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.
