My Son…

I can’t wait for this kid my wife’s carrying around in her belly to get here. I can see the day in my head. It will be a great day, a joyous day. It will be the day that people finally stop asking me if I’m excited about being a father.

Because here’s the deal people. No. No I’m not. I’m not excited at all. I’m terrified.

This is a child. An actual human being. A messy, complicated, screwed up person. And I’m the one who’s supposed to be there for him? To teach him how to live? To give him the cognitive and spiritual tools he’s going to need to succeed as an adult? I’m the one he’s going to look up to and think, “Some day, I’m going to be like that“?

No. No no no NO NO NO.

Screw. That.

I mean, I get by, okay? I like to think maybe I have a handle on some stuff in my life. But I’m still learning, still growing. There’s so much I don’t know about how to be the kind of man I should be. How am I supposed to help my kid turn out okay, when I haven’t even turned out okay myself yet?

And you know the weirdest thing? When I talk to actual parents about my concerns they’re all, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll figure it out. It just comes naturally.”

Are you KIDDING me? Because I’ve met your kids, and let me tell you something, just because they’re not torturing puppies and making bombs in the basement does not mean they’ve turned out okay. (Actually, strike that last one. Bombs in the basement wouldn’t be so bad. I wanted to build bombs when I was a kid. It shows a certain level of scientific curiosity. Also, I wish I had a basement. Basements are cool.)

I want to raise a son with a work ethic, a son with an inquisitive mind, a son with a kind heart. A son that will one day be a good dad when his turn come around.

So don’t tell me it comes naturally. I’m not the wisest man in the world, but thus far in my life I’ve found that nothing worth having comes naturally.

Lately I’ve been reading the book of Proverbs in my Bible, and while I’m in awe of the wisdom recorded there, for me as a father there’s a tremendous fly in the ointment. Because each new section of the book begins with the phrase “My son…”, and I know who wrote the book of Proverbs, and I know how his son turned out. The wisest man on the earth wrote a book specifically to teach his son how to be the man he should, and that son turned out to be one of the worst kings the nation of Israel had ever seen.

And I’m supposed to do better than that?

So no, with all due respect, I’m not excited. And I’m not going to assume fatherhood will “come naturally”.

I’m planning. I’m reading parenting books, and psychology books. And I’m trying to become the kind of man I would want my son to look up to.

I know there are no certainties in life. I know that at some point he will have to make his own choices whether for right or for wrong. But God help me if I don’t do everything in my power to set him on the right path.

The Trying of Your Faith

Over the few short years of my adult life the single most important thing I have learned is that there are only three ways to get good at something: practice, practice, and practice. Unfortunately, just knowing that you have to work hard to get good at something, doesn’t make the actual process of working and practicing any easier.

Which is why, not more than a few weeks ago I was pulling my hair out with frustration at not being the foster parent I really wanted to be. I was coming unglued inside, wondering if I had made the right decision, trying to figure out what had happened to my formerly tranquil life. In short I was in short supply of patience.

Probably my least favourite verse in the Bible is the one that says, “The trying of your faith worketh patience.” It basically means that if you want to have more patience you have to endure lots of things that make you impatient, which is why when I was coming up my dad always told me, “Son, never pray for patience.” And though there were plenty of things my dad told me that I might not have heeded as much as I should have, that one I followed.

And now I’m sorely in need of patience and I’m getting it the only way you can get patience. Practice, practice, practice.

But the good news is, the trying of your faith does work patience. Or, to put it differently, there’s only so much hair you can pull out before you go completely bald.

Which is why I’m happy to announce…drum roll please…the return of my sanity!

Okay, so maybe that’s just a bit more dramatic than necessary, but it’s true. Things have really been looking up over the last few weeks. My nerves haven’t been as frazzled, my patience has not been wearing as thin, and on the whole me and Ashley and the kids have just been happier.

I think it helps too that we’re all finally figuring out our roles in the household. For instance, I am figuring out that I can tell the kids what to do, and the kids are figuring out that it’s really a good idea to listen and obey.

There are still issues to work on, still things I need to strengthen in my life to become the man and the father I would like to be, but at least now I feel like I’m on the right track.

I still worry whether the things I have tried to teach Thing 1 and Thing 2 will have any real and lasting impact on their lives, but I can say without question that they have had an impact on mine. I feel surer of myself, more confident that I can be the father I need to be to nurture my own child into the person he ought to be when the time comes.

Because, like everything else worth having in life, being a good parent doesn’t come easy; it takes hard work and practice.

And thanks to Thing 1 and Thing 2 trying my faith, I’m that much closer to where I need to be.

To Live Would Be An Awfully Big Adventure

This is it. This is the day I’ve been waiting for.

I feel like I’m an astronaut in a windowless capsule, plummeting down into an alien world. I don’t know what I’ll find when the hatch opens. Will the natives be hostile? Will they want to speak to me at all? What if it takes so long to understand their language that I offend their culture forever with my bumblings.

Okay, let’s back up. A word of explanation is in order I suppose. Where to begin? Ah, I know.

I’ve always wanted to be a father. I mean maybe not always. I’m sure there was a time when I was lying on my back in some cradle somewhere staring up at one of those ridiculous mobiles that I wasn’t thinking, “You know, fatherhood sounds like a pretty good gig.”

But for a majority of my life I’ve had a desire to raise children. Even before I wanted to be married, I wanted to be a father. After all, girls might have been icky, but adoption was still a very real option.

Fast forward a few years, and now I am married. And wouldn’t you know it, I married a woman who wants to be a mother. And I mean really wants to be a mother. She’s dying to take care of kids. So much so in fact that for a while she took a job at a daycare that forced her to work eight hours a day without a break in violation of state labor laws.

But the hitch is, we haven’t been able to have any of our own. We’ve conceived few times, but so far nothing has stuck. Add to that the fact that babies seem to be falling from the sky at the church we attend, and I think you can understand the position we find ourselves in.

But my wife and I aren’t the kind of people to sit around and wait for something to happen. So when she said, “Let’s sign up to be foster parents,” I shrugged and said, “Sure.”

Fast forward through us driving for an hour every week to take a three hour class for eight weeks and us jumping through all the hoops for our home to be certified, and we come to today.

If everything goes according to plan, today is the day we’ll receive our first placements. Plural. Brothers.

Part of me is excited. Part of me is screaming, “What are you thinking!? You don’t know the first thing about these kids. What if they hate you? What if they want to run away? What if you end up making things worse?” Part of me is trying to contact the mothership. That part of me is a little weird.

But I know my heart. I know that the debt I owe to my own father is incalculable. And I’m thinking, maybe, just maybe, I can make that kind of difference in someone else’s life.

I don’t know how long they’ll be with us, what they’ll be like, what their real parents were like…nothing.

I’m about to embark on a grand adventure. It’s a pass or fail test with two real human lives on the line. I’ve prayed for the wisdom to make the right decisions and be a good leader. I’ve prepared the house for their arrival.

Really, the only thing I can do now is hang on and get ready to splash down into a new world. The next message you review will be transmitted from the planet’s surface. Assuming I survive this.

My Dad vs. The Talkative But Paranoid Barber

[The following is a mostly true story. Whatever that means.]

My dad says that the important skill a barber possesses is not his ability to cut hair. The ability to cut hair is important of course, but it comes in a very close second to the ability to talk. Because basically you’re this guy’s prisoner for fifteen minutes, sitting in his weird chair while he does things with sharp objects very close to your head. Hmm. Come to think of it there may be a story in that somewhere.

But this story, like I said before, is true. Or at least as true as a story can be after two retellings and being processed by a writers imagination.

The story goes like this. My dad goes to the barber a couple of weeks ago, this barber, like all good barbers (and good hairdressers too for those of you who might accuse me of sexism) strikes up a conversation.

And somewhere in the conversation it comes out that I am a writer. I would be lying if that part of the story didn’t make me a little proud, to know that my father is willing to talk about his son’s prospective writing career with complete strangers. Anyway so somewhere in there my dad mentions that I’m a writer and the barber says, “Oh is that so? You know, I do some writing myself.”

My dad, a little surprised by this says, “Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes,” says the barber. “Yes indeed.”

“Have you been published anywhere?”

The barber shakes his head. Dad glances up at his reflection in the big mirror that covers the wall of the barber shop and sees that the guy looks just a little nervous.

“What I do,” the barber explains, “is I type out all my stories on the computer. When I’m done for the day I print out what I’ve written and close out the file without saving.”

“I don’t understand,” my dad says. “Why go to all that trouble?”

“That’s the only way I can be sure,” says the barber. “Don’t you see?”

My dad doesn’t see, and he says so.

“They can see that stuff if they want to. They can get right onto you computer and see all your files. This is the only way I can be sure, see?”

My dad, realizing that logic has become something of a rare commodity in this situation does not ask who “they” are or why “they” would be so anxious to read the writings of a small town barber. Instead he asks, “Well do you ever plan to get any of them published?”

The barber shakes his head. “Not me, Albert” (My dad’s name is also Albert. But I’m NOT a junior. Clear as mud?) “I’m putting them all in a safe place. Somewhere where no one will find them until after I’m dead. Then…well we’ll see.”

“I don’t understand. Why not send it off to some publisher somewhere? Who knows? Maybe you’ll get published, get rich.”

The barber shakes his head looking a little sad. “I can’t do that,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” says the barber. “When I was a young man I had my palm read, my fortune told. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but over the years every single one of the predictions that fortune-teller made came true. I met my wife on a train. She conceived within the first year of our marriage. And then my dad died in a car accident three days before my thirty-fifth birthday. All of this she told me, understand?”

My dad says he does, but that he doesn’t know what any of that has to do with the barber’s hidden manuscript.

“Well,” the barber answers, “I’ll tell you. That fortune-teller said one more thing to me. She said, ‘You’ll be a bestselling author. But not until after you’re dead.’ And you know what? I’m not in any great hurry to die.”

[This has been a mostly true story. Had this been a story I made up, there would likely have been some twist at the end where the barber took off his face to reveal a mass of quivering alien flesh underneath, and my dad would have melted him away with that gel stuff barbers keep all their combs in. But this story was true, apart from the things I made up, so none of that stuff happened. You'll have to settle for this.]

The Art of Eating Green Beans

You know what I hate? Canned green beans, that’s what. You know how their all limp and slimy and…ick.  How do you people eat those things? When I was a kid my parents had this policy that you had to finish what was on your plate before you could eat anything else. And one day I decided, screw it, I’m not eatin’ no stinkin’ green beans.

Dad said, “That’s fine. You can have them for breakfast.”

“Great!” I said, and ran off to play with my toys.

But the next morning I got up and there were the green beans sitting on a little plate in the fridge looking like some kind of goo monster that was just waiting for me to eat it so it could tear out my my stomach from the inside.

“There is no way I’m eating that,” I told my mom.

“That’s okay,” dad said. “You can have them for lunch. But you don’t eat anything else until you finish them.”

“Okay,” I said.

Fast forward to FOUR DAYS LATER.

I was hungry. Like really hungry. I had been staring down those green beans for days. I thought dad would eventually relent and let me have something else, but I he was steadfast, immovable.

Mom was cooking hot dogs on that fateful day. She had this little contraption called the Hot Dog Hut and you’d put some water in the bottom and and some hot dogs on this little rack inside, and the water would get hot and steam the hot dogs. Possibly not the greatest culinary achievement ever, but I can tell you I never wanted anything more than I wanted those hot dogs. And I knew what I had to do to get them.

With trembling hands I pulled those green beans out of the fridge. With each faltering step toward the microwave I was sure the green mass on the plate would come to life and devour my fingers with it’s slimy horror, but nothing happened.

I put the plate in the microwave and heated it up. I could smell that hateful stench coming from the microwave, and I prayed for something, anything to intervene so that I wouldn’t have to eat those green beans.

But all that happened was that the microwave dinged. I wanted to turn back, but those hot dogs smelled so good, and was so hungry. So I took out the green beans, Got a fork from the drawer and devoured the whole quivering mass in three huge bites.

And you know what? After all that waiting, after all that dread and horror, after building up the sheer terror of that moment in my mind…it was still totally disgusting.

To this day, I hate green beans. Hate ‘em, hate ‘em HATE ‘EM.

But I will eat them if I have to. Especially if there’s a hot dog in it for me.

Where am I going with this? Well nowhere really. It’s just a story I wanted to tell. I think there’s probably a moral in there somewhere about doing things you don’t like to do, to get to do things you do like to do.

But I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to tell you all how much I appreciate my dad. I know it wasn’t easy for him to stick to his guns on something like that. He didn’t want to see me hungry. A lot of parents would have backed down before then.

But he knew how important it was for me to understand how to do the things I hated. He understood that I was going to have to learn how to conquer my fears. He knew the importance of sticking to his principles and not backing down when his kid pitched a fit.

So this post isn’t really about anything other than him. It’s not father’s day or anything, but he was and is a great dad. He made me into the man I am today, and I’m closer to him now than ever.

I just wanted all of you to know that.

The Writer’s Guide To Catching Fish

When I was younger, my dad used to take me fishing from time to time. I’d get all excited, and we’d pack up the fishing poles and the tackle and head out to the lake. But when we got there it was disappointment city.

We learned to hate the phrase “fifteen minutes ago.” As in, “Fifteen minutes ago six hundred fish just grew legs and started crawling  ashore with the words “Eat Me” printed out in their scales. You just missed it.”

I’m sure we caught some fish in our lives, but it was never anything spectacular. Dad christened himself “the unluckiest fisherman alive” and became resigned to the fate of always being just fifteen minutes behind the excitement.

But looking back on it, I’m not sure he wasn’t making the same mistake I see some writers making. He saw the success of others, and when he couldn’t replicate that success for himself he told himself he just wasn’t as lucky as all those other people. And while it’s true that in fishing (and writing) there is a fair amount of luck involved, we’re often far too eager to place the blame for our failure on luck or fate.

We convince ourselves that other people are just born writers, that they have some mystical quality about them that we don’t have. We tell ourselves, “I could never write like that,” and lo and behold our prediction comes true.

But the truth is that writing is a lot like catching fish. And here’s how we can do better in both areas.

1. Fish Hungry

Whenever me and my dad went fishing we always took some kind of food along with us. We always told ourselves that if we caught a fish we would fry it up and eat it, but just in case we had our baloney sandwiches back in the truck.

And we always ended up eating those baloney sandwiches. We didn’t catch fish because we didn’t have to catch fish.

Writing is the same way. For most of us it’s just a hobby, an amusement. We look up at professional writers and we think, “Now they’ve got something I could never have.”

And in a sense that do have something we don’t have. It’s called desperation.

There is a reason Chuck Wendig is a better writer than I am. It’s because he has to be. His writing is what puts food on his table and ensures that his soon-to-be-born son will be provided for. If he has an off day, he might not get paid.

I’m not suggesting that we should all quite our jobs and become freelancers, but I am saying that as long as we treat our writing like a hobby instead of a job we will continue writing like hobbyists.

2. Fish Often

You know who catches fish? It’s not the guy with best tackle or the best boat. It’s not the guy who reads all the books about fishing and studies the mating habits of speckled trout. The guy who catches the most fish is the one who has his line in the water more than anyone else.

Writing is the same. If you want to be a great writer, you have to write. A lot. If you’re writing hit and miss, sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike, you’ll never make anything of yourself as a writer. Real writers write. As in every day.

Yes, time can be hard to come by. I understand that. Too bad. Do it anyway.

If I sound like I’m being harsh it’s because I’m partly talking to myself here too. I need this advice as much as any of you. Every day I find myself struggling for time, trying to resist the temptation of some amusement or other so that I can focus on my writing. Sometimes I succeed. But often I fail.

But I keep trying. Because I’m not satisfied with where I am as a writer. An neither should you be.

None of us is so good that we couldn’t get better.

***

Addendum: For those of you who requested that I write the “man pukes up finger he doesn’t remember eating” story from yesterday’s post, your voices have been heard! I’ve got the first bit of it done, and I hope to finish it and post it sometime later in the week. So keep your eyes peeled. (Actually you don’t have to keep them peeled. I eat them with the skin on all the time and so far, no adverse affects.)