Monster Fighters

So I’m sitting here this morning, listening to Jon and Ella play. Over and over Ella keeps emphasizing to Jon that the figures they are playing with are “monster fighters – they fight monsters so normal people don’t have to.” Anytime that declaration is made, it is quickly followed by a series of “Hi-yah! Bam! Smack! P-sht! Wee-boom!” sounds that illustrate just how thoroughly the monster fighters are kicking monster butt.

And I’m thinking: “I wish I had a monster fighter.”

I mean seriously – who wouldn’t want to have their own private monster fighter. Especially for the monsters that most of us face: doubt, depression, fear, uncertainty, and other creatures from the adult nightmare lagoon. How many of us wouldn’t love to call on someone else to handle the finances when they get tight, or the office when it gets too stressful? Or someone who could appear and deal with the baggage of our past in fell swoop? That would be awesome.

And even as I write this, Jon calls his monster fighter “Daddy” and Ella calls hers “Mommy.” There’s another monster fighter named “David” too, but I’m kind of hung up on Mommy and Daddy being the leads.

Because there are days when I don’t feel like fighting anyone’s monsters. There are days when I wonder if I have requisite power to fight my own. And yet that’s part of how my children see me: as their protector. Now, they have no delusions that I’m some sort of super dad (Jon asked me the other day if I could lift a weight. A weight. Sad.), but they do know that daddy’s the one to run to when you don’t understand something.

Ella does this all the time; if she can’t wrap her mind around an injustice in the world, or a question about theology or God, she comes to me and we begin one of our hourly games of “The Third Degree” – where she mercilessly hammers away at me with questions until I either answer her to her satisfaction or I finally go insane and scream, “I don’t know! I just don’t know!” To me, it can seem like an annoyance (and really, timing is generally the issue), but for her it’s a form of monster fighting: the world seems big and mean and scary, and she wants to know that there is a way to make sense of it all, find peace in the midst of the scariness.

So I help her fight her monsters.

As a father, that’s a pretty cool thing to realize. I’m not big and brawny and “manly-man” so the notion that my daughter still finds value in me – in a big old nerdy nerd – is even better than a Father’s Day card. In fact, instead of cards yesterday, I got a day full of hugs, thank yous, and “You’re the best dad, ever!”s. I also got approximately 100,000,000 questions between Ella and Jon, but those just laid the groundwork for the hugs, thank yous, and best-dad-evers.

It was a glorious day.

Who are the monster fighters in your life? To whom do you turn when the situation gets scary and you need consolation? We may not have our own private Indiana Jones or Superman at the ready to battle the evil we encounter, but we probably have more resources than we know.

So who’s helping you fight today?

Just Like Dad

Sunday is Father’s Day. Do your dad a favor – don’t go the tie route. Get him something nifty, like an electric razor or some boxer shorts. You know: show a little creativity in your choice of banal, inexpensive gifts! After all, dad will pretend to like whatever you buy him, so why put in the effort?

I’m kidding about the gift. Not so much about dad pretending to like whatever you get him.

Personally, I’m looking forward to the next few Father’s Days. My kids have finally entered the stage where I can expect some homemade gifts like ashtrays, coffee mugs, and elaborate attempts at pop-up cards. I am especially looking forward to the creative madness that my daughter will produce; Ella has the potential within her to make something heretofore unseen in the universe, and I want in on that kind of creation. And once Jonathan gets a bit older, his detail-oriented mind and science bend might actually produce some Father’s Day chemistry that turns out to be an anti-aging, performance-enhancing serum that allows me to live until I’m 190. So, yeah – I’m stoked about my potential Father’s Day gift haul.

But the greatest Father’s Day gift I’ve ever gotten has simply been to celebrate my own father each year. The joke around our house is that dad was always traveling, but my memory has him home quite a bit. I can see us in the backyard of our old house, tossing a baseball. I can see him cutting that same yard with the tiny, tired push mower that we used for years (it was only after I moved out and went to college that the man actually bought a riding lawn mower, a strange coincidence I’ve never reconciled). I close my eyes and I can picture him leaning against the fence at ballgames, or setting up a tent on a Scout trip, or paddling like a madman as we fought the Table Saw rapid on the Ocoee River.

For as much as we joke about my dad’s absence, it’s his presence that I most remember.

When I stepped away from youth pastoring, I also stepped away from seeing my dad on a weekly basis. In my entire life, there’s been a little more than five years when we didn’t go to the same church; over the past two years, we’ve worked side-by-side on most Sundays in the church’s sound booth: dad on the mixing board, me on the presentation software. Again, it wasn’t so much about what we did together as much as it was the fact we were together. I highly doubt that he would be so sentimental about the arrangement (though he’s surprised me a bit on that front lately), but for me, the warmth and joy of working with my dad on a weekly basis was something to be cherished.

As we both learned in 2011, you only have a little while to spend with your dad.

It was that weekly time together – even when we weren’t in the booth, we were still at the same church, in the same place – that I knew I would miss. There were a lot of wonderful people at the church, people that I still love dearly, but there is something special about being able to spend time with your family week in and week out; something even more special about being able to show your parents your personal growth on a consistent basis. Not that I live for my parents’ approval, but you never outgrow the hope that your parents are proud of you. Every Sunday, I knew that they were.

My kids felt the separation too. When I told the kids that we were stepping away to chase a new path, my kids were both hurt. Jonathan seemed to take it hardest; he started crying. When I asked him why, he said, “I’m crying because now we won’t get to see Nonna (my mom) and Poppy (my dad) anymore!”

He thought that the only reason we saw my parents was because we went to church together.

Once I explained that family is family, regardless of where you go to church, and that we would make special effort to see Nonna and Poppy now, instead of just taking it for granted that we would see them on Sunday, he felt better. In a strange way, so did I. Because I realized – as much as I loved seeing my dad every week – I took for granted that we would see them. It was a given. I didn’t have to work to make sure my kids had a relationship with them, it just happened because of Sunday.

That realization made me a bit sad. I don’t want my kids growing up and taking their grandparents for granted. So we’ve made extra effort (perhaps too much) to get the kids over to their grandparents’ house at least once a week. I worry about over-staying our welcome, but my parents assure me that it’s okay. That they love it.

Kind of like my grandparents used to tell my parents whenever my brother and I went for visits.

It’s weird thinking about that now. I’m now in my dad’s position and he’s assumed the role of his father. My dad had one advantage over me, in that when he was 37, I was 15. He had the youthful energy to be a good dad to a young boy; I sometimes wonder if I suck as a parent because I don’t have the same energy as I did at 27. My kids don’t seem to mind, though, and maybe I actually have an advantage not available to my dad: the perspective that comes from being older. Honestly, I don’t know.

I do know, however, that my dad thinks I’m doing a good job. He’s never sad that too me – or if he did, I mentally deflected it because I’m not great at accepting compliments – but I know he feels that way because he always tells me how great my kids are. That’s high praise. I eat it up.

I look a bit more like my dad these days, which is funny because for the longest time I didn’t think we looked anything alike. Now, my hair is going gray (though not as gray as his) and I definitely see him staring back at me from the mirror, or in pictures. I’m taller and thinner, but the eyes are the same. I can only hope that mine give off the same kindness and good nature that his do. After years of wondering which parent I favor, my physical presence finally caught up with my personality and the answer is clear.

I’m just like my dad.

And that’s awesome.

Do? More.

Don’t believe this. Not for a second.

From a very early age, we teach kids to identify themselves by what they can accomplish. When a baby can flip over from back to stomach, we ooh and aah; when she learns to sit up, we applaud; when she stands for the first time on wobbly, uncertain legs, we celebrate the triumph; and when she takes her first tentative steps, we announce that she’s becoming a “big girl.”

It continues throughout childhood – each physical or developmental marker brings another round of Facebook statuses, Tweets, videos and pictures. The first tooth lost. The first day of school. The first dance. The first game. Every achievement documented, celebrated, and cemented in the child’s head as the surest way to understand themselves.

I am what I do.

Naturally we don’t let that idea remain. We tell our children that they are more than their accomplishments. We try to instill in them that their value lies not only in what they can do, but also in who they are. We teach them that they are intrinsically valuable – even without doing a single thing, they are beloved and special and worhty. We say that, and then spend most of our time praising them only for things they do. It’s our default setting.

Heck, even Aristotle sad as much: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, it is a habit.” The connection between identity and productivity is dadgum hard to override, because we understand that there are bad things that happen when a person gets too caught up in what he or she can or can’t do. I mean, I’ve seen elementary school kids crushed because they didn’t get an A on a spelling test. I’ve seen high schoolers devastated because they didn’t get into the college of their parents’ choosing. I’ve seen adults completely adrift in life after losing a job they thought was their dream.

We are what we do.

Since we’re human, things are naturally complicated. We shouldn’t solely define ourselves by our actions, but our medium for expression as individuals is throughactions: thought, communication, creation. We cannot tell the world who we are unless we do something. But we go awry when we come to believe that what we do is all we are, and that when we can no longer do those things that make us us, then we are no longer someone who matters.

It’s what makes nursing homes so challenging. Same as hospitals. We hate being reminded we have limits; that the very thing that makes us feel alive – our physical/mental capabilities – will be stripped away. People struggle with aging because it’s a regression to the mean; it’s the universe’s way of telling us that we are finite, we are frail.

We are not gods in flesh.

When we come to the end of ourselves, we wrestle with the notion of value. Life becomes an existential cage match. If we cannot do, then what good are we? If we’re merely clogging up the planet, using up money and other resources better spent on those who can create, why should we linger? Why spend our last days as a museum piece that only teaches it’s hell getting old?

I’ve heard those questions from the lips of people who’ve gotten old, gotten beyond their prime years of production: why am I still here? What good am I?

My grandmothers both ask me that question when I go to visit. I look at them and I see life, my life, sitting there in front of me, and I wonder, how do you not know you’re valuable? I look at them, aged and beautiful, and all I can think of are things like sunshine and laughter and meals and hugs and wisdom and prayers and guilt trips and love. And I love them for ALL of it. Every bit. I don’t necessarily remember any one single act (though we do have a few stories to tell) but what I remember, more than the lifetime of doing, is the person who did it, and did it all, because she loved.

Maybe she can’t get her shoes on anymore. Maybe she doesn’t sleep well at night. Maybe she is reaching a point that she’ll require someone to watch over her the way all of us worried parents watched over our own children, someone who can encourage and celebrate each accomplishment, regardless of how small. Maybe all of that and more.

But there will come a day when neither one is here. When both will have gone the way of all people, when both will be a marker next to the marker for a good man who went before her. And when that day comes, I will wish not for her to do something for me, not for her to create or accomplish anything. I will simply wish like hell that she were still with me, that she still existed in a form I could hug or kiss or look at, simply because she’s who she is. My grandmother.

Funny, isn’t it? We spend so much time trying to do something, and not enough time enjoying who those somethings make us into. We think about that only in the end, only after it’s too late to truly appreciate the person for themselves. I think about friends and family today who would give anything to have just a little more time with a Pop, or a Nana, or a brother or sister or a child…

We are not merely what we do. We are more.

Love someone for that today.

Childhood 2.0

Yesterday my children allowed me to do something that I’d dreamed about for years. Simply because they exist, I was allowed to walk through the right field gate of Turner Field, out onto the turf of the Braves field, and stand in the bright afternoon sun. Suprisingly, it was everything I thought it could be. Up close, the grass was greener than on television, the dirt somehow browner, and the smells…

Well, let’s just say we’re not missing anything by NOT having smell-o-vision.

We were on the field because someone, some genius in the Braves organization, realized that it cost the organization absolutely nothing and garnered them all kinds of goodwill by allowing kids in attendance on Sunday afternoons to run the bases after the game was over. Why no one thought of this back when I was a kid baffles me; perhaps it was because Atlanta Braves baseball wasn’t quite the destination/event back then. If you remember the old Launching Pad (Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium) then you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t remember FulCo, then take the ugliest abomination of American architecture that you can think of and infest it with more ugliness. Then multiply it by five.

Congratulations! You’ve now come up with the genius design that dominated the American sports landscape in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s – the dull, lifeless, repeatable round stadium that appeared in such sports crazy cities as Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Cincinatti. Or, basically every mid-sized American city who couldn’t afford to build something better.

To be fair, this was back before people realized that aesthetics matter when it comes to sports. I don’t know why, but the idea during the latter 20th century seemed to be that space was purely functional; that how the space made you feel, or appeared, was of no consequence. In some places that idea was born out by the play of the teams – Pittsburgh, for example, destroyed people in Three River Stadium. But here in Atlanta, the connection between human consciousness and environmental effect was writ large: FulCo killed the players’ will to win.

Heck, on some nights, it killed the fans’ will to live.

But I still dreamed of patrolling the ground there. I was small, couldn’t hit a ball much beyond second base, but I was fast and quick and the best fielder in my Little League. My aunt and uncle had season tickets back in those days (so you know my family LOVED baseball), which meant that I got to go to my fair share of games. I remember vividly seeing Dale Murphy and Claudell Washington cover the outfield. Because I played second base, Glenn Hubbard became my hero; I loved him so much that I switched jersey numbers from Murph’s iconic 3 to Hubb’s 17.

Sorry, Murph.

Even after a summer on the All-Star team killed my love for playing (it was 1986; we won the Dixie League State Title that year) I still loved going to the games and dreaming of being on the field. Other kids got to walk the grounds because of their youth group, or ball team, or because their parents somehow possessed a special kind of magic that allowed them access to people and places denied us mortals, and I always felt the burn of jealousy deep within. It seemed unfair.

It wasn’t, of course, but try telling that to a young boy. And of course, the fact that I’d never walked the field in my life made yesterday that much greater. The first time I stepped onto the field of my childhood dreams, I did so with Ella and Jon and Rachel, not to mention my brother and nephew, and my dad. We all walked – simply walked – the warning track from right field to just past the Braves dugout, at which point the parents were diverted into the stands as the kids were directed towards homeplate.

Given how some of us adults were talking in the line, that was a good move Turner Field. Watching some over-exuberant adult wipeout a couple of tots with a head-first slide into homeplate would’ve been sad, and watching the security guards escort him off to jail would’ve been sadder.

Plus, I don’t think my wife would’ve bailed me out.

I watched as my nephew, Joey, rounded the bases, followed by his cousins, Aidan, Parker, Jon and Ella, plus several of his friends from church. The whole game experience (including pre-game lunch at the Varsity) was for his sixth birthday. I think I can safely say it was a magical experience for him, because it certainly was for me. It reminded me of some of the most powerful and magical things from my own childhood, and that I still connect strongly with some of those things even in my adult life.

But greater than that was re-learning that there are some things better experienced through your children. Seeing Ella and Jon run those bases was a treat for me; I recorded it on my iPhone, and it will be a video that I sneak a peak at from time to time as a subtle callback to the wonder of childhood joy. And when they came off the field and up the aisle, holding certificates and t-shirts that said “I ran the bases at Turner Field!”, there was no missing the expression on their faces.

Magic.

It was one of the best days I’ve had in a very long time. I think I took around 200 pictures, of everything from the grass to the kids to the seats to the benches in the dugout, and only posted half of them to Facebook. Guess I just wanted everyone to share in how special the day truly was to me. Not only did we get to celebrate my nephew, but we got to spend time together as a family and update a vivid memory from my childhood: parents and children enjoying a ballgame, laughing and sharing and loving every minute. It was Childhood 2.0.

And it was a blessing.

Stillborn, Still Here

I couldn’t sleep last night. My neighbor’s to the back apparently were conducting search and rescue missions in their backyard, because a massive floodlight lit up the back of my house, a light so bright it was sufficient for identifying insects in their yard with the naked eye. From my patio. Over 300 feet away.

Anyway, since I couldn’t sleep, I powered up the laptop and checked email. There was the usual assortment of junk (mostly writing website stuff), but among the various vanities was a tiny little message from my father-in-law, Jim. The subject line took my breath: Ruthanne Awaiting In Heaven.

I wasn’t prepared for it, so it stunned me. Even though I mentioned Ruthie in yesterday’s blog, and even though my mind knew her birthday was today, I simply hadn’t been consciously thinking about her. Sure, when we visited my parents yesterday, my dad pointed out the flowers they’d placed in her memory at church. He asked Ella to tell him how old Ruthanne would be; Ella walked over to the plant, saw the preciously painted pink polka-dot nine, and informed my dad that her sister would, in fact, be nine years old. My dad grinned, turned to me and said, “Can you believe that? In just a couple more years she’d be a teenager!”

“Yeah, and only another couple of years and she’d have been driving!” my mom added.

I shook my head. No, I really couldn’t believe it. After all, I’m doing well just keeping up with a seven year old girl who thinks she’s seventeen and a four year old boy who enjoys screaming random bits of conversation when not actively giving his mother a hard time. In other words, I have no idea what the heck we would do with a third, older child.

I would imagine we’d lean on her to help keep the other two in line, or ask her to watch them when we need to get work done. I can imagine her being Ella’s best friend and chief rival, Jon’s mini-Mom, and Rachel’s sweet helper. It’s easy to think about those things. But it’s hard to imagine how she would relate to me. Ella is so much like me in her creativity and imagination (though she is very much like her mother too) that I can’t imagine having a daughter more attuned to this nerdy dad. I look at Ella and try to think about what Ruthanne might have been like – responsible, intelligent, socially aware, helpful, lots of the qualities that Ella exhibits by virtue of being the first surviving child – and I just can’t picture it.

Yet, that doesn’t make me sad.

Once upon a time, I would’ve felt tremendous regret for what I missed out on with Ruthanne. In some ways I suppose I still do, but it’s not as consuming as it once was. In fact, other than the occasional question about Ruthie from Jon or Ella, I really don’t think of her much at all. It sounds heartless, but here’s the thing: like David, I know she’ll never come back to me, but one day I’ll go to her. In the meantime, I have to love on Ella and Jon, pour into them my very best and cherish every moment we have together (even the stressful and annoying ones).

Like the past couple of mornings, when we’ve been watching the entire Star Wars franchise (even the horrid prequels). They run around the house, fighting with plastic lightsabers, knocking into things and raising a ruckus, but it’s life and it’s beautiful and I cherish it.

That’s not to say that today doesn’t hold meaning – it does. But what it says even louder is that the passage of time, the healing of wounds, is not only possible, it is inevitable. It comes whether we work at it or not; it simply comes faster when we participate and chase after healing. Everyday people come to this blog because of a search on the word “stillbirth” or the phrase “stillborn child.” I can honestly say that there hasn’t been a day in the last two years when that word hasn’t shown up in my stats information. That means that everyday for two years someone has either been curious about stillbirths, or wondered how to survive a stillbirth, and they’ve landed here. They’ve read our story. And they’ve seen that healing does come.

It’s painful at times. It’s sudden (or seemingly so) at others. But it’s persistent and it’s real, and that’s something I desperately wanted to know nine years, eight years, heck five years ago.

We’re still here. We’re still a family. Perhaps even more so because we have such a poignant reminder of the fragility and value of life.

And we also know what my father-in-law knows. His email was brief, but so powerful. Jim is a man who has lost much in his life – Ruthanne, his little brother Preston, other family members who didn’t have much time on this earth, but who live now eternally in heaven. And so his quiet, thoughtful, touching email grabbed me last night and reminded me that while we’re healing here, we’ll be fully healed when the day comes that we join our loved ones on the other side.

Here’s what he said:

Dear Rachel and Jason,

The most beautiful thing about Heaven is knowing that infants like Ruthanne, Preston, Gravis, and Helen who went early before us will be waiting to meet us there.

The closer I get, the more I am looking forward to seeing them!

Remembering Ruthanne in our thoughts,

Jim Paw and MeMe

Short. Sweet. Heartfelt. And for our family, utterly true.

Today, the sun is shining, and both my kids are foaming at the mouth to get out of the house and do something fun (which means, as it does with most children, going somewhere and spending money). Today, they’ll want to run all over a playground or go to Stone Mountain or see a movie or any number of things that incite their tiny little imaginations. And, as best we can, Rachel and I will chase after them, laughing and enjoying the day, forgetting our loss by embracing our blessings and simply living without the burden of regret.

This is what life is. It’s perpetual rebirth. It’s discovering each day that the greatest way to honor the memory of Ruthanne is to not let that memory steal our life. She was stillborn, but we’re still here. One day, we’ll see our loved ones and never have to let go, so let’s start that process today, with the ones closest to us. We’ve got a lot of living left to do.

So do you.

Now get out there and do it.