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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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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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Creators vs consumers

I’ve been convicted repeatedly this week how deeply the desire for significant work is wired into our children. A few weeks back, inspired by a whole lot of scrap wood, I built a dual workbench for my youngest children. I did this because they’re always underfoot whenever I want to use my workbench.

Happy craftsmen at their new workbench

They loved it for a few days. But eventually they realized their workbenches aren’t where they action is. Papa’s workbench is where wood gets cut and screws get driven.

Because their birthdays were upon us, we also got them miniature versions of their favorite tool: my Husqvarna chainsaw. These toys likewise took their attention for a few days, until they realized their saws were never going to cut anything, nor would their little weed eater do anything other than give the weeds a massage.

“This tree isn’t coming down, Papa.”

“Use your chainsaw, Papa,” they tell me, even though I was so sloppy with the last tree I took down that it yanked my chainsaw out of my hand when it fell, driving it blade-first into the dirt. I had to get one of my older sons to help me jack up the end of the tree and use a wedge and hatchet to free it. I felt literally unmanned. My kids of all ages thought it was a hoot.

I read an essay recently that’s stuck with me, in which the writer drew a distinction between the model of man our economists like to use, and the model of humanity most of us recognize as more genuine. The economists’ man is a lazy being who wants more and more stuff, at a lower and lower price, for as little work as possible. Maybe that describes too many of our teenagers, but it doesn’t describe our little ones, does it?

No, they come to us ready to work. They’re so primed for work that they won’t be sidetracked by phoniness. No little work benches and plastic chainsaws for them. No baby dolls and kitchen sets. They want to drive real nails, feed real babies, make real bread.

The benefit of teaching your child how to use an ax is that then you don’t have to use the ax.

Which means so much more work for you and I, doesn’t it? And why does that discourage us? Ironically, because we’re so intent on getting real work done. It took me literally five times longer than normal to build two 8 x 4 garden boxes last month, because I had toddlers helping me saw the boards, paint them with linseed oil, stack and dry them, then cart them to the garden, level and square them, screw them together, fill them in. Anyone who’s ever supervised a three year-old driving a 3-inch deck screw understands how limited can be the patience of man.

But they are our work of creation, aren’t they? More than gardens or cleaning, home repairs or day jobs. And what a cruel trick we let the world play, when we pacify them with trinkets and distractions, all so we can get “real work” done. And then, when they’re 17, we marvel at how lazy teenagers are, as if we had no hand in that.

One of the habits we focus on during every Intentional Fathering cycle is bringing our children alongside us. Engaging them in our work. It’s so important, and the good news is that it yields fruit no matter what their ages. Our children—even our oldest ones—want work that matters. (It’s why so many of them hate school, but that’s a separate discussion.)

Our hearts rightly go out to adults who find themselves without work, or who get stuck in jobs with no visible connection to the creation of meaningful value in the world. That instinct for mercy is right. Let’s extend it to our children. Engage them in the work of our lives while there’s still time.

Fathers, this is our work: showing our children how to be creators, not just consumers.

Little brothers want to do what big brothers do.

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In praise of the irritating child

Since this week we’re focusing on the habit of proper praise, I’m thinking about my stubborn teenagers. Each of them in his own way has managed to get under my skin over the years, and I haven’t handled it well. I’ve come to realize this is because I’ve harbored the notion that I’m entitled to a disturbance-free life.

You can see how children might undermine one’s desire for calm. Far too late into fatherhood, I realized how often I get irritated at my kids for being, well, kids. Worse, as I’ve learned about the habit of praise, I’ve come to realize how often I got (and still get) irritated at them for manifesting traits which are good.

My irrepressibly active son now thankfully takes out his aggression on people other than me.

Qualities like honesty, persistence, and intensity can be challenging when they begin to bud. Thank God they’re hard to squash, though I wonder how many children this world manages to mangle permanently, what with our widespread desire for easy parenting, the prevalence of mind-numbing entertainment, and schools geared for somnolent obedience over the cultivation of virtue and action.

Since I’m also learning that the path to world reform begins with yourself, what all this big talk means in practice is that I’ve had to work on catching myself when irritation sets in, and asking whether the irritating thing my child is doing comes at least in part from a good place.

I’m realizing, further, that I should ask this about anyone’s actions, especially my own. Too much of my behavior-management has been superficial, aimed at the leaves rather than the roots.

My persistent bike-rider has graduated to even more nerve-rattling feats of daring.

My 15 year-old, for example, has an uncanny ability to sniff out hypocrisy. Once, when I complained about a jerky driver in front of us, he noted three or four jerky things I had recently done as a driver. My first instinct was to slow my truck to a less lethal speed and push him out the window. But the kid was right.

When he was four, my now 18 year-old insisted on riding a bike, repeatedly launching himself down the driveway and crashing. I pleaded with the boy, as his knees slowly turned to hamburger, to just use a bike with training wheels. But no, it was essential to him for some reason to ride a big-boy bike.

My 20 year-old, meanwhile, has always been like a hunting dog with a scent. Once he locks in, there’s no distracting him. No reminding him that there are other things he should be doing. No suggesting that perhaps his obsession with learning how to build a computer, or training like a Navy SEAL, or building a survivalist go-bag is, perhaps, overdoing things a bit. He always seemed to have just two gears: Disinterest and Overdrive.

My hyper-focused one-track son is now a United States Marine.

Not only have they irritated me, these boys have produced a fair share of chaos, epic messes, broken bones, and poor grades in subjects that bore them. I’ve worried whether each of them would survive childhood, and whether I would survive them.

Now I’m seeing how many of those irritating qualities sprang from strengths that are the best parts of them. Thank God they’ve been more persistent in becoming men than this man has been in conforming them to his desire for comfort.

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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.

A nice thing about building a workbench for three year-olds is they don’t know enough to judge your craftsmanship.

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.

He hasn’t yet figured out why his chainsaw isn’t taking this tree down.

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.

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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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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.