Entries in Life

Had I known it was this much fun, I would've started sooner.

I was barely out of college when Ginger arrived. Well, "barely" is stretching it a bit. I graduated in '95 and Ginger was born in '97. dvfmama and I had been married for just over a year. Talk about scared! I was working at a university, not earning a lot of money, and living across the street from a drug dealer in a vine-covered shotgun house.

Stubbornly, I wanted to stay in the neighborhood, but, of course, dvfmama wouldn't stand for that. So, we moved across the river.

I was still scared, but now life was coming at me fast. I changed jobs and we had a second, and, later, a third child. The third one was "easy". I'd become accustomed to the demands my children put on my time. Of course, I couldn't do everything I wanted to do, but now I had a great excuse: I had three kids.

And, I began to enjoy them.

As they grew out of the "lay there, scream, and look cute" stage, I began to enjoy and even value the time I spent with them. The rewards are sometimes subtle, but they are there.

For example, I gave my oldest daughter a very rudimentary understanding of multiplication. This past summer, she was learning addition and i tried some things like "what do you get when you had two tens? How about three sevens?" Now, a few months later, she surprises me by telling me different multiplication facts. In school, they're still learning addition. It's great fun to see that she has a real interest in learning — and that she isn't getting worn out by repetative multiplication tables.

Its things like this that make me believe this story:

He had everything, I thought. He was the father of three children, and he was happily married. When he turned sixty, I asked him what he would do differently in his life if he could do it again. What would he become or have? His response overwhelmed me, since it had little to do with wealth or fame. He said, "I would have had more children, even if we had to adopt them. My children have been my greatest joy and fulfillment in life."

Nowadays, more and more people are choosing to be "child-free" and more power to them. Still, I can't help but think, like this father who thinks back over fatherhood, that my children "made my mistakes moot."

This goes back to what I wrote about New Orleans: children are the celebration of humanity. They are an admission of imperfection. They are a hope for something better, but an acceptance that life is not totally in our control.

Conventional wisdom says that men feel more imprisioned by their kids than liberated by the experience of fatherhood, but I'm beginning to find fellow fathers who don't just want to be around their children — they fight for them. Not all men feel this way, of course. Not all fathers have taken a chance to get to know their kids.

But, those that have love their children dearly. Not only that, but I would venture to say that, of the fathers who become involved, they would surprise their pre-child self. I know I would. 10 years ago I had no clue what it meant to be a father. Probably because I was just growing out of being an angry son, I couldn't understand the frustration, joy, amazement and humilty that my own father must have felt.

Children teach us our limits, but that is freedom, not oppression.

+Seraphim's writing evokes a sense a beauty. Often he writes in a sort of prose poetry that helps me mediate on what he is saying. He's been posting some beautiful pictures and poems, but I thought I'd encourage you to go read the link by reposting the following poem that he gave by David Athey.
( Read the poem... )

I just found out that there was an explosion at the toxic waste plant in El Dorado, AR. About 6,000 people were evacuated from their homes.

The church I attended when I lived there didn't have church today. The pastor and a nursery worker were calling people when there was a second big bang. At that point, the pastor said something like "Tha hell with this!" and left. The plant's stacks are visible over the trees from the church.

My grandfather was staying at a nursing home near the plant. When my mother called the nursing home to ask that they get him ready to go, they said "Can't. We've got an emergency here. Come 'n get 'im." My mother said that the place looked like the twilight zone when she arrived. As if they were preparing for or had just been hit by a nuclear blast.

The EPA is now flying planes around the area, taking regular samples.

(Above is summarized from an IM conversation with my mother.)

( Read more... )