Hero or Goat?

Only time will tell whether my children remember me as a hero or a goat, as I often seem to exemplify characteristics of both. I played both the goat and the hero particularly well for seven year old Henry during the holidays.

On Christmas Eve day we set out on the long delayed mission to hand deliver Christmas cards, the first Amy and I have sent in several years, to local friends whose proximity made addressing and mailing unnecessary (although they would have received them much sooner than December 24 if we had). Of course this would be a bicycling adventure, and a chance for Henry and me to have some good father/son time. It was freezing cold, but he's a good sport and didn't complain as we covered a mile or two in the neighborhood. One addressee, however, was about two miles away, across the big streets and into another neighborhood. I am struggling to find that balance between gently pushing my kids to do things I think are good for them (just about anything that involves being outside), and shoving them so hard that they learn to hate those things, and me likewise. So I wasn't going to force Henry to ride over to Alec's house, but he was up for it despite the chill factor, and that made me very happy.

Of course, it took us forever to get there, not just because Henry's seven year old legs can't pedal as fast as mine, but because I had to stop and chit-chat with two different sets of people we ran into along the way, as well as pull over to take a phone call. For me, life is about stopping to chit-chat, taking phone calls, riding bikes; there's no other way I'd rather spend an afternoon. Being in the world, connecting with folks, soaking up the weather in the world's most indisputably agreeable climate, California. And to have my little buddy along with me, can I have my cake and eat it too?

But on the way back, his foot slipped off the pedal and he scraped the back of his leg a bit. He stopped, cried, sat on the sidewalk. It was a legitimate injury; the boy's not too prone to dramatics of that kind, but I tried not to make a huge deal out of the scrape. This may or may not be correct, but I try to approach my kids' minor injuries with concern and empathy commensurate with the actual damage. Maybe I'm a cold hearted bastard, but it grates on me to see a kid bump his knee, scream bloody murder, weep hysterically, then need to be held for a full hour. I give my kids lots of affection, lots of hugs, kisses, squeezes, but not as a reward for getting a scrape. I think there's a lesson in taking a hit, shaking it off, and moving on. Maybe my testosterone levels are too high, who knows?

I was patient, I waited, I gave a hug, but then it was time to move on. Perhaps I didn't give him as much TLC as he wanted, or maybe he was just getting tired now that we were on about mile five for the day. Regardless, his pace slowed to a crawl. I felt like I could barely keep my bike balanced I was riding so slowly, yet he was persistently twenty to thirty yards behind me, farther back than I'm comfortable with at his age and for the streets in question. Now I don't blame a kid for being slow, but it seems like every time I'd look back he was coasting. Coasting is great when you need to slow down or when you're descending a hill, but when you're crawling at a snail's pace through the city, my feeling is one needs to pedal, not coast.

Here is when that little voice inside me says "You are a complete prick. Your little boy who loves you to pieces is doing his best right now. He got himself scraped up, he had to wait while you stopped to socialize with a bunch of adults along the way, and now you're all pissed that he's riding so slowly. Lay off, Dad!" But I can't help it. It takes all the will power I can muster not to scream "Hurry the hell up! Quit coasting goddamit and pedal!" Actually, I did say these things, but I didn't scream them and I didn't curse. Finally, we roll down what passes for a hill in Sacramento and through a four-way stop that's usually not too crowded. Before the hill Henry had just caught up to me, but I didn't realize he had almost immediately then lagged twenty yards behind again. I cruised through the intersection, looked back, and sure enough, he hadn't even approached it yet. A car went in front of him, Henry waited, then he crossed without any problem. But I was pissed and I let loose. "Listen, you NEED to stay right behind me! I look back there and you're coasting, you're not keeping up! And then a car goes in front of you and I'm on one side of the intersection and you're on the other and that ain't cool!"

And he loses it. Lip quivering, eyes leaking, he starts blubbering. My head is screaming "You're an asshole! You're the worst father who ever lived! Why the hell are you picking on this kid? You're just like your stepfather! Henry's going to hate you, hate bike riding, hate Christmas, hate going outside, and it's all your fault!" Now I'm pissed at myself, I'm feeling bad for Henry, but we finish the final few blocks without incident. God bless that boy, he bounces back from stuff fairly easily when he wants to. I would have shut myself in my room for the rest of the day. We have a hug, I tell him I'm proud of him for riding so many miles, brag on him to Amy and all that good stuff. I still feel like a goat though.

Did I redeem myself by playing hero the next morning, Christmas, when I successfully hacksawed the exploding ink security tag Santa Claus mistakenly left on Henry's new Heelys skate-shoes, the present for which he waited patiently for months, but that the security tag made impossible to try out?

What will be our legacy as fathers to our children? Will they tally up all the times we acted like a jerk, weigh them against the times we came through, and judge accordingly? But how many heroic acts make up for just one time acting the goat? Or how many times are you allowed to get to get away with exhibiting crap parenting and still keep the kid's esteem? Does it really matter what our kids think of us? Is that the goal, to be well regarded? No, certainly not, but it seems like much of who we become depends on where we come from. And I think "where we come from" is not necessarily what it was really like there, but what it felt like there. Soon their lives will be about their friends, which is also "where we come from," but for these short years they are about us, God help them.

I'm ashamed when I think about that boy crying on the side of the street, his dad bitching at him. I'm proud when I remember the look in his eye Christmas morning when his Heely was rescued from the security tag. But maybe the trick is during the other spaces, the rest of the time, when I'm not playing the goat, or even acting very heroically. Maybe just being present in his life, making breakfast, shooing him out the door for school, playing with him, reading to him, making him do his homework and brush his teeth, going shopping, riding bikes, occasionally bitching at him, maybe just being myself is enough. Maybe.

Calling from the Shore

"Fighting Father Dave," the Rev. David B. Smith, is a Parish priest, community worker, pro boxer, author, and father of three working outside of Sydney, Australia. In this column, The Pain of Non Custodial Fatherhood, Father Dave tells contrasting stories of saving his daughter from drowning, and years later sitting by her bedside helplessly as she recovers from a drug overdose. The piece is an intelligent lament on the role non custodial fathers are supposed to play in a child's life, and how this contradicts what we thought fatherhood was supposed to be like.

This is not just my problem. It’s the dilemma of modern fatherhood, particularly acute for non-custodial fathers. We’re supposed to be in the picture, somewhere, but not as fathers, not acting like real men. We’re supposed to be in the background somewhere, on the shoreline, offering helpful advice when it’s asked for, but if we see our children going down, our hands are tied. We can appeal to the mother, to the police, to the school, or to child welfare, but we’re unable to act like men and do anything.

Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot

One of my favorite writers, Pat Conroy, eulogizes his father, Col. Donald Conroy, in this oft-printed piece from 1998. Col. Conroy was the real life "Great Santini" made famous by his son's novel, which was turned then into the Acadamy Award nominated film starring Robert Duvall. Pat Conroy, throughout his career, has attempted to articulate the reconciliation between damaged families and meaningful lives. He has, in my opinion, done so successfully with equal parts humor and heartbreak.

Some of you may have heard that I had some serious reservations about my father's child-rearing practices. When The Great Santini came out, the book roared through my family like a nuclear device. My father hated it; my grandparents hated it; my aunts and uncles hated it; my cousins who adore my father thought I was a psychopath for writing it; and rumor has it that my mother gave it to the judge in her divorce case and said, "It's all there. Everything you need to know."

What changed my father's mind was when Hollywood entered the picture and wanted to make a movie of it. This is when my father said, "What a shame John Wayne is dead. Now there was a man. Only he could've gotten my incredible virility across to the American people."

Grass is Always Greener

Tomas Muniz, a terrific writer and radical out of the East Bay, has a powerful post over at mamazine.com called Dazed and Confused, in which he desparately tries to come to grips with his teenage son's marijuana use.

Lying about it. That was the clincher. I needed serious help. He seemed more comfortable making up extravagant explanations for me than talking to me about his choices, his decisions, his willingness to take the consequences if need be. Instead I got, "No really, I just took this bud from a friend cuz I didn't want him to smoke cuz, you know, drugs are bad." Followed by his sad little smile. Help me!

My Father's Footsteps

Jockomo has a great post over at his blog called Why I Don't Build Boats for a Living, about the complicated period many sons of successful men go through when they realize, for whatever reason, that they don't want to go into the family business.

Throughout the years, though, a certain group of people – almost like an elite underground, or purveyors of a profound open secret – would look at me and say, “You’re not related to the boat builder, are you?” This filled me with a strange mixture of pride and shame. The pride came from the confirmation that I was indeed the son of the great boat builder. The shame came from that fact that while I could see these people were impressed – they were talking to an apple that had fallen very far from the tree. In fact, the branch kind of coiled back, and in slingshot fashion, jettisoned this apple out of the orchard. Of course, I should feel nothing but satisfaction that I am my father’s son, and I should not be ashamed that no one is ever going to look at my son’s driver’s license and say “Keaton - are you the son of the great California State paper pusher?” I also feel a bit regretful that I did not pursue my father’s craft, though I know it would have been a tough tutelage.

Rides of Passage

A post of my own: Godspeed, Rhode Gear, from June, 2006, when I got incredibly sentimental about the pending retirement of the mounted bike seat that had secured the rear ends of all three of my kids in its years of service. The seat is now retired, but I can close my eyes for a split second and feel the bump of tiny kid shoes into my hips, my whole back warm and tingling with awareness of the little body riding back there, smoothly rolling through the city with all that confidence and faith in (gulp!) me!

I just plain didn’t like the idea of my little guy riding way back there behind me, enclosed in his screened bubble, strapped in with a five-point harness and helmet, down at ground level. How much fun is that? No, I wanted him right up there with me where all the action was.

I wanted us to be able to talk as we rode.

PapaKind

Why PapaKind?

Well, I was getting inspired by a few things out there on the web, mainly men talking about relationships with their fathers. It's an interesting thing: a man and his dad, as it also informs his relationships with his own kids, maybe especially his sons. I'm a 37 year old man in Northern California with a decent relationship with my own dad, however I mostly grew up several hundred miles away from him. The man who was much more involved in my upbringing, at least since I was eight years old, was my stepfather, who died in 1994 when he was 52 and I was 24. My relationships with both of these men was complicated, and still today - with two sons and a daughter of my own - I find I spend a fair amount of time thinking about my two fathers: the difficult upbringing with an emotionally unstable stepfather, whose love could be as fierce as his anger depending on the day of the week, or time of the day; and my more even tempered biological father who, despite his love for me, remained a more distant figure - geographically and emotionally - for most of my youth. I love and I'm grateful for my real dad, 68 this year, but I still miss my stepfather tremendously as well. I hope to write more about these two men.

Of course, I have two of my own sons now, and who knows what my legacy to them will be. One, 11 year old Vincent, fittingly, is a stepson to my wife. I became a stepson myself at eight years old when my mom moved us to Los Angeles to live with my new stepfather, 400 miles from my real dad. Vincent's mother and I, however, when we split made a commitment not to make the same mistakes our own sets of parents had made: moving a child far away from the other parent. I have to believe this is a positive thing, in the long run, for Vincent. My other kids, Henry, 7, and Josie, 5, live with my wife Amy and me full time, and like all dads I'm learning as I go.

As I look back on my own childhood and think about how I might avoid the mistakes I felt my own fathers made, I find that not only do I make brand new mistakes, I also make the exact damned mistakes I swore I wouldn't. I'm overly critical, I yell, I use my voice and my size to intimidate, I preach, I drone, I'm distracted. These were all criticisms I leveled at my own fathers, between the two of them. But I also love, I hug, I kiss, I show up at every single game, concert, conference, recital, and I tell them every single day how proud I am of the young people they are turning out to be. Between my two fathers I got a fair amount of this positive stuff as well.

So who knows? Maybe we men give our fathers too much credit in shaping our own lives. Maybe we were going to be who we are, regardless. And maybe so long as we're at least trying, we won't fuck our own sons up too badly; maybe they're just going to be who they are as well.

What interests me is the process. If there are any questions I'd like this site to address, they are: what was it like to be a son to your father when you were a kid? What's it like to be a son to your father now? How is it with your own sons or daughters? What kind of issues did you deal with then, and what kind do you deal with now, in respect to fathering? Are they the same, different, how? Do you accept or reject your father's influence, or if both, how does that conflict affect your own parenting?

So when I come across good writing by fathers or sons that touch on some of these questions, I'll point you toward it. If you have any ideas of your own, or something you've read somewhere, please let me know. May you continue to be inspired.