Tag: Sons

  • What It’s Like To Be a Stay-at-Home-Dad? (“Mommy Has Questions” Podcast Interview)

    Here is the episode of the podcast Mommy Has Questions that I was interviewed on. It was a fun conversation about stay at home parenting, male roles in the family, and the couple of other things. I had great time, enjoyed the discussion, and the whole Mommy Has Questions team made me feel comfortable and right at home. So thank you for having me.

    Please, give it a listen – follow, subscribe, leave a comment. You know the drill.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Everything is Green, Son of a Clothes Horse, and Sick Kid on the Couch

    ODDS and ENDS: Everything is Green, Son of a Clothes Horse, and Sick Kid on the Couch

    (Who said that!? Not Me!)

    …And I hope you enjoy the weird AI image that was created for this post…

    Came out this morning to do the Alt Side Parking Dance, and discovered that our little car was covered in green. The wife had parked under a tree, and now there is a fuzzy haze of pollen all over the vehicle. Besides the fact that my allergies started weeping in despair as I felt my nose simultaneously running and clogging up, I also wondered how much pollen could this car collect? Could my car have so much pollen on it that if I drove around the City, even out in the country, it would act as a pollinator? I know the bees are dying off, but if push came to shove, couldn’t we just drive are cars around to, in a very basic rockbottom way, pollenate the world? Just an idea, cause there is a crap ton of tree pollen on my car.

    First of all, let me start by saying this very loaded statement; I love my wife very much. And as such, we tease each other often, as is our want. There are many things she makes fun of me over, but one of the most recurrent jokes of her’s is to call me a “clothes horse.” Going on twenty years, she’s called me this. Until I had met my wife, I had never heard this term before. A clothes horse is a folding frame used inside someone’s house to hang laundry on while it dries, or a fashionable person who thinks too much about their clothes. (I bet you can guess which definition my wife uses for me.) Most specifically, she will uses this term towards me on days when I have a sitting around the home outfit, a running errands in the neighborhood outfit, and then a third running around town outfit. Not that I do this all the time, but it does happen; I have been known to wear three different outfits in one day. So, I was home visiting my dad the other week, and I witnessed my father doing the same thing; over the course of the day, he had three different outfits he would put on. I had never noticed that, nor thought about it, as that’s just who my father is. Now, I clearly see the depths of the influence this man has had on my life, for I am the Son of a Clothes Horse.

    The kid was sick the other night. Like very sick, and throwing up. She was weak, and needed to be comforted, which I was more than happy to do. As she gets older, the opportunity for a snuggle starts to decrease, you know. But I noticed something as we were on the couch at 2am, hoping that she would be able to keep crackers down; That when she’s sick and on the couch in the daytime, I watch whatever she wants to watch – But at night, I make the kid watch what I want to watch. Nothing inappropriate, but it’s my choice. So, the other night, at 2am, I made my kid watch the MST3k episode “Cave Dwellers.” It’s one of my favorites, and to be honest, I wasn’t too concerned with what the kid thought, as she was nauseous and going in and out of sleep. The next morning, she was feeling better, still a little under the weather, but better. And to my surprise, she was making Cave Dweller jokes – like, “I fell on my eight sided dice,” “Gotta a Minute!” and “The tapes not queued up!” I couldn’t have be prouder to be her father!

  • Still Dealing with It (Unedited)

    (This isn’t a review on The Pitt, though I might do one at a later date. Anyway, I just wanted to state that at the start.)

    When my daughter was born, I discovered that all of my emotions were right at the surface. It didn’t take much to make me cry; my baby girl holding my finger, or falling asleep on me would cause a gush of joyous tears out of me. But I also began to notice that commercials that had to do with parents and kids would make a big softy outta me. I even cried watching a Simpsons when Marge sang a lullaby to Bart. I wouldn’t call this state sensitive, nor thin skinned, but it was a state where I felt that it was very easy to tap into what I was feeling. Maybe everything didn’t make me cry, but I was able to feel everything. I learned to control it, but “control” isn’t the right word – I learned to work with it, might be a better description.

    The only other time I felt that way was when my mother was in the hospital, and the fear of her death made me and my whole family exist without much of an emotional filter. When the doctor confirmed that she was, in fact, going to die and there was nothing that could be done to save her, what littler filter we had dissipated. One moment we would be normal and having a conversation, and then something would snap, and we would just explode in tears – just loud painful sobs. Then it would pass, only soon at any moment we would again break in sobs, tears of grief. After she passed, we all dealt with her death in our own ways; each person’s mourning was their own. We were there for each other, but we all took different paths in dealing with it.

    For me, I just tried to plow ahead. I had a kid to take care of and a family to provide for. I was left feeling sad all the time for about two years. Not so many tears after that first year, but on special days, holidays, birthdays; the sadness would return, but anger started showing up for me as well. I have been trying to work through my anger and sadness. I through myself into art, creative outlets, and putting a few additional pictures of my mother up around the home. It’s been almost seven years, and talking about her doesn’t hurt anymore, which I know is a sign of progress.

    But there are a few areas that I know I have been avoiding, or not processing well. One of the oddest manifestations of my avoidance is that I pretty much won’t watch medical shows. Anything with doctors or hospitals, I will come up with a reason not to watch it. I won’t even watch reruns of M*A*S*H or ER. And I know 100% why, and it’s because I don’t want to relive any of those feelings of watching my mother slowly die in a hospital bed.

    But I am a huge ER fan, and curiosity got the better of me and I started watching The Pitt, and sure as shit there is a story line about an elderly father not wanting to be intubated to stay alive, and his adult children over rule his wishes. The show didn’t shy away from showing the pain and discomfort the father was in, as well as showing the confusion, guilt, shame, and fear of having to make end of life decision for your parents.

    The situation in the show was not exactly like the one me and my family went through with my mother, but it was painfully close enough. And as I watched the story unfold, the vice in my head kept telling me to shut it off, it was late, go to bed, you have an early morning, reliving your pain won’t help… But I pushed though it. I let myself go back there. Feel it again; the fear and pain, and numbness and rawness and confusion – sometimes not knowing how I was going to survive this. How was I going to keep living without my mother? How was I going to live with this loss, this pain, all of this that will never go away?

    I sat on my couch at 1am and just cried for a while. I don’t even know if the show was that good, but I know I let something out that I haven’t been acknowledging existed in the first place. I have been dodging that final week of my mother’s life. That week where she was in a hospice bed with a morphine drip, and it was my mother but it wasn’t. She wasn’t there, and we just listened to her breathing with everything and nothing passing through my head. I sat there watching her dying, and we all spoke to her, but she was never going to respond back to us. I just wanted my mom to touch my hand and tell me that she loved me, but that moment had passed. All I could do was watch and wait, and it was so painful.

    I am still processing, and a dear friend did say to me that we never stop processing losing a parent; it just becomes a part of who we are. I think they’re right, and I love them for their honesty with me. I still have places and emotions I need to work through. Recesses that refuse to come into the light of day. I know where they are, and what they are. Just not always ready to deal with them yet.

    I will.

    In time.

  • Decorations

    As it is Christmas time, again, we are in the process of decorating the apartment for the season. Unfortunately, when I say “we” that doesn’t include me. Not that I am excluded, as the wife and kid give me plenty of opportunities to decorate. But since the kid’s birth, I have found my drive to put up a tree, and lights, wreaths and garland, declining year after year.

    Now, to clarify, I am excited about Christmas time. I love shopping, and the baking of cookies and cakes, seeing friends, going out to look at the lights in the City, and all the holiday events that are around here. I enjoy taking part in the kid’s excitement for the season, and we have a great number of traditions we take part in leading up to the big day. I like Christmas!

    I just don’t have a desire to decorate for it.

    It feels like a bit of a chore.

    In a weird way, because all my life’s a circle, I think I am coming around to a better understanding of why my father behaved the way he did during the holidays. He wasn’t a grinch or grumpy at all. No, he just got all the boxes down from the attic the weekend after Thanksgiving, and sat on the couch watching sports, sometimes drinking a beer. If he was asked to help out – put something up high as my mother was rather short, or give an opinion if a decoration was level – he would, of course, do it, but he would return back to the couch. When my mother announced that everything was hung, my dad would get up and put the empty boxes back up in the attic, without complaint.

    And my father is a big kid during Christmas. He likes getting up early to see everyone’s reaction to the “surprise” present that appeared under the tree. He always played with me and my brothers Christmas morning, and same went with the grandkids. He was, and is, a joy to be around.

    Just don’t ask him to put decorations up.

    I guess same goes for me.

  • Short Story Review: “Autobahn” by Hugo Hamilton

    (The short story “Autobahn” by Hugo Hamilton appeared in the September 23rd, 2024 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Christoph Niemann

    Funny how a situation, a moment that you are experiencing, can unlock a memory that even sometimes has nothing to do with what you are doing. Walking into my kid’s school the other day, I started to remember being at my grandmother’s house, and how it would smell when she was making apple dumplings. Interesting, how moments in our lives can be keys to the past. Hugo Hamilton’s “Autobahn” plays around with that idea, but in a more dramatic fashion.

    Here’s a super simple description of the story: The narrator, an Irish hitchhiker in Germany, is questioned at gun point by a police officer along the Autobahn, and while being held there, the narrator begins to remember his father.

    This is a very short story, and though it isn’t a flash piece, it had that quality to it. Also, this story did remind me of a song, perhaps because there were two “melodies” happening with the piece; the cop story line, and the father story line. (And then it could be that the story ends mentioning a Doors’ song.) I found that Hamilton did a good job switching between these two narratives, like jumping from the chorus to the bridge, and then back again. Both story lines had the threat of violence to them, which created tension needed to keep the story dramatic, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that the narrator was never really in danger.

    What I found most interesting about “Autobahn” were two bits; one was the theme, and the other was the climax. I liked how Hamilton laid out the difficult and conflicting the relationship was between the narrator and his father. How the father could be abusive toward his son, but also encourage his son’s talents, and how circling that square is a never-ending challenge which ends up making memories of the father always close to the surface. Then there was the climax, where the narrator describes a moment when he saw his father at a newsstand, but his father didn’t see him. It was drawn well, and had a lasting but fleeting feeling to it.

    I liked this story, though it did feel light. Like, the story wanted to go to a third gear, so the speak, but pulled back in the last section. Over all, Hugo Hamilton created a very specific emotional moment, that I could relate to, as sometimes you can’t stop a memory from coming up.