I Didn't Know I Could Feel This Way

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My own daddy was flawed enough that there have been times when I wished he had been even more flawed than he was, so that I could cut the cord, so that I might be able to muster simple anger at him, so that I could just be mad at him the way so many people seem mad at their parents all the time. I mean, I would have the goods. After our mother died, he should have understood that he was the only thing his four children had in the world and done whatever he could to live as long as he might. More than one therapist has suggested that I have permission (in the way that therapists hand out permission) to find it unforgivable that he didn’t do that. What he did, instead, was to fall deeper into a bottle even as hepatitis B & C ravaged his liver, provoking the cirrhosis that in turn caused the hepatocellular carcinoma that killed him, if one can even assign a cause of death to a man so dedicated to his own destruction. And, you know, it’s correct to say that his profound failure to put us first in that way would justify anger, if I had any. That he never told us to brush our teeth or wash our hair or change our clothes, leading to exactly the wrong kind of attention in the exquisitely sensitive middle school years, was something of an extra. Yes, I think I would be justified, if I could ever summon any anger towards him. If I could. If I only could.

My own son’s old man is not so far gone, and this is part of a larger trend. I am a large man, physically, but my father was larger. He was a scholar where I am only an academic. I have at times had a drinking problem; he was an alcoholic. I have done a lot of drugs, but he was a proper junkie. I am well-traveled by normie standards, while he saw the entire world. He spoke Indonesian, Balinese, Javanese, French, German, and Dutch; I have a carefully-nurtured Wordle streak. I am a craftsman where he was an artist. I mutter around in the pallid, trivial culture of the 21st century, where he drank deeply of the umami witch’s broth that was the 20th. I complain where he lamented. He lived the poetry he could not write; I write the prose I cannot live. After years as a director in the wilds of 1960s and 70s New York, he became a professor at a small liberal arts college, where he celebrated tenure by walking around everywhere barefoot and ruled as a passionately loved teacher and deeply resented colleague for twenty-five years. After two years of trying I finally got a sad administrative job at a city college where my boss complained when my cheap dress shirts were too wrinkly, and I could not manage to hold onto it for even four years. His instability was operatic; mine is pathetic. He died. I merely survive.

His hair was thick and lush and then it fell out. Now, in one of those little miracles that’s reserved for babies, it’s growing back again. His eyes are brown where mine are blue like his were too. (Those are pearls that were his eyes.) I have a picture of him, black and white, riding a wooden horse, wielding a grin, a perfect representative of a more innocent time; I now take pictures of him with a camera with infinite settings and an incompetent user who nevertheless captures his doll-like beauty, his constant joy. He was old when I was born, I grow old now too, but I refuse to imagine a universe in which he might grow old in turn. I look in his face and I see him, but I have to search to find me, just as I had to when I searched in the mirror for him in me. I’m not trying to be cute; it’s just that it all bleeds together, when you try to raise a son to be like someone who lives only in the memory of those who are now very few. Hereditary influence is all I have to share. Brothers and sisters have I some. This person’s father is my father’s son.

My son’s mother is a natural, which came as no surprise to me, though she professes to have been afraid that she wouldn’t be any good at it. It’s a humbling experience within a larger humbling experience, watching her raise our boy. She speaks to him constantly, the stately staccato music of a mother’s sing-song Korean, setting the boundaries of his modest world, doing little voices, ever enthusiastic, predicting his moods and heading the bad ones off at the pass. I am clumsy and fear dropping him. He won’t sleep in his bassinet, not yet, and so we divide the day looking after him, and for the first three months of his life I would hand him off to his mother around dawn and then climb into bed to sleep and every single day I would wake with a start, in absolute terror, believing with my whole being that he was suffocating in the sheets around me, that he was caught somewhere in my pillowcase. And she would calmly come around with him in her arms, and there he would be, red cheeked, pleasantly spasming, alive. That an infant is more enamored of his mother than his father is a dog-bites-man kind of story, I grant you. I am content to putter around wordlessly as I quietly observe her intuitively nurturing this gorgeous little baby who, like his mother, like everyone I have ever loved, I do not understand.

But you would like to hear more about him! Alright. Well: he laughs, these days. He fills the house with the susurrus of that singular infant language. He gurgles and coos. When I have been working for several hours and I come downstairs and greet them he looks up at me, smiles a little, then grins broadly, then casts his face down to the floor and smiles some more, as though shy, as though a five-month-old knows what shyness is. He gums his toys with manic diligence until he grows bored of them and discards them coldly. He is soft all over, so soft, and he demands your constant attention without a hint of shame. His cheeks are big and smooth and he likes to grab his mother’s face and when you pick him up and stand him on his little legs he flexes his body like he’s delivering a political address, his face indignant. It appears he will join a long line of defiant men. I hope only that his defiance will prove a little less useless than mine. His baby smell is perfect. His little toes are perfect. The round fat rolls that segment his arms and ring his thighs are perfect. He is perfect.

You make fun of parents and parent things until you become one. I have taken more pictures in the last five months than I did in the previous two years. I say things like baba and didey and tootsies. I delight in wearing ugly brown slip-on shoes with socks high up my shins and his carrier strapped to my softening body. I think about him every minute of every day. I shameless spam my family with his pictures and with stories. Not only do I do all of these annoying parent behaviors, I find any capacity to be embarrassed or apologetic about them entirely gone. I have surrendered and it feels good. I am doing this thing, this very thing, and I am doing it all the time, and I feel happy and free. I hold his little hand, often. “My son’s son,” I giggle stupidly to my wife. “My son’s son.” She pretends to be amused.

He speaks! He speaks. He will not stop speaking. Words are unnecessary, words would be an extravagance. Words are for another age, another time, another day. Speech is guttural, speech is animal. He listens to his mommy and he apes her cadence. He parrots his daddy with syllables of undifferentiated music. He crows along with the sound of the tinny melodies that emerge from his little swing. And when he thinks no one is watching, he wolfs down what the world gives him and “hums back to it its slow vowels.”

Everybody talks about needing to be ready, these days - we want to have kids, but we’re not ready, we need to get ready. That’s not how it works. You get pregnant and it makes you ready. You make yourself ready. You feel yourself rise to the occasion. Ready comes later; the world of man was not built on ready.

The indignities of age don’t stop accruing. I went through life in an endless boom and bust cycle that finally went bust bad enough that I had to stop; now I have wrangled myself like a cowboy wrapping himself in his own lasso. The price is that I’m fat. I dealt with my shame by lifting weights, getting big where I could not get skinny. My shoulder gave out; I had an expensive operation performed by an expensive doctor at an expensive hospital and did expensive physical therapy and a year and a half later another expensive doctor told me the shoulder was toast, the tissue was all gone, nothing to be done, and I can’t lift anymore. I tried the oral semaglutide; it didn’t work. I did the injectable kind; it gave me stomach paralysis that left me repeatedly upchucking into a trash can. Now I mutely watch my belly grow. My beard skipped past cool grey to old man white, and even that pattern merely makes me look wizened, not experienced. My hair thins, though I have dragged that particular conflict into a trench warfare stalemate with drugs. My skin, never great, gets worse. There are deep laugh lines despite a life without a lot of laughs. Still, worst is that the bum shoulder makes it hard to hold my son for long, and he would like to be held always and forever, please.

And yet what a joy. What a joy. What a constant joy. I think people are afraid to be real about how fun this all is, afraid to sound like they’re bragging, afraid of perpetuating one stigma or another, afraid that people won’t appreciate just how hard it is. And, yes, it’s very very hard. I typically watch him from 9PM to 5AM; my circadian rhythm is a shambles. This is bad enough. Not being able to sleep next to my wife is worse. I am exhausted, obviously. We never do anything, obviously. We dream up plans that we know we will have no ability to execute for years, sometimes many years. Yes, it’s all very hard. But so what? So what. People shying away from having babies because they heard that it’s so hard are making one of those category errors that are inescapable in this rotten decade in this awful century: they think that hard is the opposite of good. Well, this is better than good. He is a joy to me. He is a constant source of simple happiness. He is happy to see me in a way that’s purer and less complicated than anything I have experienced in a long, long time. This is so fun. It’s not some terribly hard exercise in weighing the pros and cons. He is purpose, for me, and he is the reason, and he shoos away the pointless worrying over my own irrelevance. But most of all, he’s fun. He’s always so fun.

Soon I will walk up our suburban Connecticut street while he toddles along, on our way to the local playground, and he will ask me questions about the factory where they make trees and why birds argue with one another and how the grass makes clouds. And I will know every answer. I will teach him everything there is to be taught. He will be curious and he will be kind and I will give him every fact and figure that the Immanent Will stuffed into this portly globe, because Daddy knows, and he will know that Daddy knows, and the world will seem alright.

I can talk to my siblings about anything but there's a difference between what you can talk about and what you want to. When you tell people your father was an alcoholic they always think that means he beat you up. No. He was gentle and loving. He gave hugs and accepted kisses. He taught me that that there was nothing in life but to stand for whatever you were meant to stand for and from there to pursue beauty and intensity, which he understood to be the same thing. I know he taught my brothers and siter their own special things too, like the secrets he told me, and I wonder what was just for them but never want to ask and never want to know. And I wonder when they understood him as we were all forced to come to understand him. When you’re young your dad is just your dad, and that mine stumbled and cried was no more mysterious than that other dads watched baseball and grilled steaks. At some point I would in fact come to realize the he was always drunk; when did they? I did in fact find him passed out in the garden and shepherded him back to his bed with uncertain ten year old hands; did they, ever? Did they ever find his exhausted and sagging body, splayed out on the slate pathway he himself had laid decades before? When did they know he was dying? When did they realize that he had known he was dying for so long? He is jaundiced, in pictures, yellow as a daisy, old old old. I suppose I don’t want to know what they knew, and when. So many things I don’t want to know. A pint of vodka is such a small little thing, and he was such a big man. But you’d be surprised. His door would be locked, the desk chair she had given him would creak under his weight, and I would listen to him cry.

He is so alive. All those little pleasant baby spasms, the committed wiggles, they tell you that the life you are holding is committed to survival. I hope he will be smart. I know he will be a friend. His soft eyes take in many things, and I can see humility in his face, I see him accept it all as something beyond himself, I notice him notice the world. We have a little backyard that’s full of moss and squirrels and thistle, and when he can walk he will still be built low to the ground, convenient for grabbing the tall weeds and the squirrel bones and every bug that there is to be grabbed, and I will teach him to live in a world of things. I will not let him be another sacrifice to the intangible. I will fight the 21st century on his behalf and I will win that fight. I will raise him in a world of things, and he will know the waxy sap of weeping spring grass, I will hold him after his first bee sting, he will learn how wet mud can be, he will catch the sun. His world will be the stuff of touch, the excitement of fingers, he will live in the glory of atoms.

He got clean, you know, the last year of his life. They sent him away because he got the DTs and I thought I would never hear his voice again, never again feel his ample belly in a morning embrace. But he did come back. Just not for long. The addict asks, what is left that I might make of this life? I like to believe he asked himself that, even though I don’t want to think about how paltry the answers must have seemed, how little time he had. It’s alright. He had left what he had left, he was given what he was given, he lived within it. And so do I. And so do I.

Kindle my heart, I would say to my wife’s baby bump. Kindle my heart, I would say. Again and again I would ask him, “Kindle my heart.” And she would only stroke my hair, though she was large in the belly and always in pain, such is her tolerance. Kindle my heart, I asked of him, as though a child owes his father any such thing. Kindle my heart, I asked him when he was growing like dough beneath a warm cloth, and now as a fleshy living beautiful baby I ask him every day. Kindle my heart, I ask him, and he does. I am overcome; the flame dances and my teak heart, pitch-drenched, ashes over as it burns. He has given everything that’s needed to someone who has been looking for a reason to keep going, and I will keep going. He will never find me passed out in the garden, and that is part of his gift to me. I cradle him like a little joey in a pouch, I squeeze him like a secret shell warming in the hand of a boy whose father told him to take nothing, I hold him delicately like the morning’s last precious egg, I place him on my good shoulder and breath through his little tufts of cloudsoft angel hair, I treasure him as I was once treasured, I worry and I worry and I worry, I lay awake at night and listen to him exist, listen to him live. I hear him, I hear his insistent, insisting breath, I hear that he is alive.

Now I have a reason to number my days; now I have something bigger than all my pointless wanting, something that will live on longer than my weakness. I will write an ocean of letters to my wife, and each one will say “thank you,” and still it will never be enough, but one must go on trying. I will go on trying. For you, for grace, I will. What else will I do with whatever I have left? I look at myself and don’t see anything worth admiring. I’m not sure I ever have. But he does, in his wise infant way, with his big boba eyes, his giggling and shameless love for his daddy, and my life now is a promise to him, and I will keep it. I am ready to live in the world of the greeting card cliché, the overused metaphor, the pat message, the mawkish and the sentimental, for only there will I find the words to say what I feel, only in the sunny places where the clumsy heart delights. I am so grateful to you, Junho. I am so grateful to your mother for you. My darling, my only, my son, my child, my gorgeous boy, I love you, I promise I will never die.