I don’t wish Jared Fogle any specific harm. He seems like a nice guy, and I can’t fault him for beating the low-fat corpse of Subway’s dead horse for as long as he can. It’s also not his fault that he and I have the same first name and similar visage, and that when people meet me for the first time they usually say, ‘Hey, like the Subway guy!’
Learning that Britney Spears and I share the same birthday was disturbing. Recently discovering that Jared Fogle is exactly one day older than me was freaky, and has pushed me that much closer to joining the legions of rabid Jared Fogle Sucks mercenaries.
Yet despite his wealth, power, and horde of foot-long-bearing super-models, there’s no way that Jared Fogle’s 30th birthday was better than mine.
I won’t go into the details of how the wool was pulled over my eyes, except to say that my wife is very clever and I am not. Somehow my wife was able to wrangle a surprise party at the (real) greatest place on earth, complete with pizza, cake, and nearly forty members of my family and friends.
I felt stupid, embarrassed, and dearly loved. If I was speechless, it was because I nearly cried, and wouldn’t have been able to stop.
And as I wandered in a daze, blushing and hugging, my circuit through the crowd was punctuated with small arms around my legs and flashes of sandy-blonde hair. ‘Happy birthday, Daddy!’ Again and again. ‘Happy birthday, Daddy!’
A twenty-something friend asked me how it felt to be thirty. I replied quickly, confidently: ‘Settled.’ Like Saturday mornings in bed, when I won’t move because I can’t, my body at last in that position, arm here, leg there, covers warm, sleeping but not. The instant before Ian opens our bedroom door, or the instant after, when he crawls beside me. Comfortable, secure, correctly placed.
Blessed.
Ten years ago I acknowledged my birthday in solitude, with a new clock radio and extra-large pizza. Ten years later I celebrated with siblings, dads, moms, babies, toddlers, friends, an aunt, an uncle, a niece, co-workers, co-workers’ spouses, a sweet-natured son, a loving and lovely wife, several pulled muscles, and pizza.
It’s quiet here, lately. Partly because I’m busy, mostly because my fatherhood is being spent elsewhere.
This site is a bit of a luxury, as reflection is. Time to ponder and mull and digest, after the fact. But what if the fact is during, now? A long time coming? The freedom to ponder requires resolution, and everything is loose ends at the moment.
Fatherhood lives in the moment. It’s instinctive and reactionary. Spur of the cuff from the hip. No time to think, just do. Diaper, change. Cry, feed. Fall, kiss. Tree, climb. Naughty, step.
Problem, fix. And now.
This site lies between the now, and those gaps can be pretty small. Until this now is then, I’m missing things.
We had a fun Labor Day weekend, but Ian got the short end of the stick. The details are pertinent but irrelevant to the weight of my worry and drooping eyes. I hugged him, and apologized that we…I…didn’t give him much attention during the trip. And he hugged back, fiercely, a hug that looked me in the eyes and he said, ‘That’s okay, Daddy. I’m not mad at you.’
And this boy, who asks your name, who doesn’t push, who waits his turn and then some, who pulls me cheek-to-cheek because the song says so, who says ‘I love you’ to every-friggin’-one and means it, who calls me his best friend, who calls marbles ‘narbles’, whose feelings are bruised but won’t say so is hurting. And I want it to stop.
And as I recognized Bumblebee, mirrorball dangling from his review mirror, and, later, in the midst of his frenzied skirmish with Barricade, I thought*:
It’s a shame Ian’s only four years old.
* …and then said, to my friend, Rich. But adding that bit would’ve thrown my cadence. These are the sacrifices that must be made for brilliantgood adequate writing.
What do you do when you cancel satellite TV after realizing you’re paying $55 per month to watch Dirty Jobs and Scrubs? You build a sandcastle with your son.
(You also spend the weekend trying to install a rooftop antenna. Does anyone know when Mars aligns with Pluto Neptune? PBS is a little fuzzy.)
We watched Supernanny last night, which, for parents, is a bit like C.O.P.S.. As Kathleen Madigan says, ‘At least I’m not a drug-dealer in curlers running down the street at four a.m.’
Last night’s episode featured a stay-at-home mother of three—soon to be four—whose children were slowly tenderizing her with their fists. A large problem, of course, was the father. He would come home, say ‘hello’, and run upstairs to ‘change clothes’ for forty-five minutes.
Kelly and I have one quite well-behaved three-year-old boy. If I were ever to disappear for forty-five minutes after coming home, I’d hope that I’d have the sense never to come down again.
But—and I’m not excusing this father’s behavior—there’s something women need to know about their husbands: we know can be stupid. We know we can be lazy and selfish and uncommunicative. However, we don’t always know when we’re being stupid. We’re too busy being stupid.
Though it was painfully obvious to the rest of us that this man was walking on very thin ice, he himself had no idea. His wife had never said anything to him.
When he was a boy, a former boss of mine worked at a butcher shop. One day a customer returned, complaining that his chicken tasted strange. My boss told the customer that he, too, had noticed the odd taste the day before. When my boss brought the problem to his manager, the man simply stared at his employee. Then he raised his arms and shouted, ‘Dumb!’
Dear wives and mothers, if your spouse is being stupid, please don’t assume he’s doing it on purpose. Have mercy on your husband and yourself, and tell him.
I don’t write Total Depravity to make money. Which is a good thing, ’cause I don’t. I’ll never see the $11 I’ve earned through my brief experiment with Google AdSense, because it’s not worth their time to print the check. The purpose of this site is, and will remain, as a way for me to chronicle my fatherhood and Ian’s most embarrassing moments. And to streamline his therapy.
Blogging ‘networks’ are a fairly recent development (kinda), and 451 Press is one of them. A blog network is a collection of blogs on a range of topics, organized and maintained by a centralized group. Strength in numbers, and all that.
I started writing for 451 Press earlier this month. All About Fatherhood is my-their blog, and basically I’m doing what I do here…only there. Its content is less personal, and more about fatherhood in general.
What does this mean for Total Depravity? Absolutely nothing. You probably never would’ve noticed anything if I hadn’t mentioned it. I’m hoping that All About Fatherhood will help me focus Total Depravity more on Ian, less on everything else. We’ll see how it goes.
This is the first and only time I’ll mention All About Fatherhood, though I may place a link in Total Depravity’s advertising section. I also won’t post anything here that’s posted there*, and vice versa.
So, please stop by, and say hello! It’s a little lonely out there.
* Okay, so I cross-posted Prayers for Canon. But since when is more prayer a bad thing?
The folkloric changeling is a creature that is left in exchange for a human child. As the name implies, a changeling alters its appearance to resemble the stolen child; the parents are—ideally—none the wiser.
It’s cheerful stuff.
I’m reading The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue. The story is told by each child: he who is lost, and he who is left behind. The father suspects.
‘A feathery mist rose from the lawn and he stood, his back to me, in the middle of the wet grass, calling out my name as he faced a stand of firs. A dark trail of footsteps led into the woods ten feet in front of him. He was stuck to the spot, as if he had startled a wild animal that fled away in fear. But I saw no creature. By the time I drew near, the dimenuendo of a few raspy calls of “Henry” lingered in the air. Then he fell to his knees, bent his head to the ground, and quietly wept.’
The story is a ‘modern fairy tale’. Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, praises the book as being ‘unsentimental’, which means the characters have sex.
The father commits suicide four blocks from his not-son’s college dorm.
Which is my beef with contemporary fiction. I haven’t finished the book, but I’m fairly certain that the suffering of this man will serve no purpose other than itself. His death will, finally, become a character’s memory and regret, and will further nothing except the sense that life is pain.
This seems to be the mantra of modern fiction: life is pain. In the guise of realism, contemporary fiction is steeped in alcoholism, infidelity, and abuse. Morality is a shattered remnant of itself. Which is, of course, all true. Is there anyone reading this whose life is unscathed, and who doesn’t see the world as broken? Pain is nothing new. Ask Job.
But the realism of contemporary fiction is unrealistic. For the rest of us, suffering has its point. I think people criticize sentimentality because they see it as ignoring the murkier pools of life. I disagree. Sentimentality accepts pain, and moves on.
What’s this to do with fatherhood? I’ve no idea. I only know that I was moved by this father’s pain. There’s a fair amount of pain in fatherhood; much of it self-inflicted. Ian isn’t a changeling—who would choose me as a father?—but there’s a distance between us, between all parents and their children. Between the Father and His children.
And a purpose of that pain is the joy, the hope, of reconciliation.
Before Ian was born, I once went to a video arcade called GameWorks. In a fit of madness undying love, Kelly encouraged me to splurge on a game that took only five-dollar bills. It was a hot-air balloon race. Players were strapped into seats attached to rails, in front of a giant screen. By means of synergistic hydraulics and gears, I shared the fate of my balloon, rising and plummeting at the whims of my opponents.
Hot-air balloons as weapons, a monument to boyhood.
I sat next to an eight-year-old boy, whose mother (like Kelly) had made it quite clear that she wasn’t going to play. We launched and became best friends, popping each other’s balloons and balancing the thrill of falling with the desire to win. We taunted each other, we yelled. We laughed. He won.
I love my son. Love is the driving force of fatherhood. But, when Ian was born, I won’t pretend that this moment didn’t feature prominently in my mind. Love’s neat, and everything, but, at our most basic level, boys just want someone to play with.
Not that Kelly and I don’t have fun. She likes Star Trek: The Next Generation and Settlers of Catan. She’ll even play Jeopardy on my old, grimy NES. But she’s simply unwilling to wallow in the pathetic and sordid depths in which boys thrive, becoming too involved, taking things too far, and ignoring the little voice that says maybe a little sunshine and social interaction wouldn’t be the worst idea.
She couldn’t care less about the original theatrical release of Star Wars on DVD.
Last year, she found Ian on the living room floor, trying to play Super Mario Bros. 3. Last month, Ian snuggled next to me on the couch and asked if we could watch ‘the space bus’ (i.e. TNG). Right now, Ian’s favorite story is Fixed by Camel, which was my favorite Sweet Pickles book. (Neither Kelly nor I noticed until the other day that it’s Camel who springs the trap, and the doorbell Kangaroo pushes doesn’t actually do anything.)
Am I trying to raise a best friend, or smaller version of myself? (Pause for collective shudder.) In the end, I think I simply like seeing Ian enjoy the things I show him. I like sharing my world with him, and I like it even better when he gets it.
If that means hitting a renn faire or two, so be it.
Most shows on Noggin or Sprout strongly resemble that ‘morning person’ we all love to hate. Overly cheerful, much too loud, and vapid. These are shows which cause my lip to curl and shoulders to hunch. Shows like Dora the Explorer and its inbred cousin, Go, Diego, Go!. Need I mention Max and Ruby?
Ian is not allowed to watch these shows in our presence.
There are shows I don’t mind, and sometimes quite enjoy, like Thomas the Tank Engine, Bob the Builder, or Pingu. And then there’s Kipper.
Kipper is a series of British children books, and also a show on Sprout. It features Kipper (a dog) and his friends Tiger (a schnauzer), Pig (a pig), Arnold (Pig’s bestrollered cousin), and Jake (a sheepdog). The episodes are very short and to the point, as Kipper and his friends simply play and laugh, with only minor misunderstandings to add a little conflict.
I don’t know if it’s the world of rounded corners or the soft British accents, but Kipper is entrancing. It’s like a hot bubble bath or warm cup of tea. Like slipping between newly-washed sheets or those foot massage chairs in amusement parks. It’s…soothing.
Last night Ian was taking his bath, and we’d left Kipper playing in the background. I walked into the den, to lay out Ian’s pajamas, and saw Kipper from the corner of my eye. The pajamas fell from my hands, and I stood there, trapped. Kipper had been painting, and the red spots on his face made Tiger think that he was sick. It wasn’t exactly hilarity which ensued, but rather a slow smile of gentle delight.
I suspect a large part of Kipper’s appeal is its simplicity. Kipper and his friends are much like Ian when he pretends to be an adult. They have a toddler’s-eye view of responsibility, when all you need is a sandwich, some friends, and to play by the rules.
I suppose my liking the show isn’t so strange, after all.
I’m not quite sure why parents write letters to their children. You’re illiterate. If you weren’t, you still wouldn’t know what ‘illiterate’ means. Or ‘quite’. I’m fairly confident in your grasp of ‘why’.
Yet I’m compelled to write something, say something, about your third birthday. I like odd numbers; three is my favorite. Schoolhouse Rocky says it’s a magic number…No, not witchcraft. It’s a metaphor. Like a similie, except…look, we’ve been through this. Don’t start quoting Bible passages at me!
I like three because it implies order and balance; unless you’re talking about a three-year-old boy. There’s a point, a focus, from which everything hangs.
The obvious and most important example, of course, is the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I hesitate to say ‘ghost’, because by now you’ve seen an episode or two of Scooby-Doo. God can do better than an unfitted sheet with eye-holes. And he doesn’t run an amusement park.
This particular number is the most important in your life. If you forget ignore everything I teach you, and even if you’re skeptical, please remember this. The love, happiness, and acceptance you’re looking for will always be found in God, and in Christ. It will be complete and constant, and all else will disappoint. Listen to your father.
The more tangible three is our family: me, your mother, and you. Your mother loves you fiercely, and will protect and help you in whatever way she can. She doesn’t brook stupidity or back-talk, in that order, and will make sure you know when you’ve crossed a line. It helps if you make her laugh.
I’m your biggest fan. I will be disproportionately proud of everything you do, and make sure the world is kept abreast of every step you take. I will intentionally embarrass you in public, and in front of your friends. But you’ll never doubt that I love you, even if you’re not sure that I like you. It helps if you make me laugh.
Your mother and I will both love you, no matter what. If you’re happy, and living your life for the glory of God, then we’ll be happy, too.
Certain people, who may or may not be named Grandpa Gilbert, would like you to have a sibling or five. For now, it’s just you. You were born three years ago; the experience was quite surprising, despite the fact that your birth was induced. (That means you were evicted. Your mother is a harsh landlord.) One minute I was eating a pastrami-on-rye in the hospital cafeteria, the next you were screaming in my face.
Since then, you’ve taught me so much that I don’t think I can ever repay the favor. Because of you, I now have a better understanding of family, of God, of priorities and perspectives. We have a lot of fun.
Your other three is actually six: three grandfathers, three grandmothers. Your grandmothers will give you hugs, chocolate milk, and stern looks. Your grandfathers will do anything you want, and teach you to throw a baseball. Your mother and I are who we are because of who they are. Listen to them and call them once a month. Remind me to call them.
You also have two Aunts and one Uncle. (No, I didn’t forget Uncle Corey, but he’s an in-law, and throws off my threes.) These are the people who will tell you when to ignore me, and who will provide you with cousins, who are always best at convincing you to do things you shouldn’t.
Finally, you have three cats. They’re cats.
Like I said, three is a fairly important number in your life. Remember your threes, and remember how much love is in that number. Happy Birthday, Ian!
