Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Up
Climbing to 30,000 feet appears to be the only means I have to escape, long enough to write, the earthly concerns that have so occupied me this month. So it would seem appropriate to write about matters less terrestrial than I otherwise might. Plainly put: when awake with both feet on the ground I’ve been overwhelmed, and my mind has no desire now to dwell there when my body doesn’t have to. As Morpheus advised Neo, “Free the mind!”
This is easier said than done. Maybe the conference that LL and I are flying to, a conference on Mind-Body Medicine, will help. But letting go—allowing my thoughts to rise above such matters as upcoming patient visits, our baby’s sleep poop laughter growth and development schedule, or the forest fires consuming eastern Washington, to name but a few items—is as difficult as it is necessary.
When I advise patients to meditate I give them something to focus on: I have them breathe slowly in and out and say the number “one” on every out-breath. So perchance I must give myself a focus. Something not of the earth. Something up.
What is up? Trees, of course, though these are bound to the earth, and immediately I think of Gandalf, Bilbo and the dwarves awaiting treetop rescue by eagle from the goblins lighting fires underneath, and from there I go to the aforementioned fires scouring the arid West in which I live, while pumps siphon off snowmelt to feed neon lights and artificial fountains from Spokane to Phoenix, and then I think that we must be the goblins in this story. This will never do! What is above trees?
Sky. Wind. Clouds. Ahhh…forest-fire smoke. Radio towers interrupting sandpiper migration patterns and jet-fuel trails from unmanned drones marking dubious targets. Higher, higher!
The stratosphere. Ozone depletion and satellite junkyards falling into the Pacific, even as ever more machinery is commissioned by multinational corporations to zero in on the untapped niche market of left-handed preschoolers who don’t yet own iPhones. Higher yet!
The moon…1969 landing, one small step, American flag. No good. Mars. Land Rover. Pluto. Voyager, Carl Sagan, whales singing ad infinitum into the void.
It seems that even leaving the solar system I struggle to be free of the tedium of human preoccupations. Is there anything else out there?
Closing my eyes and breathing for a few minutes in the noisy, crowded airplane, I am transported, not to nirvana, but to a place of focus amidst similar chatter. I am in college again, in the café on the top floor of the Wesleyan Student Center, my nose pressed into texts on Chemistry and Physics. At the other extreme of the scale, I burrow into molecules and atoms and the even smaller bits that make them up.
The parallels to the cosmic are actually striking. For starters, everything we can see or smell or touch is made up of particles that are themselves 99.9% empty space. The more we try to zero in on the actual “stuff”, the less it looks like matter and the more it looks like energy. Predicting the outcome when bits of these energies collide is expressed in matters of probability. The ability of such interactions to coalesce into clusters of existence that taste sweet on our tongues or bounce off our soccer cleats into a goal or grow from a seedling into a sequoia is no less amazing than the ability of clouds of dust and gases to coalesce into a green and blue planet.
Seen from this level, the idea of something as complex as life itself is absolutely, mind-blowingly staggering. And retracing my journey into space in the face of this miracle, humans and our concerns seem no more and no less important than the named types of the smallest subatomic particle, the quark. We can be quite strange, and we can be all charm. We can be top or bottom, or just plain down. And we can be up.
This is easier said than done. Maybe the conference that LL and I are flying to, a conference on Mind-Body Medicine, will help. But letting go—allowing my thoughts to rise above such matters as upcoming patient visits, our baby’s sleep poop laughter growth and development schedule, or the forest fires consuming eastern Washington, to name but a few items—is as difficult as it is necessary.
When I advise patients to meditate I give them something to focus on: I have them breathe slowly in and out and say the number “one” on every out-breath. So perchance I must give myself a focus. Something not of the earth. Something up.
What is up? Trees, of course, though these are bound to the earth, and immediately I think of Gandalf, Bilbo and the dwarves awaiting treetop rescue by eagle from the goblins lighting fires underneath, and from there I go to the aforementioned fires scouring the arid West in which I live, while pumps siphon off snowmelt to feed neon lights and artificial fountains from Spokane to Phoenix, and then I think that we must be the goblins in this story. This will never do! What is above trees?
Sky. Wind. Clouds. Ahhh…forest-fire smoke. Radio towers interrupting sandpiper migration patterns and jet-fuel trails from unmanned drones marking dubious targets. Higher, higher!
The stratosphere. Ozone depletion and satellite junkyards falling into the Pacific, even as ever more machinery is commissioned by multinational corporations to zero in on the untapped niche market of left-handed preschoolers who don’t yet own iPhones. Higher yet!
The moon…1969 landing, one small step, American flag. No good. Mars. Land Rover. Pluto. Voyager, Carl Sagan, whales singing ad infinitum into the void.
It seems that even leaving the solar system I struggle to be free of the tedium of human preoccupations. Is there anything else out there?
Closing my eyes and breathing for a few minutes in the noisy, crowded airplane, I am transported, not to nirvana, but to a place of focus amidst similar chatter. I am in college again, in the café on the top floor of the Wesleyan Student Center, my nose pressed into texts on Chemistry and Physics. At the other extreme of the scale, I burrow into molecules and atoms and the even smaller bits that make them up.
The parallels to the cosmic are actually striking. For starters, everything we can see or smell or touch is made up of particles that are themselves 99.9% empty space. The more we try to zero in on the actual “stuff”, the less it looks like matter and the more it looks like energy. Predicting the outcome when bits of these energies collide is expressed in matters of probability. The ability of such interactions to coalesce into clusters of existence that taste sweet on our tongues or bounce off our soccer cleats into a goal or grow from a seedling into a sequoia is no less amazing than the ability of clouds of dust and gases to coalesce into a green and blue planet.
Seen from this level, the idea of something as complex as life itself is absolutely, mind-blowingly staggering. And retracing my journey into space in the face of this miracle, humans and our concerns seem no more and no less important than the named types of the smallest subatomic particle, the quark. We can be quite strange, and we can be all charm. We can be top or bottom, or just plain down. And we can be up.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Flood, part 2
It is, predictably, 17:32 on the 31st of August, i.e., there are six and a half hours remaining in which to write the monthly blog I set out to write and which I have neglected for the past two months.
Beside me on the bed, cradled in his mother’s arms and sleeping soundly, is the cause for the neglect as well as the inspiration to write further.
Three months ago I described a flood. If we humans are not merely the cause of the flood but the water itself, I asked, how might we direct our energy—our love, to which can be traced our abundance—to include all life on earth? And implicit in this question: might we in so doing construct the lifeboat of our own salvation?
In other words: the human species, through our prolific love, through, one might say, our parousing, has brought itself in a short ten thousand years (the time since the dawn of what Daniel Quinn would call totalitarian agriculture) to the distinct possibility within the next 100 years of an ecological collapse not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs. The extent to which this occurs, and the degree to which humans survive it, will depend in large part to the degree in which we can broaden our perspective. The degree to which we can recognize that our own well-being is inextricably linked with that of other species one earth.
In the last couple of months I’ve given myself the luxury of some non-medical reading. Three seemingly disparate stories stand out in particular as relevant to the above question.
The second story distracted me from the first: while visiting my dad in Oregon, I commandeered LL’s book-club selection, Ender’s Game, and didn’t really put it down until I’d finished. In crisp prose Orson Scott Card tells the story of a civilization so bent on total annihilation of an alien species that it is willing to risk its own end in one final war. What struck me about the novel was not as much the terrible outcome as the degree to which the soldiers—who are children—are inculcated from day one with the sense that they are utterly alone. That, ultimately, they must destroy or be destroyed.
The third story I’m in the middle of reading. It is the tale, in two books which LL’s dad has compelled me to read, of the “death of the Snake and Columbia rivers”. Apart from his urging I might have read these on my own. I used to guide on the Snake River where it still flows wild through Hell’s Canyon. For a while I’ve been aware of the direct link between declining orca populations in the Puget Sound and the dam system on the Snake-Columbia watershed that has reduced salmon populations to 1% of their pre-dam numbers. The blatant disregard for salmon and the Native Americans who depended on them was sad but not surprising. What did shock me was the degree of collusion between government and corporations. We taxpayers pay $870 million a year for dam upkeep and such “unforeseen” but totally predictable costs as dredging, to keep shipping channels open as silt piles up in dam-induced slackwater—while rivers die and the electric prosperity that was supposed to go to all citizens is awarded, by means of preferentially discounted rates, to giant corporations.
The first story I come to last because it was the most immediately relevant: an article in the Atlantic, by Anne-Marie Slaughter (former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department) titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Slaughter highlights the very real differences that still exist between men and women in social and economic worlds. Without in any way trying to downplay these important differences, I thought in many respects her title could have had “Families” in place of “Women”. The article discussed how the higher one went in a career the more difficult it was to maintain a healthy balance with a family life.
Put another way, as it was in a parenting book that asked me to ask myself why my child isn’t sleeping: “Look at your own life first. Are you too busy?”
The common thread in these three readings was for me the unquestioned first priority to self, progress, career. What is lost—somewhat ironically, because it is the fire driving population growth and thus ultimately all economic development—is time for love and family.
In a science-fiction novel a little boy is the pawn for destroying another world, only after which is he allowed to try and understand it. In the very real and ongoing history of the American West, in author Steven Hawley’s words, “dams are performing their usual dirty work: transferring wealth for the profit of far-off interests,” and wiping out entire ecosystems in the process. In a lament for the impossible double task of raising a family while functioning in a patriarchal career, a State Department official comes to understand that the forward progress of nations somehow does not include the health of the families that comprise them.
Were I to end this here, “this” being this particular entry as well as the larger effort of continuing to reflect and write, I would be doing a dis-service to the authors I reference above. For each in their own way puts forth ideas, solutions, seeds of dissent from the status quo. But in the interest of preventing this from becoming an even longer ramble, allow me to grossly over-condense the advise I took away from my reading into a single word which I have failed to apply to this very writing: simplify.
The tired phrase that one “must love oneself in order to love others” rings true. If we hope to expand our flood of love to include not just our immediate selves but our larger human community and the ecosystems we are part of, we must first simplify to the family level and take the time to nurture our children.
Thank goodness that this job is made easier by the fact that LL and I have, as do all new parents, the most beautiful baby in the world.
*see May’s entry, Flood
Beside me on the bed, cradled in his mother’s arms and sleeping soundly, is the cause for the neglect as well as the inspiration to write further.
Three months ago I described a flood. If we humans are not merely the cause of the flood but the water itself, I asked, how might we direct our energy—our love, to which can be traced our abundance—to include all life on earth? And implicit in this question: might we in so doing construct the lifeboat of our own salvation?
In other words: the human species, through our prolific love, through, one might say, our parousing, has brought itself in a short ten thousand years (the time since the dawn of what Daniel Quinn would call totalitarian agriculture) to the distinct possibility within the next 100 years of an ecological collapse not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs. The extent to which this occurs, and the degree to which humans survive it, will depend in large part to the degree in which we can broaden our perspective. The degree to which we can recognize that our own well-being is inextricably linked with that of other species one earth.
In the last couple of months I’ve given myself the luxury of some non-medical reading. Three seemingly disparate stories stand out in particular as relevant to the above question.
The second story distracted me from the first: while visiting my dad in Oregon, I commandeered LL’s book-club selection, Ender’s Game, and didn’t really put it down until I’d finished. In crisp prose Orson Scott Card tells the story of a civilization so bent on total annihilation of an alien species that it is willing to risk its own end in one final war. What struck me about the novel was not as much the terrible outcome as the degree to which the soldiers—who are children—are inculcated from day one with the sense that they are utterly alone. That, ultimately, they must destroy or be destroyed.
The third story I’m in the middle of reading. It is the tale, in two books which LL’s dad has compelled me to read, of the “death of the Snake and Columbia rivers”. Apart from his urging I might have read these on my own. I used to guide on the Snake River where it still flows wild through Hell’s Canyon. For a while I’ve been aware of the direct link between declining orca populations in the Puget Sound and the dam system on the Snake-Columbia watershed that has reduced salmon populations to 1% of their pre-dam numbers. The blatant disregard for salmon and the Native Americans who depended on them was sad but not surprising. What did shock me was the degree of collusion between government and corporations. We taxpayers pay $870 million a year for dam upkeep and such “unforeseen” but totally predictable costs as dredging, to keep shipping channels open as silt piles up in dam-induced slackwater—while rivers die and the electric prosperity that was supposed to go to all citizens is awarded, by means of preferentially discounted rates, to giant corporations.
The first story I come to last because it was the most immediately relevant: an article in the Atlantic, by Anne-Marie Slaughter (former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department) titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Slaughter highlights the very real differences that still exist between men and women in social and economic worlds. Without in any way trying to downplay these important differences, I thought in many respects her title could have had “Families” in place of “Women”. The article discussed how the higher one went in a career the more difficult it was to maintain a healthy balance with a family life.
Put another way, as it was in a parenting book that asked me to ask myself why my child isn’t sleeping: “Look at your own life first. Are you too busy?”
The common thread in these three readings was for me the unquestioned first priority to self, progress, career. What is lost—somewhat ironically, because it is the fire driving population growth and thus ultimately all economic development—is time for love and family.
In a science-fiction novel a little boy is the pawn for destroying another world, only after which is he allowed to try and understand it. In the very real and ongoing history of the American West, in author Steven Hawley’s words, “dams are performing their usual dirty work: transferring wealth for the profit of far-off interests,” and wiping out entire ecosystems in the process. In a lament for the impossible double task of raising a family while functioning in a patriarchal career, a State Department official comes to understand that the forward progress of nations somehow does not include the health of the families that comprise them.
Were I to end this here, “this” being this particular entry as well as the larger effort of continuing to reflect and write, I would be doing a dis-service to the authors I reference above. For each in their own way puts forth ideas, solutions, seeds of dissent from the status quo. But in the interest of preventing this from becoming an even longer ramble, allow me to grossly over-condense the advise I took away from my reading into a single word which I have failed to apply to this very writing: simplify.
The tired phrase that one “must love oneself in order to love others” rings true. If we hope to expand our flood of love to include not just our immediate selves but our larger human community and the ecosystems we are part of, we must first simplify to the family level and take the time to nurture our children.
Thank goodness that this job is made easier by the fact that LL and I have, as do all new parents, the most beautiful baby in the world.
*see May’s entry, Flood
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Flood
My new favorite expression in English comes, perhaps not surprisingly, from someone to whom English is at least a second language—after Gujarati—and on a good night of the telling, a third or fourth or fifth, behind French, Spanish, and Farsi. This is the same friend who didn’t so much coin, as call into existence for its obvious need, the word “parouse”, to peruse while carousing. One of the many delightful things about Neville is the casual conviction with which he invents language, and it was with nothing less that I first heard him say, “Don’t worry about that. It’s just water over the bridge.”
Like the phrase “heels over head” (for is not one’s head almost always over one’s heels under normal circumstances?), this expression packs much more weight than the original and/or intended statement. Water under the bridge carries with it the reassuring familiarity of the hydrologic cycle: the moment may have passed, but just wait for the river to become the ocean to become the cloud to become the snowflake to become the stream, and it will return again. History is a circle. Have a cookie, and by the time you finish it you’ll feel right as rain.
Water over the bridge implies a linearly rising tide, infrastructure swept away, a calamity, a natural disaster, poodles on rooftops, get out the lifeboats. A flood.
Growing up I heard over and over again that history comes in cycles. Water under the bridge. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Romans, the Anasazi, civilizations rising and falling, the regularity a lullaby. If there was a thread pulling anything forward, it was that of progress. Yes, thousands might die in a tribal conflict, but now we have…the wheel! Yes, millions might die in a world conflagration, but now we have…toaster ovens! morality! iPhones!
Lest you think I thumb my nose at progress: I love my iPhone, aspire to lead a moral life, and am eyeing a toaster oven (less electricity than a conventional, less nukes than a microwave). Neither progress, nor, for that matter, cycles, are bad ideas.
But what gets lost in this representation is the fact that almost everything we as humans have meted out upon the earth—most notably, ourselves—follows the mathematical model of water over the bridge. We and our phones and our ideas and our infrastructure are a flood. We are a natural disaster actively happening.
And by this I do not mean that what we have, that who we are and what we have created and are yet capable of creating, is anything short of wonderful. I simply mean that it is unsustainable. A river rises and falls with the seasons, but a flood by definition rises and rises and keeps on rising. Eventually, on a finite planet with a finite amount of water, it too must fall. My concern is the destruction that a flood leaves in its wake. In the process of converting as much as possible of Earth’s arable land to human food production, we drive other species to extinction. In the process of building the Grand Coulee and Hoover and Three Gorges dams to light our casinos and fill our swimming pools, we condemn salmon runs to oblivion and sanctuaries to wastelands. In devouring our fossil fuels we have already put enough C02 into the air that the ocean, in absorbing it over the next century, will become so acidic that up to 90% of all shell life—including half of the phytoplankton that is the base of the entire marine food chain—will simply dissolve. From the number of new McDonalds in developing countries to the obesity rates that follow to the health care costs of that obesity, from the inequality and abject poverty our unfettered capitalism ensures to the violence that that inequality promotes to the wars we wage in the name of combatting that violence (and, tacitly, to ensure unfettered capitalism), we have removed ourselves temporarily from a cycle of giving back to the earth at a rate equal to that we are taking from it.
Wow. This posting itself has become a flood, a tirade.
Someone recently asked me if I would ever again be able to write about anything other than my new baby. In some ways the answer is that I never have, even from long before he was born. All of the above, this torrent of words, concerns the world that we have created and that our children will inherit.
In wanting to make sense of this world, I also choose to believe that everything that we humans have brought about derives from a parallel flood. This other flood is that of a deep animal desire to take care of each other, to love and protect and provide for our young, our families. Bringing a child into the world is water under the bridge. There is no turning back. There is no return policy. There is nothing but a rising tide, at times overwhelming in the face of the trials of daily living, of love.
We do not invent toaster ovens and dam the rivers to power them out of malice, but out of desire to feed and house ourselves. When we wage war and plunder the earth’s resources, almost always it can be traced back to an urge to provide for our immediate needs, albeit at often-overwhelming cost to other humans, to other life, or to our future selves.
The question then seems to change. From, how can we stem the flood?, to how can we embrace the flood, expand our scope of the flood, to include the entire planet? Can we expand our love for our babies to include all babies, including those born today on the other side of the world, including those born right here 100 years from now?
That seems like a good subject to explore in next month’s blog. This bridge is long since underwater.
Like the phrase “heels over head” (for is not one’s head almost always over one’s heels under normal circumstances?), this expression packs much more weight than the original and/or intended statement. Water under the bridge carries with it the reassuring familiarity of the hydrologic cycle: the moment may have passed, but just wait for the river to become the ocean to become the cloud to become the snowflake to become the stream, and it will return again. History is a circle. Have a cookie, and by the time you finish it you’ll feel right as rain.
Growing up I heard over and over again that history comes in cycles. Water under the bridge. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Romans, the Anasazi, civilizations rising and falling, the regularity a lullaby. If there was a thread pulling anything forward, it was that of progress. Yes, thousands might die in a tribal conflict, but now we have…the wheel! Yes, millions might die in a world conflagration, but now we have…toaster ovens! morality! iPhones!
Lest you think I thumb my nose at progress: I love my iPhone, aspire to lead a moral life, and am eyeing a toaster oven (less electricity than a conventional, less nukes than a microwave). Neither progress, nor, for that matter, cycles, are bad ideas.
But what gets lost in this representation is the fact that almost everything we as humans have meted out upon the earth—most notably, ourselves—follows the mathematical model of water over the bridge. We and our phones and our ideas and our infrastructure are a flood. We are a natural disaster actively happening.
And by this I do not mean that what we have, that who we are and what we have created and are yet capable of creating, is anything short of wonderful. I simply mean that it is unsustainable. A river rises and falls with the seasons, but a flood by definition rises and rises and keeps on rising. Eventually, on a finite planet with a finite amount of water, it too must fall. My concern is the destruction that a flood leaves in its wake. In the process of converting as much as possible of Earth’s arable land to human food production, we drive other species to extinction. In the process of building the Grand Coulee and Hoover and Three Gorges dams to light our casinos and fill our swimming pools, we condemn salmon runs to oblivion and sanctuaries to wastelands. In devouring our fossil fuels we have already put enough C02 into the air that the ocean, in absorbing it over the next century, will become so acidic that up to 90% of all shell life—including half of the phytoplankton that is the base of the entire marine food chain—will simply dissolve. From the number of new McDonalds in developing countries to the obesity rates that follow to the health care costs of that obesity, from the inequality and abject poverty our unfettered capitalism ensures to the violence that that inequality promotes to the wars we wage in the name of combatting that violence (and, tacitly, to ensure unfettered capitalism), we have removed ourselves temporarily from a cycle of giving back to the earth at a rate equal to that we are taking from it.
Wow. This posting itself has become a flood, a tirade.
Someone recently asked me if I would ever again be able to write about anything other than my new baby. In some ways the answer is that I never have, even from long before he was born. All of the above, this torrent of words, concerns the world that we have created and that our children will inherit.
In wanting to make sense of this world, I also choose to believe that everything that we humans have brought about derives from a parallel flood. This other flood is that of a deep animal desire to take care of each other, to love and protect and provide for our young, our families. Bringing a child into the world is water under the bridge. There is no turning back. There is no return policy. There is nothing but a rising tide, at times overwhelming in the face of the trials of daily living, of love.
We do not invent toaster ovens and dam the rivers to power them out of malice, but out of desire to feed and house ourselves. When we wage war and plunder the earth’s resources, almost always it can be traced back to an urge to provide for our immediate needs, albeit at often-overwhelming cost to other humans, to other life, or to our future selves.
The question then seems to change. From, how can we stem the flood?, to how can we embrace the flood, expand our scope of the flood, to include the entire planet? Can we expand our love for our babies to include all babies, including those born today on the other side of the world, including those born right here 100 years from now?
That seems like a good subject to explore in next month’s blog. This bridge is long since underwater.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Infinite Time
On my chest, making occasional squeaks and grunts as he breathes against the Moby wrap holding him in place, is our new baby, our new world.
Shortly before this new world arrived, one of the PA's I work with told me to enjoy the infinite time that I had as a not-yet-parent. I smiled and nodded, as if I knew what he was talking about. I thought I did know. I thought that yes, becoming a parent would be a big, even huge adjustment. But infinite time? I did not have infinite time!
Sorry for the interruption. Be right back. Spit-up, need new burp rag.
The truth was I couldn't imagine being a whole lot busier than I already was. Now, looking back, I appreciate the small moments of time that I did have. Time for things like an evening game of Bananagrams with LL in which we'd make words like "discombobulate" and "scintillating". Time that I had but somehow failed to use to keep up on emails. Time to use the bathroom without--
Sorry, abnormal breathing pattern. Moby adjustment needed. Back in a minute.
Where was I? Oh yes, infinite time. I remember having a conversation about time, a scintillating conversation about time, in my residency training. It was during the taking of one of those Rorschach tests of the pysche, and the woman administering it explained that those of us like myself who were ENFP's tended to view time more loosely, and thus have a greater likelihood to, for example, be late for--
Excuse me. Fussing. Bordering dangerously close to squawking, which is usually followed shortly by squalling, then outright screaming. Intervention: a walking bounce while singing "Do-Re-Mi."
Oops. Good news. Everything is working in the GI and GU departments. Change starts with your underwear; I'll be right back.
So yes, as I was saying, I'm starting to appreciate the time that I had in my former life. Not that I would trade this new life, this new world, for anything. And these things are pretty irreversible anyway. It does make me think, though, about the myriad ways in which I was wasting away all the--
Uh-oh. New pattern. ("The word 'pattern'", as the parenting book a friend lent me, "can only be used if one invokes chaos theory.") He's trying to eat my shoulder.
free time I had before having to wake up at 3am to burp someone. If I think about...
Serious rooting behavior now. This is the kind of thing that even the Creole lullaby that my mom used to sing to me, and which she's now taught me so that I can sing it to our baby, can't soothe.
...if I think about...what was I thinking about?
Now we've progressed to head-banging. Those little neck muscles are so strong!
Ok, I give up. We've managed to hold off the inevitable for a couple hours, at least, giving LL some well-deserved sleep. But now we're into realm in which dads simply have nothing to offer.
Which makes me realize, with an overwhelming wave of gratitude for LL: whatever else I may be doing, I am not breastfeeding for thirty to sixty minutes every two hours. I may have infinitely less time than I had before--but time being the relative thing that it is, I still have an infinite amount.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Parenthood
I am standing on the edge of fatherhood, and to paraphrase my friend Erik, it scares the pants off me.
Don’t misunderstand me. This has been something I’ve looked forward to for as long as I can remember. Literally. Since I was a kid and old enough to form memories, I have wanted to have kids of my own. My brothers and sister and I would turn the garden cart over onto the picnic table in the front lawn of the Olsen house, where we lived before we moved onto the land where my dad was building a house, and we would play Pirate Ship, and I would think, someday I want to have my own kids, and watch them invent worlds in the front lawn.
Now that someday is upon me.
In fact I wanted about a dozen kids. Mind you, I didn’t want to contribute my own genetic material to a dozen kids. Maybe one or at most two given the world’s population growth: two children from two parents is a sustainable number. But I wanted to adopt another ten or so and raise a dozen. I was blessed with good parents and a happy childhood, and at age seven I could imagine nothing more fun or rewarding than being a parent myself, to as many little ones as I could.
It was my older brother who recently reminded me of this childhood dream, I think sometime shortly before or after LL became pregnant.
“How many kids are you guys planning on having?”
“Oh, I think one, or two at the most.”
“Not a dozen?”
“A dozen!?”
“Yeah, when we were little, you used to say that you wanted to adopt a whole bunch of kids. Do you remember that?”
I did, and when we talked about it, I remembered that scene in the front lawn of the Olsen house: waves crashing over the deck, the ship tossing in a South Seas gale, the cargo full of richly plundered loot, and lo! off the port bow, a dark shape looming through the salt spray: a desert island? a sea monster? Ahoy, mates!
It strikes me in these memories of childhood that our parents were so often in the background. They loved and supported and encouraged us in every way to become whoever it was we would turn out to be with very little demands of what that might look like. In retrospect one of the ways they did this was by continuing to be who they were. My mom served for twenty years on the local school board, worked as a home health nurse, and in the same year that I graduated from high school, completed her outreach degree as a Family Nurse Practitioner. My dad worked as an ER doctor 60 miles away in order to put four kids through college, and in his free time built a mortise-and-tenon house from floor to ceiling with essentially his own two hands. And between the two of them they read stories to us every night, put a hot home-cooked meal on the table every morning and every evening (pancakes every Sunday), took us on overnight backpacking trips into the Eagle Cap wilderness and on road trips to Albuquerque to visit Granddad (with plenty of stops to run amok over the red-rock canyons en route), patched up the scraped knees of bike wrecks and the bruised emotions of junior high crushes, and listened and listened and listened to us. Without being overbearing they were always close by, always there.
Now, as I contemplate the birth and raising of a single child—never mind twelve—it scares the pants off of me.
I know that very soon our days and nights will become a joyous and exhausting marathon dictated by our baby’s cycles of crying, feeding and pooping, and I will not have time to be terrified. But at the moment my fears are irrationally focused on the distant future of what our baby will grow up to be, and all the myriad pitfalls that I might step into as that baby’s father. I will want to comfort and caress, instruct and inspire, protect my child from everything the world might throw at it, and ultimately the best I may hope for will be simply to be there.
Perhaps I might take a morsel of comfort in observing that my siblings and I did not grow up to be pirates or pillagers. Turned loose but always able to count on the sturdy mast of our parents’ love, we instead became the opposite: each in our own way striving to bring more healing, joy and understanding into the world.
In this recognition comes a clarity of purpose for today’s writing. Not to somehow pretend that with words I can set a lifetime’s course as a good parent, but to take a moment and give thanks to my own parents.
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