Future workers

Something you can’t comprehend until after you’re a parent is all the work involved. I don’t just mean the labors of feeding, changing, washing, and supervising the little turkeys. I’m not even talking about the added work of home repair, which, with sons ranging in age from 20 to 3, I’ve found to be, well, significant.

All that work aside, there’s the added burden of just accomplishing everyday tasks. Unloading the dishes, once you’ve got a toddler interested in “helping,” means pulling out dishes while you quickly scan the racks for something he can “put away” (i.e., shove into a random cabinet for you to hopefully find later) that won’t shatter when he drops it. Painting a door means giving him a little brush and a cup of water for paint and repeatedly steering him away from your open paint can.

It’s easy to adopt a mindset that our little ones are obstacles around whom we must work, rather than workers in training. We’re busy enough as it is, after all. Teaching them how to help with a task makes it take three times as long.

But they’re wired to work, aren’t they? It’s why they get into our toolboxes and climb onto our desk chairs and pretend they’re us. Even the busiest parent has noticed how working alongside us can calm and center a child.

When my oldest son was four, I cut an attic door in our ceiling and nailed in plyboard flooring. He put on his toy tool belt and hard hat, and was so insistent on helping that I finally took him up and put him to “work” hammering and painting. It was a summer day in the South, and the attic was sweltering. But he stayed up there with me for hours, his attitude far better than my own.

When my 15 year-old was three, he would follow me on his tricycle as I drove our riding mower. When it came time to push mow, he’d get out his toy mower and push along behind me. And when I started in with the weed whacker, he’d follow along with a hockey stick. He’d spend every minute of the three hours I was out there in the hot sun, working just as hard as I did. And he loved it.

Now that several of my sons are older, I look back on all the ways I squandered their inclination toward work. I was too busy trying to get my own projects done, forgetting that my most important work is raising them. Even today, when I conjure work for one of them to do alongside me, that cheerful camaraderie returns, and it makes me feel the way I imagine we were crafted to feel about work, before we made it about the dollars we pocket rather than the things we create.

And because in many ways I’ve had a restart as a father, with these unexpected toddler twins, I’m trying to do better.

Our littlest ones celebrated their third birthday last week, and even though the rest of the world is quarantined they don’t know it, because their parents and every brother but our Marine are here, and that pretty much is their world. We had a wrestling tournament in our back yard, and a nail-hammering contest, and limbo (we needed something a three year-old could win), and other feats of daring. And as I watched my older sons take care of their little brothers, I realized there’s another work they lean into with joy, which is the work of fathering. And I certainly can’t claim an ounce of credit for it. It feels like something that happened in spite of me, with all my grumpiness and self-obsession. It feels like something entirely unearned. It feels like grace.