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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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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.