August 14 2023
Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me.
What else is there? What else ever needs to be said. If I am free, then I can say those words over and over, endlessly.
Recently I was a bad father, and both Waits and Murphy called me out on it.
“You’re right, boys. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.”
They hug me. “It’s ok dad. But don’t do that anymore.”
There’s nothing to hide. Nothing to run from. They are the father, and I am the prodigal son, on the ground at their feet. They need to see me in that place and I equally need to be there. How can I say I love you and expect them to believe it if I am unwilling to say I’m sorry with the same intention?
Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me. Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me. Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me. Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me.
August 10 2023
I love when the boys withhold stories from me, when they have secrets, when they keep things as sacred. Those stories are theirs. I knock on the door. The handle turns from the inside, they crack it open, and I peek in. Can I see more? and they decide whether or not to let me in.
Sometimes they swing the door wide open. Sometimes they slam it shut. Maybe I’ll knock again, maybe I’ll scratch at the door like a puppy.
I love you, I love you, I love you. Let me in, let me in, let me in. Tell me everything, everything, everything.
I stick my fingers under the bottom clearance, that gap between the door and the floor. Wiggle the fingers, slide them along the hardwood. I’m here, ready for you.
August 1 2023
My boys will either stay with me, leave me, or reject me. They will do all three at various times, sometimes simultaneously, but ultimately they will choose one of those paths. I can’t speak to the feminine, and the ways I think about a boy staying with/leaving/rejecting his mother are difficult to articulate (and difficult for me to consciously enact) as my mom died when I was a boy. It wasn’t until my late 20s when I started to consider the fact that I still walk those paths as an adult even though she was absent after I was 12 years old.
Oooof that’s something real and heavy right there. Started off sharp didn’t we. Ok let’s take a quick break with a dad joke.
How do you know a joke is a dad joke?
It’s apparent.
Boom. I’m 40.
So my boys have these paths: stay, leave, reject. I have the same for my father. Sometimes I am aware of which path I’m walking, sometimes I am not, especially when I am on the path of staying and clinging. On that path I am 12 again. You know how when you go back to your hometown to visit your parents, and right when you walk through the front door you’re in an instant emotionally a child again? And you don’t realize it until after you’ve left their house driving back towards yours? Or maybe 10 years later?
I know the path I want my boys to plow: they will need to leave me. Not yet, though. Right now they are building up their healthy egos, strengthening their foundations. But, even at 8 years old, I can see it starting to happen with my oldest boy.
We went to the trampoline park, one of those warehouses that is nearly wall-to-wall trampolines and dad injuries, dads like me who think, “I could do a flip when I was 15. Surely I can at 40.” We’re all so dumb.
We’ve gone to these trampoline parks since they were old enough to jump. It’s fun. The boys are getting more adventurous with their jumps and I move in the opposite direction, which means I jump up and down in a stiff motion, sometimes daring to bounce on my butt then back up to my feet. That’s all I’ve got anymore. I can’t afford to miss work because I broke my arm showing off to, let’s face it, other parents.
I noticed on the most recent trip to the trampoline park that Waits, who is 8, went off by himself much more than usual, and he didn’t shout “Dad! Watch this!” nearly as much as I wanted him to. Murphy, who is 5, stayed close to me in general, always checking over his shoulder to see where I was and to see if I was watching his moves.
Waits has entered into a new stage of leaving. He needs me less. It broke my heart and also I am thrilled for him.
I don’t yet know what leaving will look like for them as teenagers or adults, but I do know that part of my father work is to prepare them to leave with the best foundation possible, to develop their wildness while also being their to hold them, make their food, buy their clothes, and constantly say no you can’t have your own phone you dumbdumb child.
Will they reject me? Absolutely, and it will hurt. Will they move close to me and try to stay in the safety of their childhood container? Again, yes. But my hope is that, when it’s time, they will leave well, with all of the blessing I have to give, to become their own men. They can develop only so much under my eye — and so much development will happen under the eyes of others and in the embrace of the earth.
Just not yet. Not yet boys. I’ve still got more time with you and I will soak up every second I can.
Except when they’re assholes. That’s when they can go to their mother’s.
July 31 2023
I sing because I am a man with a song, and I do not fully trust in a man who has no song. I dance to help the sun rise in the morning — that’s a good grandiosity. I weep because I live with the full and vast spectrum of desire, and I weep in front of my boys and with my boys so that they will not forfeit their ability and quickness to weep that they were born with. I will not stand by with cowardice as the world around them tells them to stop weeping. It’s not the earth that says that, but rather it’s the fear of men. I sit in silence so that I am practiced in listening, in waiting, in being slow to everything that requires slowness. I sit in silence in the morning before my boys awake so that when my anger is stirred by them I do not unleash on them what is not theirs to bear. I fill our home with the incense of the earth so that our senses are filled with florals and cedar and tobacco and not drywall and paint and plastic. I admit that I am powerless and I open my hands to let go, to do my best to welcome everything. I show my boys the scars on my body and the scars on my heart, telling them the stories so that they know from birth that there is no success and there is no failure — there is only being and loving and compassion.
May I believe what I say and may my boys believe what they see.
July 30 2023
I know so very little, and I believe from my own experience and from observing the experience of others that peace is not related to career or financial success. I don’t always feel that that’s true, but I believe it somewhere that exists in the roots below feelings.
When I feel disrupted, unhappy, or am treading the waters of a sense of my own failure and incompetency, then my feelings say that some amount of success will be a balm to the disruption. And maybe it would be a balm, like blowing cold air on a burn. Cold air does nothing to address the repeated action of putting my hand in the fire.
I met a guy who had achieved the sort of career success that seems so far from my reach. I have thought if I reached that place then I’d be set.
But my rooted beliefs know that peace does not live there, and I saw it in that man as well. When talking to him he had an air that I recognized in myself at times, that he was unappreciated and undervalued.
I know that feeling. I feel that when my beliefs are thin, exposed, easily wounded. Of course they are, because that’s when I think my value and appreciation comes from outside of myself and away from, as we say in AA, our higher power.
That’s the place I’m writing from today. The roots of feelings are exposed.
Go back to the depths of being, Joshua. You know that rich soil.
July 18 2023
Suffering and wonder — these two paths are what have invoked almost all (possibly all) of the change in my flickering 40 years. Pain and love. Trial and awe.
Neither are necessarily easy, maybe because both require acceptance and letting go.
Loving and being loved are difficult in their incompleteness. I love you, I want to love, and I don’t know how. I’m tapping into this love from a higher power, transferring it from my body to yours, and I’m limited. I’m scared and I’m scarred and my self-protection flares up without my knowing. Let go, little boy! Open your body and heart and soul and love what you can love and let it keep expanding. But what about if and when I get hurt? Uh huh. Yes. Risk is absolutely necessary, and can you trust that you’ll be held?
Suffering, same story. It goes against my nature to sit in the ashes, to allow the pain, to resist trying to fix it because you can’t fix it — we are not in control.
Open your hands, little boy, little girl. Unclench your fists and let the scars in your palms heal from where your fingernails dug in deep. Listen to suffering. Listen to love. Go slowly, walk humbly, be gracious.
July 10 2023
Made a loft for the boy’s room. Next I’ll had some climbing/hanging elements. Those boys will climb any and everything, so I figure I might as well provide them things to climb on.
They are young. What I say means next to nothing. Of course it doesn’t. How I say what I say means everything. Of course it does.
They are in the moment, always. No past, no future – only now. Full of desire, bursting with want, not yet having developed a filter, they say exactly what they want to say. I admire them. I wish I were as tapped in.
I carry out two plates of pancakes. These morning cakes are syrup sponges. I balance two plates in one hand, imitating the servers I’ve seen at restaurants, and two cups of orange juice in the other. I want them to have orange juice and also, by carrying them all at once, I am mitigating the where’s the orange juice? or I want juice too! I am learning to lessen my own suffering. What’s next is having them come get their own food. One thing at a time though — I made a good breakfast and that’s the success of the moment.
They see the plates. Ugggghhhh I don’t want pancakes! You said we could have croissants! You broke a promise!
They are right. I did say they could have croissants, but I forgot to set out the frozen croissants the night before as they need to thaw and rise. I said I was sorry, that I had forgotten to set them out. I say that it’s ok not to want pancakes, and it’s also unkind to say I don’t want that in that particular tone (you know that shitty tone) whenever someone brings you something they’ve made for you.
It’s ok not to want it. It’s not ok to roll eyes and audibly bemoan an act of service. I don’t say it that way. I say it in kid words, with a calm tone, and no accusation.
Sometimes I say it with accusation and frustration. That’s always about me and not about or for them. This time I say it for them, on their behalf, for their future that they don’t need to think about.
I walk away towards the kitchen, turn around at the door, and see them each taking bites of pancakes.
Sometimes it goes well.
If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something, you must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception of the way things are.
The soft overcomes the hard.
The slow overcomes the fast.
Let your workings remain a mystery.
Just show people the results.
Tao Te Ching
Built a roof rack for my Mazda 5. Found a Thule cargo basket for $50 on FB marketplace. Spent maybe $100 on other materials: rubber bottle stoppers to buffer the rack from the roof of the car, threaded rod, unistrut bars and attachments. Measure, cut to size, fab, paint, fasten – not as sleek as a proper roof rack but a good $700 less expensive.
