“Our job is to be memories for our kids and
ghosts for their future.”
Emmett J.
Scanlan
Yesterday, I deleted something from my
Google Calendar.
Four words, “Dad has the Shepkids.”
Those four words have occupied every other
weekend on my calendar since the third weekend of July in 2017.
Nine years, four months, and a lifetime
ago.
Hazel was about to turn four. George was
approaching his eleventh birthday, and Fritz was getting ready to turn eight.
I was a father of three young children
trying to navigate the unfamiliar waters of a divided household.
There were lawyers, schedules,
arrangements, adjustments, and all the other unpleasant bullshit that comes
with taking one family and turning it into two households.
Somewhere in the middle of those new
arrangements, I put four words on my calendar.
Dad has the Shepkids.
They were not a suggestion. They were not
a reminder to pick up groceries or change the oil in the car.
They were a declaration. Those weekends
belonged to my children.
I couldn't make other plans. I wouldn't make
other plans. Whatever else was happening in the world could wait until Monday.
For those Friday afternoons through Sunday
evenings, I belonged to George, Fritz, and Hazel….. and they belonged with me.
We went to the zoo, the swimming pool, the
forest preserves, and the museums. We rode the CTA Christmas Train every
December.
There were breakfasts, lunches, dinners,
bedtime routines, arguments over television, disagreements about who sat where,
and the occasional domestic disturbance that only three siblings can
manufacture.
There were dirty clothes, wet towels,
missing socks, forgotten homework, and enough dishes to suggest I was operating
a small restaurant.
There was laughter. There were tears. There
was life, and there was a father who understood that those weekends were about
more than entertaining three children. They were about raising them.
I heard Irish actor Emmett J. Scanlan
speaking with former English rugby player Joe Marler about fatherhood.
Scanlan offered a line that stopped me in my
tracks.
“Our job is to be memories for our kids and
ghosts for their future.”
I have been chewing
on those words since I listened to that podcast. Because that is precisely what
those weekends were about, even if I didn't fully understand it at the time.
I wasn't just taking my children places, I was
giving them a place. A place where they belonged. A place where they knew the
rules. A place where they could count on breakfast being made, dinner being
served, and their father being present. A place where they could be children
while I handled the business of being an adult.
Structure.
Consistency.
Nurturing.
Those aren't particularly glamorous words.
They don't make for exciting photographs or memorable Facebook posts, but they
are the bricks and mortar of raising the Shepkids.
Children need to know where they stand.
They need to know somebody is in charge. They need to know that the person in
charge loves them enough to establish boundaries and occasionally enforce them.
Especially when their world has been turned
upside down through no decision of their own. I couldn't give my children the
household I had once imagined, but I could give them my time and my attention.
I could give them the best version of their father that I was capable of
producing.
Some weekends, that
version was better than others.
The Shepkids never saw my Google Calendar. My
children watched me walk the earth. They watched me work hard on the earth. They
watched me pray for the earth, and they watched me yell at the earth.
They saw their father get up early, go to
work, pay the bills, make mistakes, apologize when needed, and lose his
patience when the world refused to operate according to his schedule.
They watched me laugh. They watched me worry,
and they caught a glimpse of something fathers aren't always comfortable
revealing…. Vulnerability.
There is a peculiar kind of vulnerability
that comes with fatherhood.
Before children, a
man believes he has control over his life. Then a child arrives and suddenly
your heart is walking around outside your body, wearing sneakers, asking for
money, and making decisions you have absolutely no authority to prevent.
You worry about things you never considered
before. You worry about their health, their friendships, their education, their
happiness, and whether the world will treat them with the kindness you want
them to receive.
You worry about the mistakes they will make. You
worry about the mistakes you have already made.
The hardest part of fatherhood isn't
changing diapers, making lunches, or driving children from one activity to
another. It is accepting that you cannot live their lives for them. You can
provide the foundation. You can offer the lessons. You can demonstrate
integrity, faith, kindness, and perseverance.
But eventually, they have to take those
lessons into a world that doesn't always reward good behavior, and you have to
trust that something you said or did along the way managed to stick.
Today, George lives with me. Fritz comes
over almost every weekend, and Hazel never makes it over to the Divorced Dad
District.
I no
longer need Google Calendar to tell me when I am supposed to be a dad.
The Shepkids aren't four, eight, and eleven
anymore. They have their own lives, their own routines, their own struggles,
and their own ideas about how the world ought to operate.
The funny thing about Google Calendar is that
it has no interest in mortality. When I originally created “Dad has the
Shepkids,” I scheduled it every other weekend without an ending date.
Google Calendar carried those four words
forward into eternity. I could open the calendar for August of 2051 and check
whether I have the Shepkids from the fourth through the sixth or the eleventh
through the thirteenth.
I will be eighty-five years old. Hazel
will have just turned thirty-eight. Fritz will be preparing for his
forty-second birthday, and George will be getting ready to celebrate his
forty-fifth.
As though three middle-aged adults will still
be waiting for their father to decide whether they were going to Brookfield Zoo
or the Forest Park swimming pool.
As though I might still be packing
sandwiches, laying out snow boots, and reminding somebody to put on a clean
pair of socks.
Somewhere
between 2017 and 2051, a father becomes an old man and his children become the
adults who will carry his memory into a future he will never see.
That is the part
that got me. We fill our calendars with appointments, obligations, birthdays,
anniversaries, and reminders about where we need to be. We mark the important
days and still forget the important moments.
Calendars
also have ghosts.
They hold the names of people who are no
longer with us. They remind us of birthdays we can no longer celebrate
together. They carry anniversaries of marriages that ended, houses we no longer
live in, jobs we no longer hold, and children who no longer need a hand to hold.
My calendar still knows the father I was in
July of 2017. A man trying to hold three little lives together for forty-eight
hours at a time.
A man who believed that if he could provide
enough structure, enough consistency, enough laughter, and enough love, perhaps
the children would come through those difficult years with a strong foundation.
I pray I did it right. I pray George
remembers the lessons. I pray Fritz remembers the laughter, and I fucking pray
Hazel remembers that there was never a weekend when her Oldman didn't want her around.
I pray all three remember that their father
worked hard, believed in God, tried to tell the truth, and occasionally failed.
I pray they remember a man who loved them
more than he knew how to explain, and I pray they forgive me for the times when
my best wasn't good enough.
Because someday, if God grants me the years,
I will be the old man my father once became, and someday after that, I will be
a memory.
A voice.
A story.
A ghost.
Perhaps George will hear me telling him to
keep working at something when it becomes difficult. Perhaps Fritz will catch
himself saying something that sounds just like his father. Perhaps Hazel will
remember a Christmas train, a trip to the zoo, or an ordinary Sunday afternoon
when the world seemed safe because Dad was there.
That is how we remain. Not through
calendars. Not through possessions. Not even through the photographs that
slowly fade in their frames. We remain through the lives we touched and the
lessons we left behind.
Yesterday, I removed four words from my
calendar. I didn't remove a single memory. I simply closed a recurring
appointment that had served its purpose.
The children who once needed a designated
weekend with Dad have grown into people who need their father in different
ways. Some days, that means advice. Some days, it means patience. Some days, it
means showing up, and some days, it means loving them from a distance and
trusting that the door you have always kept open will someday be walked through
again.
Emmett Scanlan was right.
Our job is to be memories for our children
and ghosts for their future. Maybe the greatest accomplishment of fatherhood is
to become a voice they can still hear when there is nobody left to speak.
Dad has the Shepkids. He always did and he
always will.
AOMH.
All of my heart.
