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The ripple effect

My son is staying home from school today because he’s afraid he might get shot. Rumors are swirling about a group of kids talking, possibly even planning to bring guns to school. We’re told the authorities are involved. Who knows what’s real? My son says one of the supposed plotters doesn’t like him. He’s afraid he’ll be looking down the barrel of a shotgun or pistol or whatever else children can nowadays get their hands on regardless of their mental state.

I don’t know anything about that kid, and I doubt most of the rumors are true. But I know, you know, our children know: This is our world now. The world we’ve made for our children.

I say We because of the ripples we all of us create during our lifetimes. I’m thinking of the old neighbor who always welcomed me into his workshop while he tinkered, to ask all the questions I wanted. Of a woman on my street with a house full of books and no TV that I ever saw, who used to welcome me in, give me cookies, let me sit dropping crumbs all over her nice chairs, and talk with me. I have no recollection what either of these adults ever talked with me about. I only know that to this day I love to be in workshops and rooms full of books.

Mister Rogers and Officer Clemmons

And I think as well about the people I’ve either wronged or been kind to, and how they went on to wrong or be kind to others, perhaps the momentary decision turning on how I treated them. And so on, and so on. Yes, this is the world we’ve made. Are making.

There’s a wonderful essay by the reporter portrayed in last year’s movie about Mister Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. In it he ponders what Fred Rogers would have thought about school shooters:

“The easy answer is that it is impossible to know, because he was from a different world, one almost as alien to us now as our mob-driven world of performative slaughters would be to him. But actually, I think I do know, because when I met him, one of the early school shootings had just taken place, in West Paducah, Kentucky—eight students shot while they gathered in prayer. Though an indefatigably devout man, he did not attempt to characterize the shootings as an attack on the faithful; instead, he seized on the news that the 14-year-old shooter had gone to school telling his classmates that he was about to do something ‘really big,’ and he asked, ‘Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, “I’m going to do something really little tomorrow”?'”

He went on to devote a week of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to talking with children about how being little doesn’t mean unimportant. How they can do big things by first doing little things. He gave them hope that their lives matter, that everyone’s life can be a good one.

Which I suppose is true for any of us. It’s why we focus here on building up small fathering habits. Because of the ripples all around us. C.S. Lewis once wrote that everyone we meet is either an immortal horror or an everlasting splendor. And if you believe in ripples you understand that, intentionally or not, you play a part in which of these a person becomes.

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Your child the wild river

A stubborn child can be hard on a parent. We’re trying to keep them alive, and it’s like they’re working against us. It’s the stubborn child who keeps climbing onto the roof even though you’ve warned him about broken necks. It’s the stubborn child who tries to tame the stray cat even after you’ve explained to him that rabies is incurable. It’s the stubborn child who won’t keep his mouth shut around the impossibly cruel bully at school.

And all you want to do is help your stubborn child, if only he would listen. But of course he won’t. Sometimes it feels like all your warning words only serve to increase his interest in the forbidden fruit.

Every child is like a river, and his will is the river’s depth. The thing about a deep-running river is that it runs fast. It’s a matter of hydraulics and velocity and other words I don’t completely understand, any more than I understand why so many of my children came out stubborn.

And the thing about that fast-running river is you’d best not try to dam it. Because maybe you actually could, but then you wouldn’t have a river anymore. You’d have something else. Something it wasn’t meant to be.

If you don’t want to bottle up the river that is your child, all you really have to work with are the banks. It’s the patient, hard work of shoring up those banks that is your only hope of directing your child the river along a path that doesn’t smash through every town in sight before careening off a cliff. You want those banks strong enough to keep the river flowing toward the destination that only it knows. Which means you have to accept that the destination isn’t yours to decide.

A postcard of the Niagara Falls Gorge

We’ve all seen parents who can’t abide this lack of control. They craft retaining walls, hard twists and turns, dam after dam, trying to direct their rivers to the larger river they believe it should belong to, or to the ocean that is their dream. Many of those rivers comply, but their spirits are broken. Other rivers smash every restraint in sight in an effort to survive. To keep being a river. The broken river and the untamed river both lead to a kind of heartbreak, I think.

I wish I had some applicable piece of parenting advice, but I’m afraid I have none, other than to ask yourself whether you’re building dams or banks. Whether you’re helping your child develop the depth of will she’ll need to leave you a strong-running force in this world, or a dissipated and shallow swamp. I don’t suppose any of us are river engineers, or that we’ll get all the little decisions that shape a river right. I only know that as a father, my job isn’t to direct these rivers in my care to a final destination. It’s to send them off strong, purposeful, and unbroken. Not into safety or predictability, but into life.

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Habits of weakness

One of my two year-olds has a habit of clutching his waistband. When you have twins you tend to buy two of everything, and because he’s skinnier the pants that fit his brother sometimes slide down his legs. So he compensates by holding onto them. It’s not a very masculine look, especially when he’s running, but he doesn’t care. All he cares about is not face-planting into the driveway because he has a chubby brother.

What’s funny is that he even does it in footie pajamas, which have no chance of slipping off. It’s a habit now. I worry that when he reaches high school and tries out for the track team, he’ll sashay down his lane looking like Oscar Wilde evading the vice squad.

Notice the mismatched slippers on these style mavens.

We grown-ups have our remediation habits too. Practices of self-medication, self-protection, adaptation. Maybe we drink to unwind at the end of the day—every day. Maybe we defer to our wives on more decisions than we realize, because somewhere along the line we got the impression that this is how to avoid disappointing them. Perhaps we give our kids third and fourth chances when they break our rules, because we’ve found nagging is less unpleasant than enforcing consequences.

It’s funny, the lengths we’ll go to avoid discomfort, and how easily those shortcuts become habits.

My twelve year-old had a couple of concussions last year, one from sports and one at the hands of a drunk driver. I’m taking him to a neuro-ophthalmologist, who’s giving him a series of exercises to combat lingering challenges to his concentration and peripheral vision. The first thing the doc did was prescribe new glasses. Our optometrist had declared the boy has astigmatism, but this doc believes it’s a treatable consequence of the concussions. He wants to try therapy before we resort to stronger glasses. “You don’t want to train his eyes to be more dependent than they need to be,” he says.

Which is something we all have to guard against, isn’t it? Those little habits that serve as crutches to circumvent the hard work of leading, of maintaining principles and rules, of making choices we believe are right, regardless of whether they cause momentary unhappiness.

The challenge is knowing when we’re jogging down the lane of fatherhood, but clutching the waistband of our footie pajamas. The immensely popular psychologist and social critic Jordan Peterson has some advice for identifying when we’re not being truthful—he says we know we’re prevaricating when we feel weak. Like less than men.

So there’s a first step. Let’s try to notice when our words and actions—as well as our silence and inaction—make us feel like something less than the men we need to be. Let’s put down some of those crutches and do the hard work set before us.

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Absence and the heart

This week I’ve been quarantined in my bedroom with the flu. It’s particularly tough because my oldest son, a United States Marine, has been with us during what will likely be his longest leave for some time, and I’ve missed most of it. Today he flies back to base.

My littlest ones, two year-old twins, have decided that I’m being held against my will. They’ve made several forays against the door in an effort to liberate me. I’ll hear them conferring in low chatter down the hallway, then there will be the thundering of little feet as they charge the door, then a catastrophic thump as toddler flesh meets wood. They’re so adept at breaking into/out of every other confinement that I’ve shoved a chair up against the door.

It’s Christmas, and I’m literally barricaded inside my bedroom.

When it’s warm enough the twins play outside. Sometimes they congregate beneath my window. “Papa!” they shout. My older sons pause before some unnamed excursion. “Hi Dad!” they yell up at me. They pile into my truck.

I wave back from where I sit beside the window. My wife comes over to quietly confer with me about the day, how I’m feeling, what people are up to. She confirms that she’s checked everyone’s temperatures and no one else is sick. “I miss you,” she says.

Which could seem like an odd thing to say, given that we’re twelve feet apart and in constant contact. But I’m not there. I’m not with them.

My father-in-law holds the twins’ hands as they traverse the long driveway. In the kitchen below I hear my saintly mother-in-law chatting with one of our family friends.

I’m here and not there. “I miss you,” I tell my wife.

Maybe it’s a cruelty that this is the week all we who are going through the daily Intentional Fathering habits are focused on delighting in our children. Or maybe it’s just another way God is using this project to change one father, me.

Because while it hurts to hear them carrying on with the holidays, to hear the clink of dishes and the occasional bursts of laughter, to get texts telling me what they’re up to and checking on whether I need water or broth, it’s a good kind of hurt, I think. When you can’t hear everything you want to hear, you listen closely. When the ones you love are only in sight for a few minutes, you pay attention. When you can finally taste your broth, you remember it’s a blessing to live in circumstances where food comes easily to your hands.

Yesterday I was well enough to sit on our deck for awhile. The babies were napping, and everyone kept his distance. The sun felt good, though it was cold. One of the twins woke up, and his mother laid hold of him to keep him from running into my arms. She reminded him that I’m sick.

“Want to look at Papa,” he insisted. He sat near her and did just that. And his countenance was warmer than the sun. It was so filled up with unquestioned love that I almost couldn’t bear it. His was the gaze of someone delighting in the one he loves.

It occurred to me in that moment that all these things we fathers are working on: gratitude, delight, kindness, listening—they aren’t habits we need to acquire so much as a remembrance of who we were, back when our hearts were less burdened.

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It goes without saying

One of my children used to own a little digital device. Afflicted with the double-liability of being not only a child but a boy child, he often handled this device with reckless abandon. We developed our own litany around this device. He would tuck it between his chin and chest to carry it because his hands were full, and I would remind him how much the device had cost. He would leave it lying on the floor, and I would remind him that its screen had not been designed to resist the heels of his older brothers. After every exchange he would make a surprised noise, as if this were the first time he was hearing about the eggshell quality of digital screens. It was like living with an Alzheimer’s patient who is continually surprised to learn that he is in possession of a kitten.

And so the inevitable happened, as inevitable things tend to do. I didn’t hear about it from the boy. Instead my wife came to me and relayed the bad (but gratifying) news. He had indeed been carrying it carelessly, and it had indeed dropped, and lo and behold, the screen had cracked, just as his sage father had foretold. I was hearing it from her, she explained, because he was afraid to tell me.

I was only just getting into a practice run of my sermon when she held up her hand. “I told him he has to be a man and own up to it,” she said. “Your job is to not be a jerk when he does.”

Well then.

I allowed that she had a point. I can get overzealous when it comes to helping my children see all the ways that greater attention to my strictures and advice can spare them (and more importantly, me) many of life’s hardships. And besides, the little tyke was already suffering, what with his Angry Birds now indistinguishable from their arch enemies the Bad Piggies. I resolved to hold my tongue.

A few days later the boy screwed his courage to the sticking post and came to me, eyes downcast, to confess his error. Even with my wife’s forewarning still stinging my pride, I felt a sermon welling up within. But I restrained it, and instead thanked him for coming to tell me.

I couldn’t resist pointing out, however, that I’d warned him. He nodded. This was the part he’d been expecting. Ah well. I never said I was perfect.

And as if God himself wanted to illustrate this point, the very next day I was standing beside this particular child when I took out my far more expensive device using just two fingers, because my hands were otherwise engaged. It tumbled from my fingertips and struck the concrete in a manner that is gravely warned against in the owner’s manual. The resulting crackreverberated between us, the boy and me.

And this son of mine, bless him, didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. Which is how I learned from an 8 year-old that most of our criticisms are unnecessary.

It’s not the first lesson I’ve learned from my children, nor the last. Sometimes I think maybe I’ve had this fathering thing all backwards. That the purpose isn’t so much for them to learn from me, as for me to learn from them. Or maybe that’s just how it goes for we less than perfect men.