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Behind the locked door

When you lock your doors at night, do you ever think maybe the thief is already in the house?

Men can crave anything: money, cars, sex, video games, even “me time.” Dr. Timothy Patitsas writes, in The Ethics of Beauty, that such greed causes men to rob our own families, by inciting us to:

. . . ignore the sufferings of a thousand others who are starving now, of our spouses and children whom we neglect, betray, or put at risk while we obsessively hunt for excess.

I remember the night I spoke by phone to one of my boys, Golden. He was maybe 8 years-old at the time. It was a hard year, a divorce year. I was gone a lot. Too much.

“Sometime soon,” he asked in his soft voice, “can you play Legos with me? Just you and me?”

“Yes honey,” I said. It’s one of those promises you make to a child when there’s really no alternative.

I broke that promise. Not intentionally, of course. But weeks turned into months, and months, well, they have a habit of becoming years—usually faster than we expect. Golden and I were together often after that phone call, but we never had one-on-one Lego time.

Do you know why? Because I didn’t make it happen. Because there was always something else I needed to do. Or wanted to do.

That’s how fatherhood works: You don’t intend to fail, but if you don’t restrain the small greeds that hunger to become consuming greed, you will rob your children. Just because you don’t plug failure into your GPS doesn’t mean you won’t get there.

I hate admonitions from self-appointed parenting experts that amount to little more than: “Become a saint.” Try harder, be better, give more. Being a parent is exhausting. Just getting through life, anymore, feels exhausting. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re exhausted. In fact, it’s just about impossible. So that’s not the takeaway here.

We can get better without transforming overnight into saints. That’s how habit-building works. You don’t have to be a saint, you just have to do a little practice every day. Next time I’ll offer a few ideas that have helped me battle greed. And if you have ideas, I’d love to hear them.

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Smell what you will

It’s getting on towards bedtime as we drive home from church. There’s a powerful odor of boy-feet wafting from the back seat. Professor and Jackrabbit are altar servers, which means they’ve been afflicting the priest, deacons, and other servers with that foot funk. I announce that they’re taking baths when we get home.

The negotiation begins. The negotiation is always the same. Do we have to wash our whole body? All of it? Surely not the hair, Papa. Please, we beg you, not the hair.

It’s been a long week, so I agree to limit my bath fatwa to their feet. On account of I can smell those feet from where I sit. We get home and they set to it. I hear the water running, the splishy-splash of washing, the inevitable tumble off the bathtub’s edge. Finally, they present their feet for inspection.

Nobody warns you that crouching to smell feet and sniff breath will be among the duties you adopt after you procreate.

They don pajamas and prepare for bed. I draw them close for hugs, and this is when I smell in their hair the sweetest admixture of little boy and incense. Somehow they smell both familiar and otherworldly.

Holy, even.

I read once that smell is one of the earliest senses to emerge in babies. It’s how we tell our mamas from the frightening multitude of not-mamas out there. As a consequence, smells can affect us deeply. They don’t just remind us of lost loves, of mama’s kitchen, of that terrifying night in the ER—in a way they can pull us into those places again.

And maybe sometimes they can even draw us heavenward.

C.S. Lewis observed that every person we meet is either an immortal horror or an everlasting splendor. “There are no ordinary people,” he wrote. “You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Of course he didn’t mean that every person is purely evil or purely good. We all bear within us some profanity, and some divinity. Over the course of our lives, we choose which part to nurture.

And we choose also which part we see, and hear—and yes, smell—in others, including our own children. The stinky feet or the heavenly hair.

And what we see in them, well, that’s what they learn to see in themselves, isn’t it?

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Eyes and bellies and other parts

I’ve been thinking a lot about bacon. Have you tried it? Holy cow is it good. Speaking of cows, hats off to steaks sizzling on a grill, prime rib, and juicy cheeseburgers. And don’t get me started on roasted lamb.

We Eastern Orthodox are in our final Lenten throes. Our liturgical calendar is different than that of Catholics and Protestants. I’m unsure why. I’ve had it explained to me many times, just as I’ve had Bitcoin and natural law explained to me many times. Some heads are just not fitted for certain knowledge. The point is, I’m glad Easter approaches, for many theological and spiritual reasons, but also because a man can only eat so much hummus.

So why fast at all? And what to teach our children about it? In The Ethics of Beauty, Timothy Patitsas writes: “…it is in the lowest part of the soul, in the appetitive powers, where the battle will be won or lost.” In other words, if we want to achieve noble, virtuous lives—and raise sons and daughters to do the same—we must subdue our passions. Fasting is a means of bringing the body, and thereby our passions, into submission.

Jackrabbit and Professor attend a little private school. It’s Montessori-based, which aims to help children become self-directed learners. Every week they’re responsible for achieving a number of goals—reading aloud so many pages, say, or completing a handwriting primer.

Jackrabbit is struggling. Week after week, he fails to complete his goals. The children who do complete their goals get to go on field trips. Jackrabbit usually has to stay behind. He tells me he has difficulty keeping his eyes off the work of the older kids. It’s not the work itself that distracts him, it’s the fact that they’re using computers. One downside of not giving your children screens is that when they do see one, even an ad for dish soap can be captivating.

On the drive to school, we talk about what he can do to guard his eyes. Which leads to a talk about battling the body. Now Professor is curious. “How can you fight your body, Papa?”

Oh man, I’d almost rather talk about Bitcoin.

I do my best to explain that some parts of our bodies—especially men’s bodies—will run the show if we let them. Men will eat themselves to death, drink themselves to death, and look at wrongful things until their minds can’t focus on anything else.

Jackrabbit wants to know if hands also want to take charge, because sometimes he can’t help but whack someone. Professor’s question is more philosophical: “But if your belly and eyes are you, why do you say that you’re not in charge?”

Your belly, your eyes, your hands are parts of you, I say. But they’re not all of you. You have a heart, and a mind, and a soul. When one part of you tries to rule over the others, it leads you into bad places.

“Like not getting my goals done,” Jackrabbit says sadly.

Think of today like you’re going into battle, I tell him. This gets his attention.

Your eyes have been running the show at school, I say. Today, see how much of the time you can make them look at what you need to focus on, instead of what they want to focus on.

“But what if I can’t?”

You won’t win the whole day, I say. But see how much you can win. Even if you just stay in charge of your eyes for five minutes, that’s five minutes you won. And tomorrow you can try for six.

“Do your eyes ever try to be in charge, Papa?” Professor asks.

Sigh. Yes, child.

You will battle the rest of your lives, I tell them, to keep charge of your bodies. Every part of them is made to do good things, but it’s up to you to make sure they do those good things.

In the school parking lot I pull their heads close to mine and pray that they’ll win their battles today. Off they bounce and stumble into their little school. Off to fight their battles, as I go to fight mine.

That afternoon, Jackrabbit finds me at my desk. His face is beaming. “Papa,” he says, “I finished all my goals. I won.”

Amen, child. Amen and amen and amen.

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Fence-Keeping

When I’m gone more than a couple of days, the youngest human being in the house tries to take charge. He’s seven years old—younger by minutes than even his twin. Call him Jackrabbit.

Brief digression: A few years back I started writing a book about parenthood, faith, the best way to plant potatoes, and the like. I gave my kids codenames to afford them a bit of anonymity. The names I chose were whimsical and, in retrospect, perhaps a bit silly. The thing is, much of that manuscript is in longhand, which makes changing the codenames a challenge. As several partially finished manuscripts and a shed full of non-functioning machinery can attest, any work that lands on my list must bide its time. And two sets of codenames for my kids would just be, well, weird.

So, Jackrabbit. The little alpha bear. Where his twin brother (Professor) is cerebral and calm, Jackrabbit is a man of action. The actions he takes, in my absence, are things he sees me doing when I’m home. He climbs onto the kitchen counter and stretches the sink hose to our Berkey filter when it needs refilling. He sits in my chair and tries to do my New Yorker crosswords. He tells his mother how things are going to be around here.

Ali Dark, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

(I don’t know where he gets that from; being a man who doesn’t want to wake up dead some morning, I am not in the habit of bossing Jackrabbit’s mother around.)

I read somewhere that children stay closer to their teachers when their schoolyards don’t have fences. Put in a fence, and the kids roam farther. Perhaps paradoxically, boundaries make children feel safe to explore. That seems to be physically true, and perhaps metaphorically as well. We’ve all met kids whose parents don’t set boundaries—for their children or themselves. Sometimes the kids are withdrawn. Other times they act out, as if to provoke a bit of fence-building. Because if your parents aren’t in charge, how can they protect you from what’s out there?

In my absence, Jackrabbit has concluded that fence maintenance falls to him. My return often evokes a transfer-of-authority crisis. Fortunately, these crises are easily remedied with living-room wrestling. Professor will join in, usually with a leap-from-the-turnbuckle sneak attack (said turnbuckle being a couch or chair or any other elevated space that gives him a clear shot at his old man’s back). We roll about the floor, growling, until the proper order of dominance is re-established.

I don’t know what will happen when I can no longer take them—as a pair or even individually—in a fair fight. Fight unfairly, I guess. But one day it’ll be them keeping fences—same as for your children. I hope we’re teaching them how.

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In the hours

This website has been on quite the hiatus, but I want to share with you what came from this father’s heart in the darkened hours after the news broke in Uvalde, Texas that a boy murdered 19 elementary school children and two teachers. I think it has become too easy to put such a tragedy behind us. To click the next link, watch the next show, listen to the next song. There’s something to be said for broken-heartedness, especially for fathers. To sit with those who grieve, if only in spirit, and weep with them.

Imagine all of us, the whole earth, grieving together, if only for a few hours. How fitting that would be, given the mess we’ve made here.

Here’s the opening to a short meditation I wrote on the children of Uvalde:

In the hours after Salvador kills you, all the earth falls silent. The birds nestle their young and quiet them, our dogs tuck their tails and hide beneath furniture, the winds collapse to the ground. Waves cease their rumbling. Currents sink into the depths. All the seas become as an open and sightless eye.

In our cities, people lose interest in their shopping. Drivers park their buses, conductors step down from their trains. We parents leave our factories and fields and white-walled offices. We come home to sit in our den chairs and ponder our trembling hands. We do not turn on the television news.

The good people at Slant Books were kind enough to post the meditation, if you’d like to read the rest. No matter what you do, hug your children today. Pray for the parents who cannot.

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Eating an elephant

There’s a scene in Conspiracy Theory when Mel Gibson’s paranoid character, realizing bad guys are breaking into his apartment, triggers a string of self-destruction mechanisms while he and Julia Roberts make their getaway. Embedded fuses burn along the walls, flash-bangs go off in succession, and the whole place blows apart, piece by piece.

Sometimes I feel like that apartment. Overloaded and on the brink. One more intrusion, and I just might blow. I don’t suppose that’s an unusual feeling for fathers, for parents, for people. It’s probably not unusual, but I don’t think we’re supposed to feel this way.

Recently I took my youngest children fishing. If this sounds relaxing, envision four year-old twins holding rods with very real hooks at the end of a very real dock. I instinctively went into manage-the-burdens mode, moving back and forth between them, baiting their hooks, helping them cast, making sure they locked their lines, and repeatedly pulling them back from the edge.

I began to feel like I needed someone to pull me back from the edge. Fishing is supposed to be fun, but there I stood with clenched jaw, laboring through another task on my never-ending list. I could feel my patience slipping as they yanked at their lines, swung their hooks too close to my head, and general behaved like, well, four year-olds fishing.

That’s when one of them said, apropos of nothing as he eyed his bobber: “Papa, do you know how to eat an elephant?”

“No,” I said. “How do you eat an elephant?”

“Bite by bite.” His brother nodded in agreement.

I’m not very good at eating elephants, and most days I don’t feel very good at fathering, but I’m learning that you don’t have to be heroic to accomplish big things. You just have to show up every day, and do what work you can with contentment and humility. Parenting often feels like trying to eat an elephant, but the good news is that you only have to do it one bite at a time.

I can only do so much. You can only do so much. The mercy and the grace of it is that all we can do is all our children need.

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A father’s love

Just when I think political pundits can’t sink any lower, they excavate a fresh sub-basement beneath the Twitter hellscape. The post below, twisting as it does an imperfect father’s gesture of love for his tormented son into something perverse, turned my stomach:

You know the jokes: Biden the Groper. Creepy Uncle Joe. Personal destruction is, unfortunately, all of apiece in today’s political landscape, where a civil debate over differing principles is as antiquated as the horse-and-buggy. But this, my God. How did we come to this?

Many of you know I lean conservative in my politics. I’m not a Republican, but I do remember laughing out loud at Joe Biden’s comical attempt to appear like a legal scholar during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. The point is, I have no interest in defending him or any other politician.

What I do want to defend, however, is fatherly affection. We have embraced such a deep level of cynicism in this culture that our instinct is to assume a demonstrably affectionate man harbors sexual motivations. When I mentioned to a gathering of my sons’ teen friends that I was preparing a talk on Mister Rogers, one of them asked, without a shred of irony: “Wasn’t he a child molester?”

This is what we’ve taught our children: that there is nothing pure left in this world. That the love of men is inherently suspect. That men don’t kiss men unless they want to have sex with them. We’ve turned stranger danger into a blanket indictment not only of affection, but of fatherhood.

And it’s a goddamned lie. You don’t have to like the man in that picture, or emulate his politics or his business dealings or anything else. But do emulate his unabashed love for his son, because it’s too rare. Hug your children. Kiss them. Especially your sons. God knows we need more love in this world, not less.

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Fathering in the ugly season

“Democracy,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

I’m pondering Mencken’s quip as we head into what will be an ugly political season in America, bringing what is perhaps a fitting close to one of the ugliest years any of us can remember. Of course our ancestors faced far worse; 430,000 WWI casualties and at least as many dead from Spanish flu over a two-year span led some to believe the 20th century’s first decade might well be its last. We’ve become conditioned, I suppose, to believe that plagues and wars and rumors of wars are a thing of the past, thanks to our superior science and diplomacy.

If nothing else, this year has illuminated what many of us have felt in our bones for some time, which is that the experts whose claim to our fealty has been the unprecedented peace and prosperity of modern times may not be as competent as we wanted to believe.

Norman Rockwell, “Freedom from Fear”

Like many of you, I worry about what the decisions of our fallible elites will mean for my children. As my teens were preparing for online schooling, I saw a popular educator un-self-consciously tweet his concerns about nosy parents listening in on his classes. “What does this do,” he fretted, “to our equity/inclusion work?” He went on to say that he’s always counted on the separation from parents to afford him room to work with kids in a “what happens here stays here” context. Thousands of people with the words teacher or educator in their Twitter bios expressed approval.

My oldest son, meanwhile, is a United States Marine. I watch uneasily as various hawks in think tanks pound the drum for military adventure in China, Russia, and elsewhere. I wonder how many of them have sons and daughters who will be expended for whatever new theory about vital American interests requires boots on distant soil.

And my youngest, meanwhile, still have so far to go. What will schools look like, for them? Will they completely forget what church was like, back when they could wander about unmasked, being picked up by one adoring adult or another, the liturgy infusing their little hearts? Will they be forced to take a vaccine? Will they grow up with war being more than a rumor, and local industry a distant memory?

I used to have confidence the people above us will step into the gap when the hard times come. That’s how our history books read. War begins, depression strikes, and a strong, noble—albeit imperfect—leader comes forward to guide the way. I’m not so sure anymore. You read the news. You see how the people who’ve set themselves up as our leaders and would-be leaders behave.

I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, and what strikes me is how from the very beginning, politics were ugly. Republicans accused George Washington of being a closet monarchist, or at best a doddering old man getting duped into allowing the Brits to retake America. Federalists accused Jefferson of being a bloodthirsty radical plotting to erect guillotines rise over the streets of Philadelphia. Monroe, entrusted with papers revealing Hamilton’s adultery, handed them over to a journalist after Hamilton threatened to expose Jefferson’s dalliances with his slaves.

My point is: Though we’ve taken peace and prosperity for granted, maybe we should marvel at the fact that our species has managed to get along for as many years as we have.

Which brings me to my real and final point, which is that I believe we fathers have a vital role that is being put to the test now more than ever. Our communities will hold together not because of some great man or woman in Washington, D.C., but because of the decency we cultivate in our sons and daughters. Our communities will come apart to the extent we let them become like the people we see shouting at us from our cable news programs.

The people who will save what we love, in other words, aren’t running for office this fall. They’re looking at us across the breakfast table. Which means we—you and I—have a part to play that’s just as important, in the futures of thousands we’ll never meet, as any Founding Father. So keep doing the work of intentionally fathering. It matters. You’ll never win a medal for it, or a chapter in a history book, and that’s okay. Let the people at the top have all the glory. The rest of us have work to do.

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The death grip

Yesterday we piled onto a motorboat to cruise around the inlet near my father’s home. The more anxious of our three year-old twins clung to his mother, while the daredevil twin instructed his grandfather—who hadn’t even started the outboard motor yet—to go fast.

I am temperamentally more aligned with the anxious toddler, so I kept a tight grip on them both as we boarded. Even though the boat was anchored and floating in three feet of water, you just never know what might happen.

Photo credit: Isaac Woodlief

On board, my wife and I put the twins on our laps. The anxious one made sure his mother had a strong grip with both arms. The daredevil strained to get away from me so he could sit at the very front of the boat. He shouted at his grandfather to rev it up.

The truth is I hate boat rides with my children. I always have. If you dig into the Woodlief family archives, you’ll find a video shot on this same inlet 15 years ago. I’m on a jet ski with my now 20 year-old perched between my knees. We’re doing about half a mile an hour and getting passed by seagulls. Because, well, you just never know.

When we got to the waterway, my father picked up speed. I gritted my teeth and estimated how long we would have to be out. The sun was low in the sky and shimmering on the water, the weather was perfect, and all I could think about was turning around. My wife pointed at a gunship circling above. She wondered aloud to the twins whether their oldest brother the Marine might be on board.

“Ow,” my daredevil complained. “It hurts.” I realized I was clenching him so hard the buckles of my life vest were leaving indentions in his back. I tried to relax. I thought about my Marine at five years-old, putting along with me on that jet ski, absorbing all my tension.

My daredevil, his spirit deflating, turned and asked his grandfather to slow down. His anxious brother echoed the sentiment. We weren’t really going that fast.

It occurred to me that delighting in my children—in life, really—isn’t so much for my sake as for theirs. I want my children to embrace their lives, but they learn how to hold on from me, don’t they?

I eased my daredevil onto the boat floor, so that he stood between my knees. I pointed out a pelican gliding low over the water. I loosened my death grip. Soon he and his brother were pointing at birds, at the sun, at funny-shaped clouds. They asked an interminable string of questions. They laughed—even the anxious one—when we bounced over another boat’s wake.

I couldn’t bring myself to laugh, and I breathed easier when the boat turned and headed for home. But I’d loosened my death grip. Because who wants to hold on to death? In many ways that’s what I’ve done for 21 years, since the night I held my daughter and listened to the last breath rattle out of her throat.

I suppose while we fathers have to be on guard for the worst, we needn’t expect it, even after we’ve endured it. What’s the point of living if your eyes are always on the grave? Better to grip life, I think, even if I’m not always sure how. It’s been pried from my hands before, and I know one day it will be again. But not this day, and probably not tomorrow.

You know what my daughter said to me, the day the doctors filed into her hospital room to tell us she was going to die? She was three years old, the same age as these brothers who don’t know her. “God,” she said, as if delivering a personal message, “says do not worry about tomorrow.”

Kids, man. There’s so much we can learn from them, if we’ll only listen.

Photo credit: Tracy Dixon

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The other side

Surveying the increasing tendency of people to assume the worst of one another when arguing over politics, or religion, or pretty much anything else, I’m convicted that we fathers have to do our part to break this cycle of societal self-destruction.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s investment partner, once said: “I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.” Likewise, Willmoore Kendall, a largely forgotten political philosopher, used to say that one should strive to understand one’s interlocutor as he understands himself.

Both admonitions reflect a sentiment that responsible citizenship—be it in one’s country, neighborhood, or family—requires empathy. An effort to see the world as my neighbor sees it. Not necessarily to agree with him, or to compromise my principles, but to understand him. Even if this never leads me to change my mind, it inclines me to see through his eyes, which in turn humanizes him in mine. It’s harder to hate your neighbor when you understand why he sees the world the way he does.

Photo credit: Jelleke Vanooteghem

One of my sons is in conflict with someone right now, and he occasionally comes to me with complaints about how that person is being unreasonable and unfair. When he does this, I always ask him the same thing: “Tell me how she would explain her point of view.”

He hates this, and I understand why, because I’ve been there myself. It’s so much easier—and at some level more pleasurable—to write someone off as irrational, or stupid, or just plain evil. Read any thread on politics and you’ll find 99% of the comments about opponents fit one or more of those buckets. Heck, it’s probably more like 99.999%.

What if most of the people who disagree with us aren’t evil, stupid, or crazy? What if they just see the world differently? And what could the world be if our children spread that small grace—the grace that lets people disagree without becoming devils in each other’s eyes?

I don’t know, but shouldn’t we try to find out while there’s still time?