Only a Dad
By Edgar Albert Guest
Only a dad with a tired face,
Coming home from the daily race,
Bringing little of gold or fame
To show how well he has played the game;
But glad in his heart that his own rejoice
To see him come and to hear his voice.
Only a dad with a brood of four,
One of ten million men or more
Plodding along in the daily strife,
Bearing the whips and the scorns of life,
With never a whimper of pain or hate,
For the sake of those who at home await.
Only a dad, neither rich nor proud,
Merely one of the surging crowd,
Toiling, striving from day to day,
Facing whatever may come his way,
Silent whenever the harsh condemn,
And bearing it all for the love of them.
Only a dad but he gives his all,
To smooth the way for his children small,
Doing with courage stern and grim
The deeds that his father did for him.
This is the line that for him I pen:
Only a dad, but the best of men.
Steve shares this article from the BBC about the current trend of blaming simple bad behavior on ADHD.
Quite helpfully, the BBC lists the common symptoms of ADHD:
- Easily distracted
- Restlessness
- Difficulty remaining seated when required
- Difficulty awaiting turn in group situations
- Difficulty following instructions
- Difficulty in playing quietly
- Often shift from one incomplete activity to another
- Often interrupts others
- Often engages in physically dangerous activities without considering the consequences
I’m no doctor, but speaking as a father let me just say that there are easier ways to tell if your child is a boy.
Yesterday my office’s water main burst, which is rather an urgent thing for a man who drinks a large cup of coffee during the drive to work. There were signs taped to each entrance: ‘Due to a water main break, there is no water.’ Just as I remarked to a co-worker, ‘Shouldn’t that sign read, “Office Closed”?’ we received a corporate e-mail stating that very thing. So I worked from home.
I use dual monitors at work, which is very efficient, and very addictive. At my previous job, I installed a second video card and took my mother’s used monitor from Des Moines to St. Louis for this very purpose. Two bulky monitors, bundles of cords, yet twice the desktop. Very geeky. No one understood.
Which is why, yesterday, I lugged that old monitor from our basement to the living room. I had a few hours alone with my laptop before Ian and Kelly returned from their respective schools.
Ian flew through the front door and crawled straight into my lap. He watched for a few moments and took a quick, insightful breath. ‘Hey! The hand—[I use the "Hands 2" Windows mouse scheme]—goes from that screen to this screen! That’s very cool!’
Yes it is, son. Yes it is.
It is the end of an era.
Kelly had teacher conferences last Thursday night, so Ian and I had the place to ourselves. It was the perfect opportunity to revisit a lapsed tradition: the Daddy Bath. Ian started to dance and chant as the water ran: ‘Daddy bath! Daddy bath! Daddy bath!’
Yet after we were in the water, he was quiet. We played for a while, but something was amiss. The toys were lost in a tangled mess of legs and feet. ‘Daddy,’ he said to me—almost apologetically—’you’re big.’
‘Oh. Well, would you like me to get out?’
He ducked his head. ‘Yeah.’ I pouted, because my hands were too slippery with bubbles to pull the dagger from my heart. Ian’s face brightened. ‘That’s okay! You can stay!’
It lasted for five minutes. Six minutes later he said to his toy shark, ‘You’re big.’
‘Ian, do you want me to get out?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s okay. Just remember,’ I jabbed my finger at his nose, ‘I’ve always been this big. It’s you who’s gotten bigger!’
By now you know that Ian has…issues…with water. Some are certainly his parents’ fault: maybe we should’ve gone with baptism by immersion. The rest of it is just the charm of Ian.
That boy is gone; Greg Louganis has taken his place.
In preparation for summer, Kelly registered Ian for swimming lessons. Monday afternoons, half hour, six weeks. I was skeptical. I’ve been swimming with my son, and I couldn’t see how the instructor would be very effective with a thirty-eight-pound barnacle anchored to her neck.
In preparation for the swimming lessons which were in preparation for summer, we asked William Shatner to find us a nice, local hotel with a pool for the weekend. He had connections with the airport Hilton; at least it was local. Actually, apart from the unfinished construction and peeling paint, the pool was nice. The pool area was surrounded by glass walls, and to compensate the Hilton had raised the temperature of the pool to the temperature of the whirlpool—which had been drained.
Sometime between now and the end of last summer, Ian had become fairly comfortable with the shallow end of the pool. He would stay by the steps, and occasionally touch his feet to the bottom whenever I would touch his feet to the bottom. He would even monkey-crawl along the edge of pools, including the deep end, which made no sense to me. He knew he couldn’t swim, he knew the water was deep, and he knew he was clumsy.
He wouldn’t put his face under water. Not his nose, not his mouth, and only reluctantly his chin.
I wish I could describe the wondrous moment of transition of my son into a fish, but there wasn’t one. He entered the water, slipped on his water wings—Spider Man, even though spiders don’t swim—and started swimming. He whimpered a little when we first let him go, but then he was paddling like Steamboat Willie…’s steamboat. He went back. He went forth. We had a race. He won.
Still, I’m a pessimist pragmatist, and so reserved my judgment for the impending lesson.
Please. While other kids were clinging to the locker room door, Ian started swimming laps. The instructor asked her students to start jumping up and down in the water, and he didn’t stop until the lesson was over. He paddled, he kicked, he blew bubbles.
He put his head under water! This child—who berates me each time he gets water in his eyes in the bathtub—put his entire shoulders, neck, and head under water. When the teacher asked the kids to try and put their chins in the water, Ian blew out his cheeks and made like a U-boat.
Gah-wah?!
But I don’t ask questions. My only concern (because I need to have one) is that Ian may now be a little too over-confident. When the class was told to hold hands and make a circle, he drifted to port and started paddling toward the lap-pool.
More jellyfish than barnacle.
If you don’t pay attention to your child, there are plenty of others who will. Which isn’t so comforting.
‘As she turned away, so did you. … You disappeared between rows of sweatshirts, and strolled to the back of the store. I couldn’t see you, and you couldn’t see me. You left me, a complete stranger, alone with your daughter. There were no other shoppers, no cashiers, no clerks, no janitors.’
Late at Night in Bed
By Gregory Djanikian
My wife tells me she hears a beetle
Scurrying across the kitchen floor.
She says our daughter is dreaming
Too loudly, just listen, her eyelids
Are fluttering like butterflies.
What about the thunder, I say,
What about the dispatches from the police car
Parked outside, or me rolling over like a whale?
She tells me there’s a leaf falling
And grazing the downstairs window,
Or it could be glass cutters, diamonds,
Thieves working their hands toward the latch.
She tells me our son is breathing too quickly,
Is it pneumonia, is it the furnace
Suddenly pumping monoxides through the house?
So when my wife says sleep, she means
A closing of the eyes, a tuning
Of the ears to ultra frequencies.
(It is what always happens
When there are children, the bed
Becoming at night a listening post,
Each little ting forewarning disaster.)
Downstairs there is the sound
Of something brushing against something else
And I try to listen as my wife might listen,
Insects, I say, dust on a table top,
Maybe a knife’s edge against the palm.
But she tells me it’s only
The African violet on the windowsill
Putting out another flower,
And falls luxuriously into a dream
Of being awake and vigilant.
So the house grows noisier,
There are clicks in the woodwork,
There are drips, raps, clunks, things
To make sense of, make benign.
My son and daughter are sleeping calmly,
And the stairs, yes, are creaking,
The wind, I think, or maybe two men,
Where’s the beaker of acid,
The bowling ball, the war hoop
I learned in second grade?
So this is what it’s like when there’s
No one left but you to love and defend.
Outside there are cats in a fight
And they remind me too much of babies crying.
Then the bottle thrown against the stoop,
The sound of something delicate shattered.
My wife stirs, Be glad, she says,
Sound doesn’t carry far, that you don’t hear
The whole of it, cries in the night,
Children in other cities, hurts, silences.
And she’s right, I can’t hear the whole of it,
Or else I hear too much and it’s noise
Or I make it noise because it’s too much.
So I begin homing in on something
Around me, something distinct, my wife’s
Breathing, a window’s rattle. Outside,
Grass is lengthening in the dark,
And sap running up the phloem of the maple,
(Do I hear it? And how the stars must be wheeling!)
And in the far room, my children’s
Hearts are keeping time, for them, for us
Who have begun to listen in earnest.
‘There’s a fire in the distance and then a big fire. And then there’s going to be a big tornado in the distance.’
Ian, Age 3*
[*Not, in fact, Nostrodamus.]
The children are restless.
This has been a cold winter. For St. Louis. Not that we don’t know cold, but our winters are usually tempered by sunshine, warm breezes, and walks through the park. This year, we’ve been trapped. Since Christmas. In my house we’ve been huddled around a space-heater and cradling bowls of soup. Ian doesn’t like soup.
A brick home built in 1922 may seem charming, but only in the summer.
Yesterday the weatherman said sixty degrees; we reached sixty-one. Wednesday night is church night, which means choir for me, children’s choir for Kelly, and catechism for Ian. And for dozens upon dozens of other babies, toddlers, tikes, and teenagers.
At quarter-to-eight, when classes ended and rehearsals stopped, the children escaped. They ran, coats held in parents’ arms, across the church sidewalks and lawn, up stairs and down stairs and up stairs, around trees and walls. Their voices ran ahead, bounced off neighborhood homes and cars, the echoes telling them, not where to go, but that they could go anywhere.
Ian dashed in front of us, ten…fifteen…twenty feet away. He fell on his face, and then ran farther.
