilient than your children you are going to handicap them for the rest of their lives. It isn’t easy to be stronger and smarter than an up and comer who is less than a third of your age, it can wear down your stamina pretty quickly, but sometimes if you ain’t King Kong with your kids, you ain’t much of a parent at all.

When King Kong picked up Fay Wray in the palm of his hand, he scared the life out of her and she fought back with everything she had. But the big ape knew what he was doing. Of course, Fay thought she knew what she was doing too: she knew all about the jungle; she knew everything there was to know about New York (see: teenager; teenage years). But the King was stronger. He didn’t set her up in a nice cushy nest with a TV and a bag of Cheetos as he went off to fight for her safety among winged pterodactyls and giant lizards, buzzing bi-planes and great white hunters. He took her along for the ride so she could see what she might someday have to face on her own. He never hurt her, he always respected her, and soon enough Fay realized that she couldn’t have done it without him.  When King Kong died Fay Wray knew that it was his love that saved her life.

So if you want to argue with me about any of the above – if you feel there are holes in my thinking about what it takes to be a good parent or gaps in my logic on child rearing – I invite you to let me hear about it. Just remember that when I have to, I can become King Kong.