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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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Guard the door

Fear is a thief. I say this as a father whose pockets have been picked many times. I’ve had countless moments of peace snatched from my hands. Hours of sleep pilfered. Excellence replaced with adequacy, because my mind was elsewhere.

Where, exactly? On what could go wrong. An illness, a car accident, a vicious dog on a frayed leash. I am a walking encyclopedia of worst-case scenarios. Go ahead, name something children do every day, and I can tell you a dozen ways they could get hurt, crippled, killed. Where someone else might see a toddler riding his tricycle down the driveway, I see a careless UPS driver behind the wheel of a two-ton truck. A walk on the nature trail? Poisonous snakes. Family cookout? Exploding propane tank.

I was this way before my daughter died from a brain tumor, but that nightmare certainly made it worse. Enduring horror makes you realize the worst things don’t always happen to other people. They happen to you.

But fear, like I said, is a thief. When I invite it to lean over my shoulder and whisper in my ear while I’m working or praying or playing with my children, I invite it to confiscate the small joys that are our only solace in a world of hardship. How foolish, how cruel, to let what has not come to pass steal all that remains untarnished by what did come to pass.

I share this with you because this is a fearful time for many of us. Fear of the coronavirus, of a sagging economy, of what our fellow humans are capable of when they too are afraid. If you need a few dozen other looming troubles to tremble over, I’m the man to see. But right now I’m the man reminding you that there’s good all around you. That the darkness will always and ever have no choice but to retreat in the face of even a little light. That it only wins when we clamp shut our eyes.

So today, and tomorrow, and maybe even the day after that, spend a little time noticing the good. Gratitude has always been the undoing of fear. This world is full of suffering, yes, but it is also filled with goodness. See that. Be a part of that. Don’t let the thief in.

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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.