Loving being dad

So it's one of my daily dadly duties to get my 5-year-old son up and off to the school bus every morning. That means waking both of us up at 7am sharp, which, for a religiously devoted night owl like myself, is simply brutal, particularly if I've been up most of the night writing, or more likely, avoiding writing. Oh, well, caffeine fills in the cracks and gaps where sleep should have gone, like luciously addictive amphetamine-laced brain-spackle. My son, though, doesn't have the benefit of a caffeinated crutch, and it is a very enlightening window into my own soul to watch him struggle with That Most Dreadful Hour (the one after you first awake, assuming it is any time before the sun is high in the sky). Oi. His piteous cries are heartwrenching, and I blearily and with enormous fatherly sympathy pull him out of bed by his feet and lovingly toss him in the general direction of his clothes, sometimes repeatedly, as his doggedly snoozeophilic reptile hindbrain instinctively autoambulates him back into bed and darkness. At this time I must make my sincere apologies to all of my family, friends and loved ones over the years who have ever had to try to motivate me out of bed in the morning.

My son and I have our daily routines, which helps avoid the need for engaging a brain any time before noon. My delightful, but bizarrely, unnaturally perky-in-the-early-morning partner lays out our son's breakfast and clothes before she leaves the house at some ungodly hour where the sun don't shine, so neither my son nor I have to think about anything right off, thank the gods. This is all for the best - I find myself reminding *both* of us most mornings, "no, no, first socks, *then* shoes..." Then I prop him up at the table and start up the kettle for coffee or tea, if a Lovely Housemate has not already done so before heading to work. If Mr. Pokeymeals then finishes his breakfast without excessive delays or falling asleep at his seat, we have a little time to do something together before bundling up and treking up the quarter-mile to the end of our driveway.

And this morning, he either wanted to play Twister (which I wisely nixed, but that's my boy), or Snakes and Ladders, which is what we did. He picked the blue pieces, explaining that "blue was for water, and he felt very dreamy" (no big surprise, he was still at that point mere minutes from sleep if I let him slump over a bit). For me, he allocated the red pieces, because "red is for fire," and I apparently looked like I needed a little. No kidding. We only got a little way into the game before having to stop and go through the Bundling Ritual to gird our loins for the trek through the wilderness. Up at the road while waiting for the bus, I had to explain several times that throwing snowballs at daddy while daddy was finishing his mug of Earl Grey tea, particuarly if that caused lumps of cold snow to fall into the mug and make his nice warm addiction tepid, was a Very Bad Idea Indeed. This of course did no good at all, and I was forced to wearily place said now-tepid mug into a handy snowdrift, which, as it turns out, also had room to hold #1 son. Problem solved, at least for a few more weeks until he's bigger than I am and weighs too much to lift...whereupon I discovered that my earnest attempt at Providing Educational Discipline had merely placed my son in the midst of an abundant supply of Ammunition for Trouble, and the snowball fight resumed in earnest. Ah, how this parenting process enlightens us both. Hmmph.

Okay, it's times like this when I know that if I never do a single other good or useful thing in this world during my life, having and raising this kid is enough.

And lest this slice of life end on such a sentimental note, I just now had to run out to the dining room to clean up the broken glass after housemate's reform-school-girl polydactyl cat ("New And Improved! Cats With Opposable Thumbs!) shattered one of the glasses in which we were sprouting garlic bulbs, apparently because she liked drinking the garlic water from the bottom. I love cats.

Loving being dad, part 2

Later today I'm going to take a break from work, take the tractor out and plow the road in anticipation of more snow (he said hopefully). I told my son yesterday that I'd pick him up from the school bus today in the tractor and we could drive back to the house together, which he adores.

My partner just called from the hospital where she works. She asked if I would make sure our son is belted in for the ride, and to give him an extra-big hug when I pick him up. One of her patients today is a 16-year-old boy who was skiing and hit a patch of ice, slammed into a tree, and suffered a massive head injury. He is physically alive, but she just had to tell the parents there's a good chance he'll never be right again, may never walk or talk or eat or go to the bathroom by himself.

That kind of thing happens in hospitals, of course. Working acute care, you get a skewed view of what life is like, what is likely or normal. At least a couple of times a week my partner has to be there to help someone die, or tell a patient and/or their family that their case is terminal, help them make decisions for themselves or a loved one who can't swallow or eat about whether to have a g-tube permanently inserted to do feedings, along with other invasive painful procedures, or whether it's time to just let go and say goodbye. Hard stuff. The hardest patients are the infants and small children, those who can't begin to understand why they're going through what they are, the pain and fear and confusion. Often the only medical staff who can deal with those cases are those who don't have children of their own -- it just strikes too close to home.

I worked Red Cross disaster relief for a number of years, for the largest jobs like hurricanes, earthquakes and regional floods, and in a similar way I got a somewhat skewed view of what is likely, what is normal. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, bad, sometimes incredibly bad things happen to you, to your neighbors, to your town and maybe to everyone you know. It makes me intensely grateful for the fact that my own life, so far, has really been pretty damn good. Gratitude is appropriate, I find. There is so much to be grateful for.

I've also had a number of very close friends die suddenly and young over the years, along with those who have fallen victim to disease, and the more typical aging process of older friends and relatives. Losing someone suddenly is the worst, I find. It's so very jarring, there's not even a moment to prepare, to say goodbye, to accommodate to the sudden massive hole in your life. Life is very precious, and it is far more fragile than we like to imagine.

All of these things continually remind me of one of the most important lessons I've learned. It's something of a cliche, but it is one of the truest things I know.

I have three things in my life -- I have my memories of the past, I have this precious golden moment right here and right now, and I have hopes and dreams for the future. But all I really have of the future are those hopes and dreams. There is no guarantee that any of them will come to pass, or that I will be here to see them if they do. So I deeply treasure my memories, and I exquisitely treasure this present moment.

And I treasure every person who I can choose to spend those moments with. Because there are no guarantees, except this. Sooner or later, every single one of us, you and I, will die. I don't dread getting older, or complain about it much, because I figure getting older is what happens to you if you're lucky. Being born, aging, dying, it's the price of being embodied, of having this incredibly precious gift of finite space and time in which to live. Every one of us will be left behind by our family and lovers and friends, until that point where we are the ones doing the leaving.

It inspires me not to depths of pathos, but to passionately seek the pure intense spark of ecstasy wherever it may be found, genuinely living and living genuinely, inhabiting with vigor and pure nowness the ever-present moment. To not, as Mary Oliver said, "...end up simply having visited this world." But to "..say all my life I was a bride married to amazement...the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms." To not, as Thoreau put it, come to the end of life and discover only then that you have not truly lived. But to spend as absolutely many of the precious finite moments in this body in this life with people who matter, doing things that matter, living a life that matters.

And that matters. So I will belt in my son into the tractor, I will treasure the big happy grin I suspect he will have on his face, and I will hold him in a big ol' hug for a long time (as long as he will stand it). Because (I hope), I will have that moment with him. And maybe after that, even more moments (I hope). And maybe not. Now is what we have. Now is the time. Do it now.

--Chelidon

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"I like not being dead. Anything beyond that is just icing on the cake. My undead cake of livingness."
--~Jhonen Vasquez