Thread by @HoarseWisperer

We’re coming up on a double anniversary of sorts. My son’s birthday and a year since my father’s passing.

The bar is playing “Cats in the Cradle” and I’m eight dollars in to $4 pints so... shit will be said and it will be a lot and I will make no apology for that.

1/

To me, the more important of the two - the one that evolves and changes and takes on new and different meaning - is my son’s birthday.

I remember the date I found out I was going to be a father. I remember the date he first walked..

2/

When he was little, I didn’t use a stroller. I carried him. I wanted to see his face and talk to him.

As a three-year old, I’d carry him up the walk at his daycare and the proprietor would see us coming and tease me.

“You know he can walk now.”

3/

And I’d laugh back and say “He has the rest of his life to walk. I’ve got a couple years left to carry him.”

I have simply adored the entirety of it.

There is no part of his life that I wouldn’t rewind and re-live. I would do it all again.

4/

That’s not to say that I prefer any yesterday to today.

He changes and grows up and our relationship evolves - and I love it all.

As I tell him all the time “You’re just a normal kid growing up. I’m the one who needs to adjust and adapt.”

5/

And I love the challenge of that.

It’s a constant evolution. It is never easy but it is always rewarding.

I love that kid more than life itself. It is a love that can’t be measured. It is the outer limit of what it is to love.

6/

My relationship with my father was so very different than that.

It is only through the conscious adult experience of being a parent that I’ve gained the context to make sense of it and understand it.

7/

My father absolutely loved my sister and me. But for the first many years after his divorce from my mother, he was deeply depressed, deeply alcoholic and charged with weekend custody of two children under ten.

8/

Having your children while unhealthy is not more loving than having them less to get yourself healthy.

Children are not served by loving toxicity.

Children aren’t helped by immersion in a toxic soup no matter how pure your love or intentions.

9/

In that song playing over the bar speakers, “Cats in the Cradle”, there’s a lyric late in the track where the singer says:

🎶 As I hung up the phone, it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like me 🎵

10/

For me, a son to a father and now a father to a son, those lines strike me as just so hollow and imperfect for both of those two relationships.

I am a deliberate opposite to my father in many ways. Much of me and who I am is a purposeful correction. A counterpoint.

11/

And as for my son, the kid who I am beyond blessed to be close to in real and important ways, the light of my very life, it’s not true of him either.

He and I are a lot alike in many ways. We are. But as I tell him over and over and over... he is his own person.

12/

He doesn’t take after me. We have things in common. He isn’t derivative of me though. He is unique. He is an independent person wholly his own.

I cherish the things we share and cherish the things wholly and uniquely “him”.

13/

I grew up to largely reject things that hurt me. I grew up to make different choices and live a very different life not because I had seen healthiness modeled for me but because what I saw was so very much not that.

14/

And as such, as a father, I’m flying without a net of sorts.

I’m doing my best. I succeed and fail. I do some things right and some very wrong.

And as I tell my son all the time, there will be things later in life he loved about how I raised him and things he won’t.

15/

I am not the model. I am not a generation that gets to pick up healthy family traditions and carry them on.

I’m a bridge. I aspire to be no more and no better than a sturdy one.

I am no more than a crossing from a past of dysfunction to a future of hopefully better.

16/

This weekend, I’ll reflect back on both of those two anniversaries.

My father’s death. My son’s birth.

And as odd as this may sound, in the joy of my son’s birthday and celebration of who he is, I’ll have some thanks for my father...

17/

Unintentional though it was, my lifetime as a son prepared me for my lifetime as a father.

And that lifetime has been the very greatest of all. That lifetime is everything. It is just everything.

It is all of the world’s joys.

And that is what I’ll be celebrating.

18/18