Fathers From the Beginning

A Failed Attempt to Instill Ambition and Finding Something Much Better

2012-01-13T19:54:00.005-06:00

A few weeks ago Noah, our oldest, received his mid-year report card. Interestingly, the report card comes in the mail and is addressed to us "The Parents of Noah Srajek." It is a computer print-out, actually, printed in the "least ink" option on cheap, greasy looking paper.

Why, I wonder, is this letter addressed to us? For, not only is its content the result of Noah's efforts in school, not ours . . . we also expect our children to have ownership of their school performance. But how do we accomplish the latter, if we continually put the parents between the pupil and their grades? I am left to wonder, too, why our boys received their Tae-Kwan-Doh certificates on thick grade A paper, but their school report cards come on paper that, arguably, would not meet the standard for toilet-paper?

I am not sure, if a German report card (Zeugnis) still looks the way I remember. But it sure was an offical document. It included number grades, either typed in ink or written in cursive by the class-room teacher, the teacher's signature at the bottom left and the principal's signature in the bottom right corner. Our Zeugnis also included a written assessment of our efforts during the past six months. Every student was handed their report card on report card day. We were expected to take it home, show it to our parents and put it away, in a place were it was safe.

While I don't want to spend much more time talking about report cards I do want to point out this one thing: My Zeugnis meant something to me. I knew that especially the written part was intended as a reflection of what I had accomplished (or not accomplished) that year. It was feed-back anticipated by me with some apprehension but, also, with some hope for encouragement. And it had my name on the top of the page, not my parents'.

This, perhaps, sets the stage adequately for what I really want to talk about: ambition. Following his report card's arrival (the grades weren't stellar, but also not that bad), Noah and I had a conversation about it. His first reaction (after I told him that "we" had received a letter with "his" grades) was that he was perfectly satisfied with his grades. This is a "good" report card he said, after he had briefly, very briefly, examined it. I told him it was average but, in my opinion, not "good." "Don't you," I asked, "don't you want to do better than this? Does this not trigger your ambition to do better?"

My question was asked in a fairly nonjudgmental way, by the way, I really just wanted to know how he felt about "ambition" which starting in grade eight had become such an important part of my way through school. Noah's response, as so many before, floored me. "Look, Papa," he said, "you rode your bicycle through the Alpes, that is crazy. I would never do anything like that." What he was saying was "I'm not going to talk to you about ambition, because your standard for what counts as ambition is wacko." It's always good when our children hold a mirror to our faces (especially in the middle of a conversation we had intended to focus on their behavior and thinking, not ours).

I have to admit that there was a bit of a flare-up at that moment. I felt I was losing control of my honest effort to help Noah along with his school performance. I caught myself though and we sat down on the couch and began a conversation that lasted about 45 min.

Let me say up-front that it was a great conversation. I don't remember every detail but what I do remember, viscerally, is the feeling that he and I were connected in a conversation with clearly different view-points and opinions. It was the kind of conversation where, in the end, I was full of admiration for Noah's articulateness, his ability to nuance his views, and his ability to stand on the feet of his own opinions. He did not, like I when I was his age, feel much of a need to agree, but he did feel a need to understand and explore.

The real surprise turn in the conversation came with him saying he had tried ambition but felt it wasn't working for him. Had I stopped listening at that moment I probably would have thought something along the lines of "yeah, you and the other 2,000 students at Urbana High; ambition is just not working for you, right." But I did keep listening and my budding sarcasm was turned on its head when he continued by saying "the thing is, when I am ambitious I get obsessed. It drives me crazy; and I just don't like that feeling and who I become."

Wow!

Just a bit of background here. Noah has, in my estimation, always had a very strong need to please and be liked, but he has an equally strong need not to be driven by wanting to be liked. He hates the slavery that comes from doing things others demand just so that those others will like him. Noah is, in other words, fighting his ambition to be liked to the extend that it controls him and makes him feel inauthentic. He has always been suspicious of grades as a cheap kind of praise meant to manipulate rather than encourage him. But he also admits that grades can be very seductive to him.

What I am left with is an incredibly strong sense of respect for Noah's need for freedom and authenticity. Yes, I am sure that sometimes he pushes this too far and could do well by trusting another's assessment of his performance. There are two or three teachers he trusts in that way. However, this conversation tells me beyond the smallest doubt that he is in the middle of that epic battle all teens are fighting, the battle for true independence, autonomy and freedom. Noah's single-most important developmental task right now is to push away from us, his parents (to whom the grade-report was addressed). To the extent that we bluntly prevent that from happening we take the risk of seriously wounding him and, as a result, making it more likely that he will move further away from us emotionally than otherwise necessary. But, here is the paradox of attachment, in its teenaged version: As he pushes away from us and seeks his independence he continues to need us as his "secure base." This means that we must not push him away from us but, instead, continue, as we did right from the beginning, to encourage and affirm our love of him, average grades, broken plates, badly cleaned dishes, etc. not withstanding.

I did bring up that there might be a chance to control ambition lest it get out of control the way Noah fears it might. And, to his credit, Noah informed that he has started an experiment this semester that involves his commitment to completing every last piece of his homework, every day, in order to see, if it actually makes a difference. I know that many parents would simply balk at this point (if they haven't done so already). Giving our children the sense that it's okay to "experiment" with a good school performance? To many this will seem absurd, if not plain destructive. I tend to believe that it will increase Noah's sense of accoutability, self-determination and his ability to gauge and use his energies responsibly.

Still, I wish that schools, in formal and informal ways, would take more seriously their responsibility for giving students that sense of ownership over their grades and performance. I wish that teachers and school officials would think of directly dealing with their students rather than immediately contacting the parents, if there is a problem. I know that it's possible. Some teachers, deans and principals can do that for the students and the students talk about them with great admiration and respect. Those teachers are not the the "easy" ones. Quite the opposite, actually. But aside from being "hard" and "expecting a lot" these teachers are united in their sincerity and determination to respect their students, independent of their grade.

One last thought (I worry you might feel the way I do when I listen to the end of one of Beethoven's symphonies: will he ever come to an end?). My most inspired impression of parenting and report-cards comes from the song "Zeugnistag" by my favorite song-writer and musician, Reinhard Mey. It's an autobiographical song in which Reinhard describes receiving his report card in school, realizing it was too bad to ever show to his parents, faking his parents' signatures on it, being found out by the principal, being called to the office together with his parents (who are expected to punish Reinhard) and the parents just telling the principal that these are, indeed, their signatures. Mey ends with this line addressing his child and all other children:

Ich weiss nur eins, ich wuensche allen Kindern dieser Welt (und nicht zuletzt auch Dir, mein Kind, Eltern, die aus diesem Holz geschnitten sind.

[I only know this one thing, I wish that all children of this world, and you too, my child, have parents who are cut from that same kind of wood.}

The Domino Effect of Soul-Touching

2011-12-23T08:37:00.004-06:00

My father told me he found my musings about the purpose of human life too brief and slightly unsatisfying. I had that same feeling. I keep thinking about this because I care about these kinds of questions a great deal. It matters to me what I think about them, how I speak about them, how I share my thoughts with others, in particular, of course, with my sons.

Two things happened to me yesterday as a media consumer:

a) I watched a Sci-Fi movie called "Invasion" and

b) I read an article in Discover Magazine about humans having to move leap-frog to different planets and planetary systems (in the end to entirely different universes) in order to survive (the time-frame for this, by the way, was several billion years. So don't start packing just yet.)

In the movie humans are infected with a "virus" that makes them 100% tolerant with each other (but not with people who have not been infected). The virus affects people in their sleep, changes nothing about their exterior, but makes them peacable and calm. Nicole Kidman plays a psychologist mother whose son is immune to this virus and, therefore, can not be tolerated by this new brand of humans. The question that's put before her in the movie is

"Do you really not see that we (the new humans) are better than the old version? Why would you want to live as the old version (i.e., with strife, war, hatred, etc.) when you can so easily change to the new one?"

Her answer in the movie is "no, I don't want the new version." Because accepting the new version would mean that she'd have to give up her son, who can't change. Univeral love vs. individual love, in other words.

The article in Discover Magazine describes how changes in the heat and energy output of the sun (which is actually dying) will necessitate an eventual move from earth to Mars and from there on to some of Jupiter's moons and farther even. Ultimately, the article states the whole of the time-space fabric might "rip" (because of 'dark energy' forces) which will make a move to a different universe necessary.

So . . . I am wondering . . . still in line with my previous post about my grandmother: what is the meaning of my relationship with my grandmother, my love for her, in light of these outlooks? What is the meaning of my grief (or my happiness) in light of these enormous changes that might be ahead of us? "Us" is that adhortative pro-noun even still fitting. Is what will happen in a billion years still happening to "us?" One thing is clear to me: my relevance now can not be measured by whether or not I'll still be known then. Because, obviously, nothing about me, personally, will still be known then.

My favored way of thinking through this problem is the "I want to be a domino piece"-way. This is based on the assumption that all things are connected--in space and time. If I am a successful domino piece I will have put out enough energy to push at least one more domino piece such that it will also push another piece, one right next to me, to develop its own energy to push others. This, of course, is more complex than a simple line-up of dominos. Humans have the potential to radiate energy in all directions and, therefore, can affect many other people to do the same.

Another, much less attractive way of thinking about this is to believe in some kind of eternal life juxtaposed with reincarnation. Perhaps our souls do indeed remain alive when we die. Perhaps they do reappear in another body some time down the road. And, perhaps, so they migrate from body to body until, in a billion years, they are part of someone who is about to be shuttled to Mars. As an idea that promotes the separateness of an immortal soul from a mortal body I don't like this idea very much. Souls die along with the body in which they resided. To think differently would devalue the body in a way I'm not comfortable with. Our soul body influence each other. My particular soul would not be what it is without being connected to this body. So, what would it be on its own? I do believe, however, that a certain kind of soulfulness survives in the minds and souls of others. Our souls, this I believe, can truly touch others. Every time we touch another soul our soul "survives" in them. A person touched by my soul can pass on that touch to others. And so it continues. This, of course, is nothing, but a variation of the domino-theory I espoused earlier.

My least favorite, but possibly most realistic idea is that as our bodies decompose the chemical elements of that process will be taken up into new life. Parts of my body will be in the air others breathe. Other parts will be in the grass that cows eat. The cows will, again, be eaten by humans. So, in the end, I will literally become part of the world.

It's quite likely, I think, that these three ways of thinking about this are all part of one grand answer to the problem. They are certainly not mutually exclusive. I can say that the experience of soul-touching is one of the most beautiful and satisfying experiences I have had in my life. Without knowing what they were I can remember them from all the way back to when I was four or five years old (some of them happened with my grandmother). It would take too long to list all the people with whom this happened. And, perhaps, this is why they all continue to be on my mind, really their "fingerprints" are on my soul. And, hopefully, mine on theirs. I am quite intentional about this and seek out those encounters, even with the people I'm simply buying a coffee from. The sense of community and connectedness that comes from this is intense and immense. With a little bit of luck these moments of soul-touching will continue on into the lives of others. Others I haven't met and will never meet, but with whom I have been "in touch" indirectly.

As a father I have to say that soul-touching combined with the domino-effect is probably my highest parenting value. This is probably also the case because I can see so clearly that nothing, absolutely nothing, can happen between parents and their children without these two principles in place. Discipline comes out of soul-touching, good grades do too, vision and creativity come from it and, above all, the willingness and ability to love.

What is the point? Thoughts about life as my grandmother is dying

2011-12-20T20:44:00.002-06:00

I am convinced that our presence here on earth is accidental. Our existence is no more rational or irrational than that of the squirrel in our back-yard, the cow that gives us our milk or the man-eating shark in the ocean. There is no point to our existence and we share this "pointlessness" with all other beings including plants, amoebas and jelly-fish. If we ask "why do we exist," all we hear back is silence. Unless we attempt to answer the question ourselves. Then we hear what we think, what we hope, what we yearn to be true. But the fact remains that there is no point our birth (other than that it brings us into the world) and there is no point to our death (when we're taken out of the world again).

My grandmother is dying. The pictures my father sent of her lying in her bed are reminiscent of the ones of my grandfather, from just nine months ago, after he had died. The only difference is she is still breathing. But she says she wants to die, in peace. So what was the point exactly, of her life? Born in 1918, she grew up in Hamburg, married my grandfather at the tender age of 20. She brought three children into the world. Her youngest, my uncle Hans-Joern, almost died as an infant. She brought those three from East-Prussia to Hamburg, just hours before Russian tanks reached their town in East-Prussia. She waited for my grandfather, first to return from the war and then to return from being a prisoner of war.

She was 43 when I, her first grandchild, was born. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' home. First in their rented apartment in Meiendorf (where I remember my grandmother lugging "brikets" (coal) in metal buckets up the stairs. She wore a pink bath-robe and old worn slippers. I remember the "Butze", a small cove-like bed, built into the wall. It had a curtain that could be drawn for complete privacy. There I would sleep. There my grandmother would sit by my bed-side and sing lullabys for me. "Der Mond ist aufgegangen" was and is one of my favorite song. I still sing it for my boys. And I still remember her voice, much different from that of my mom, and her fingers, tenderly touching my back. But what is the point?

She had raised her three children and, one by one, grandchildren came along, first I, then my cousin Kai, then my sister Katja, followed by my cousins Michael and Anja. While we were growing up she and my grandfather had moved to a different part of Hamburg where, again, they rented a small apartment, on the fourth floor of a multi-family building. This apartment would be my grandmother's home for the next 45 years. There she and my grandfather lived, fought, and, I hope, also loved every once in a while. This tiny apartment became the meeting place for children and grandchildren. Uncounted are the family dinners we had there, crunched together around the dinner-table, 12 people, and later girl-friends also attended. I love remembering those times, my grandmother's Zitronenspeise, a kind of lemon mousse, my cousin Anja's ballet performances, my aunt Uschi's funny family rhymes, all the serious discussions about politics we had in that place. For me, though, those times ended when I left Germany in 1985 and settled in the US. In spirit I was still present at every family gathering that followed, but I missed most of them.

Uncounted are the letters my grandmother wrote to me, and I to her. Hers always included a bit of "Knete" (dough), usually $20. Nothing ever got lost, a small miracle. When calls across the Atlantic became more affordable we would call each other often. In the last few years, we spoke almost every week. Her hearing was getting increasingly worse. But we managed and every conversation ended with me saying "Ich hab' Dich lieb, Oma" (I love you, Oma) and she would say "Ich Dich auch, das kannst Du wohl sagen" (I love you too, that's for sure). The last time I heard those words was only a week ago, with her voice being quite weak and scratchy sounding. We didn't speak for more than two minutes. For the first time I thought she was right, she would die soon; because this what she had predicted since about the time she was 40. Yes, next to being an unbelievably tender grandmother, nurturing and caring for her grandchildren, she was also depressed for most of her life. But she lived, strongly, in spite of it, in spite, also, of her breast-cancer and partial mastectomy in 1977, at 59. But what is all this about? Why is this important?

In 1996, when my son Noah was born, my grandmother became a great-grandmother for the first time and by 2006 she had nine great-grandchildren. It makes me unspeakably happy to know that she has met all three of my boys. "Uroma" is a real person to them. They recognize her in pictures and know her voice. She spoiled them as she spoiled me with candy (when we were there) and with money when we could be with each other.

Now my grandmother is dying and I am left wondering what the point of all of this was and is. Why remember, why recount? In a world where our existence is accidental it is very hard to discern anything else but an immanent purpose for those activities. If our existence is truly accidental the question "why we live" becomes moot. I believe that remembering and recounting are intensely pleasurable. Meaning-making is what we humans do. It is no different from squirrels eating nuts. Squirrels eat nuts to promote the species. Humans make meaning to do exactly that too. The beauty I see in my grandmother and in her life, the awe I feel before a life lived so well makes me replete with feelings. They increase my wish to live also. Just to live, to be happy and to pay much attention to happiness in the very mundane minutes of my life. My ability to do so, much of it I learned from her, I hope I can also pass on to my children. The will to live and happiness are intimately connected. But happiness is "now", not yesterday, not tomorrow. Now. So I give myself permission to be happy, right now, as I think of my grandmother and bringing her life and what I know of it into the now.

My greatest wish would be to sit by her bed-side and sing her a lullaby. It is to tell her it's okay to let go, just as it was for me to fall asleep. That wish will remain unfulfilled. But in the now I can also remember that only in March she and I were cuddling together on the couch in her tiny apartment. She felt like a tiny fragile bird, I like a giant next to her. And we were happy to know the meaning of that moment, together.

Embarrassing Principles

2011-11-06T20:47:00.004-06:00

One of the losses of the year 2011 was that of our second car. A very cute, very versatile and agile Honda Fit. We had been a two-car family since 2000 and had gotten quite used to the ease of two cars. Of course, we also had to get used to the cost associated with two cars. But it always seemed doable and relatively unproblematic. Secretly, though, I continued to dream about only having one car and, possibly, none at all. Would life even be manageable with only one car, in a five-member family? How would we get all of us to school, to work, etc.? How would we run errands on the weekends? How would we deal with evenings where both adults had different things to do that required a car to get there?

Growing up I had, for the most part, assumed I would never own a car (or need to own one). Except for a few months after I first got my license (at 18, when I thought I wanted a car and had my grandfather who sold car-insurance calculate for me how much I would pay AFTER the purchase of the vehicle). I was able to rely on public transportation and my bicycle for most of the things I needed to do. I did have permission to use my mother's VW beetle. But at the .50 DM she charged me per kilometer, driving really was no fun and I would really only do it, if I had no other way of getting where I needed to be. Being without a car of my own had not just become a fact of life, it had become a principle of my life.

While living in the US had changed my life such that I did own a car and, later, even two, my principal attitude towards them never changed. Yes, I have to confess, losing the FIT seemed like a blessing. When it became clear that it was totalled and would not return to our garage, I was determined to hold on to this new situation and make having only one car work. But I am not the only member of this family and the other members--especially my wife and my two older sons--had their own misgivings about this new situation. For my wife the logistical issues often are aggravating, for my oldest son the second vehicle is a convenience issue and for my middle son the second car is a status symbol. I, for one, find that the logistical and convenience issues are easy to deal with. Really, it only takes a bit of planning and some decent communication (both of which our family was in need of anyway) and logistics and convenience are taken care of. With the additional help of bicycles and our local ZipCars we were in good shape.

Status is the more intractable issue and I am not yet sure what to do about it.

As it turns out my middle-son feels the loss of our FIT mostly as a loss of status and economic power. All his friends' parents have several vehicles and most of those vehicles are expensive, luxury or sports-cars. Every once in a while, when he and I spend some time together he will ask me about getting another car. He is a strong cyclist and takes pride in biking to school (something which he started last year when we still had two cars). It's different though, I can tell, when biking to school becomes a necessity because there is no other car. And even though, I pull his younger brother behind me in a trailer to the same school every morning, Jacob always elects to ride there by himself. I know it is embarrassing to him to pull into the school yard, with his dad and little brother on a bike and trailer next to him.

But the embarrassment doesn't stop there. Recently, I had to drive Jacob to a basket-ball game and since my wife still had the car I got us a ZipCar. As we were nearing the town where the game was taking place, Jacob starting asking me questions about where on the outside of the car the ZipCar logo can be found. He did not want his friends to see that he was brought in a ZipCar. Since the logo is on only one side, the passenger side, I offered to drop him off in such a way that the passenger side would not face the gym and all the other people who were waiting there. But Jacob asked me drop him off a couple of blocks before we even got to the gym.

Before we got there we talked a little bit about the advantages of a ZipCar. I encouraged him to take pride in doing something that was so environmentally sound, so democratic and so cost-effective. He listened to all those arguments, but he was clear on this matter: he was not be seen in this car with his father driving it.

I am not quite sure yet what to make of this. I do know that I want to respect his embarrassment as I think of it not as a rebellion against me or us but rather as a way for Jacob to form and arrive at his own values. I do feel a certain amount of pain, however, that he won't just agree with me. It's so obvious that this one-car situation is good, right? My own delight about this new-found freedom--freedom from a second car--is not reflected in what Jacob feels about the situation. I wish it were. Really. It is hard not to be in the cultural main-stream. With only one car we definitely are not in that stream (or, one might say, we are, but we're swimming against it). And, for Jacob, having a German father, simply put, reduces the odds of us ever swimming down-stream. Ever.

Some of the benefits of being in a culturally mixed family are less supervision and more trust, treatment of teens not as "kids" but as young adults, Nutella, valuing our children's opinions, etc.

Some of the disadvantages are a reduced likelihood of particpating in American consumerism, often radical political opinions, speedos for men, as well as some strange food-choices such as blood-sausage and liver as well as many different types of cabbage.

However, what I really would like to remember from this, and from other situations in which my sons' embarrassment about us is an issue, is that not only parents get embarrassed when their children don't behave. Children get embarrassed about us as well. It pays to notice these, to make them useful as conversation starters (rather than as argument starters). When parents and children are engaged in dicussions of values, meaningful, life-supporting materials can be generated for both. Children who are willing to question their parents in this way show a great deal of courage, self-confidence and curiosity. We ought to support it as best as we can even when it's hard, even when our own principles and values seem right and old and proven valuable. In this sense, even our car-issue has brought us closer, not only because we have to share one car more often, but also because we had to engage in a conversation that, rather than seeking agreement and congruence between parents and children, encourages position and op-position.

Forget About Parenting

2011-10-08T20:01:00.004-06:00

I have recently been thinking more and more about what I would like to pass on to new and not so new parents about parenting. The phrase that seems to be getting increasing traction in my mind is "forget about parenting." Why? Well, because I believe that my best moments as a parent have actually happened when I could immerse myself in the interaction with my parents as myself completely. These where interactions where I didn't act within the frame-work of parental responsibility, parental authority, parental modeling, parental experience, parental anxiety or parental something else. These are agenda-less interactions that are, nevertheless, full of content. They can be serious, funny, sad, stressed, frustrated, quite varied in other words, but one thing they have in common is that they're always, always, sincere.

Many parents complain about the early years going by too quickly. "They were so cute," they say, "it was so easy to have fun with them," they say, "relating to them was easy," they say. I believe what we parents are saying when we grieve the passing of those first couple of years is that we can no longer simply be ourselves with our children. Pretty soon we have to "teach" them things, right? Table manners, using the potty, numbers, letters, saying "hello" to the neighbor instead of hiding behind our legs and, of course, not to use foul language, etc.

I believe that, every time we believe that we need to "teach" our children something, we act from a fear or belief that we have already missed the train.

In re-reading this last sentence I realized that I used the word believe/f three times. While that may seem rhetorically awkward--and I was about to correct my mistake--I now realize that I was likely going towards a very intuitive place with this: forgetting about parenting is about a "leap of faith," an act of belief in the strongest sense possible: it's about believing that we truly matter to our children as Selves. When we speak with them as Selves, not as teachers, therapists, administrators, principals, admonishers and pastors a miracle happens: they begin to believe in us.

I believe in our children's integrity, in their perspectives and in their genuine and strong desire to connect with us (the latter being not only a cultural development but a biological necessity). Every time we meet with a child, we have an opportunity to connect with them. The big question is whether we can do so in a way that comes from our own genuine Self. Can we do it without strategies, without programs, without pre-conceived notions in mind of what we should do or what should help? Can we listen? Can we share? Can we feel genuine happiness, fun or sadness as we interact with them?

What this means is that we bring to our children, every time we meet them, the focus we bring to a new love. Every time. Yes. Can you sense what I'm getting at? There is a deeply "romantic" aspect to how we need to relate to our children. Yes, and this extends, of course, to when they make mistakes, when the come home with the bruises and scars that come from learning, taking risks, etc. It is so hard to focus on our children in this way.

My favorite German song-writer, Reinhard Mey, has a song about his son not returning home at the "appointed time." Reinhard describes himself as he waits for his son. He sings about his anger, the things he will "teach" his son, things he'll take from him for this "infraction," etc. It gets later and later and his son doesn't show up. Finally, way past mid-night, he comes in the door. All anger, all reproachfulness is forgotten. Reinhard pulls him close in genuine love, a raw sense of attraction to this other being who needs him so much to love him, but who, at the same time will always go his own way.

He has many songs like that. In another one, he tells a story about how he forges his parents' signatures on his own report-card because his grades are so bad. The deception fails and the principal calls the parents in for a meeting. In front of the principal and the boy, Reinhard, the parents assure the principal that these are, indeed, their signatures. One has to wonder, I do myself, how many of us parents would really have the strength of self, the belief in our children and, frankly, the guts to pull something like that off.

So much of what I see in parenting these days is about "threatening" our children. There are threats of physical harm, threats of taking things away, forced labor. When I hear those stories I worry more about the parents than I do about the children. I worry that these parents will miss out, will never experience the romance of meeting with their children as true selves. Can we resist the urge to punish and turn to them instead, listen, love, let go. LLL. Because go they will. Either way. So, why not work on being genuinely connected to them?

Resisting this urge means resisting our own anxiety at failing, at not meeting the standard, at not being responsible.

We must not be afraid of our children. But we must respect them. Some say respect is a kind of fear. Perhaps. But I believe in respect, even for the angry ones for the disgruntled ones, for the ones who act out, who call us names who can't stop being angry. Respecting someone means that we are willing to acknowledge the invisible circle of untouchability around that person. Our children are truly different, truly not like us. So it might be easy to be afraid of them--especially when they begin to have more energy than we do, are bigger than us, faster, more successful, etc. When we approach them we are approaching selves in their very own right. Not blank slates, not carbon copies, not half-baked humans, not little devils. Forgetting about parenting means that we see that circle of untouchability around each of them. It means that we respect them, fully. Wholly.

I am writing this for my three boys, of course, but really it's dedicated to all children. You're amazing! You're a gift! To us!

2011-10-04T08:59:00.001-06:00

Recently, my son Jacob got into a little bit of trouble at his school. As part of his school's cross-country varsity team he was participating in one of their many fall-meets. Finishing among the first in his peer-group has been his goal this season and, even more importantly, finishing the two miles under 13 minutes. he had been inching (or better "seconding") closer and closer to that goal and his excitement and tenaciousness grew proportionally. At this particular race, Jacob narrated this later, he could see the clock throughout the last 100 yards of the race. Just a few yards from the finish-line he saw the seconds hand finish minute 13 and move into the 14th minute. He crossed the line at 13:02. Objectively, a wonderful achievement, not just this season but over the last few years. Jacob himself sees it that way, no question. But when he crossed the line and knew he had not met his personal goal the frustration was high and the combination of exhaustion, anticipation, let-down and, perhaps, even a form of fear all led to one big scream: FUCK!!!!!!!------------Nothing else, no yelling at others, no blaming of circumstances, no statements about never running again, no, just this one exasperated cry, not dissimilar, perhaps, from what we would say if we hit our thumb while attempting to hammer a nail. The rest of the story is quickly told: there was a complaint to Jacob's coach from another coach, there was a phone-call from the coach to us, two apologies from Jacob (one to his coach, one to the hosting coach). Jacob also was disqualified from the meet in question, had to set out for the next meet and was reinstated thereafter. There was no anger about these consequences, neither on the side of the "givers" nor on the side of the "receiver." There was and is a shared understanding that it is always good to learn more about expressing anger in acceptable ways.

In a twist of irony, while Jacob is supposed to learn how to avoid the F-word, Gabriel, our youngest, came home with the assignment to find at least five f-words (words that begin with the letter "f") and glue pictures of it on a piece of paper. One must wonder when he will discover "the" F-word. Or has he already?

Background: Leslie and I had been noticing an increase in crude-language-use between our two oldest boys. For Jacob it often seemed to be connected to his current favorite in video-games, Black Ops. For Noah it more seemed like a general way of asserting himself in the world of his peers. Note, please, that both of them continued to do quite well in school, dressed appropriately, kept to their schedules, etc. It was just the language.

Background to the background: Our family has had a very hard year, no further details. It wouldn't come as a surprise to me to know that, at least in part, this use of language cannot be blamed on the boys or on Black Ops or on peer-pressure but also on us, the parents, who struggled to keep their act together in the last 12 months. It is an expression of rage and frustration, exhaustion and anticipation, and of a let-down. And, yes, there is a kind of fear too: will our family meet the anticipated and expected goal, even though this has been an incredibly hard and taxing race.

Background to the background to the background: I just cannot stand the obsession with the "f-word." It reminds me a bit of Harry Potter where everyone gasps in horror when he dares to say the "V-word," Voldemort, without worrying that he'll conjure up something evil. What's the difference between the "F-word" and the "V-word?" It is that the V-word stands for something completely evil, the F-word DOES NOT.

The English language is a beautiful language. It's continued march through the world, its obvious power as the global lingua franca, is not just a symbol of American power and cultural colonialism. It is also simply a statement about this language itself, its flexibility, its adaptability, its ability to express certain things in certain ways, it's emotional expressiveness (think of rock-music), its musical characteristics as well as its amazing penchant for brevity. The F-word is part of this language. It is a beautiful word in a beautiful language and can express passion in all its variations--remember that the word "passion" actually comes from the Greek/Latin roots for "suffering/joy." Incidentally, I have been watching episodes of the tv-show Deadwood--a wild west show set in South-Dakota during the gold-rush. The use of "fuck" and "cock-sucker" and other expletives seems inflationary in this show and, yet, several people have assured me that the dialogues in this show are nothing short of Shakespearian. One friend explained "you have to let it wash over you to get the aesthetic dimension of this language." And, yes, that actually is what I did when went to watch a recent stage-performance of Macbeth, I let it "wash over me."

One more thing: growing up in Germany I simply didn't have to deal with the same fears of foul language that seem to plague this country. One of my earliest memories (not sure if it's a memory because I was told the story or if I remember it directly) is of me enjoying the wonderful acoustic qualities of the stairway in the apartment complex where I lived by screaming, at the top of my lungs, the German word for "shit"--Scheisse. It's not that nobody cared and, I believe, my mother was slightly embarrassed by the whole thing. But it also wasn't a big deal. Certainly, it didn't lead anyone to speculate how my family communicates with each other when we're alone. Soccer is a game with very high emotional stakes. Players frequently swear or get angry. The line is drawn not about what they say but to whom. Swearing to themselves is no offense, swearing at the ref or the audience is a problem and there will be consequences.

So, while I believe that everything worked out well in Jacob's case--he learned something important about his use of language, about the country and culture in which he lives and about himself--I also feel uneasy about the unspoken part of this incident. I wonder, too, if the people of this country as a whole might fare better expressing their anger in words and not with weapons, wars and other attempts to subdue those who have harmed them or attempted to do so. Does "anger management" possibly include learning about how to use the F-word and its many cousins rather than getting rid of them?

More Than A Feeling

2011-08-08T08:24:00.004-06:00

One of the many smaller and bigger evening routines I have with my youngest, Gabriel, is singing a German "Lied" for him while gently scratching his back (or legs or arms, he'll decide) at the same time. We have an array of songs we like to sing together. "Together" here means that he'll sometimes sing along, but more often he will sing a slightly altered, funny version of the song while I'm singing the "real" one. Up to the very last minutes before going to sleep, Gabriel likes to be silly. His laugh is contagious and I would never want to deny him that silliness. But then he quiets down and the very last song often is one where he almost falls into a meditative trance of sorts. --- It's a precious time of the day.

I have been thinking about this time a lot lately. For one, it occurred to me that I do not have any recollection of when the last time was that I sang for either of my older two sons. I just don't remember and I didn't know at the time, of course, that that would be the last time. It was a routine, then too. Each would get some time of singing and having their backs scratched. For another, I realize that this ritual, for me, is as old as I am. I remember especially my grandmother--who is now almost 94--sitting by my bed-side and doing exactly that: singing and scratching my back at the same time. I spent a lot of time at my grand-parents home when I was a pre-schooler. My bed there was called "die Butze." It was a bed that was built against the wall with curtains around it, so that it felt like a cave. A very safe and cozy cave. Down to the songs she sang for me the experience was the same. I can still hear her voice (with a strong tremolo in it) and feel her finger-nails gently stroking my back. Magical times they were!

Last night I told Gabriel how "Uroma" was the one who often sang for me and scratched my back. He was listening carefully. I told him, too, that Uroma looks at his picture every morning now and says "Guten Morgen, Gabriel" (good morning, Gabriel). He turned over cozying up into his blanky and just said can you sing "Der Mond" for me (Der Mond ist aufgegangen/The moon has risen). So, I did. Choking up at moments, remembering.

Yes, at times it feels like such a loss that these times passed with my older two boys. But something else occurred to me very recently. Noah and I were driving home from dropping off his girl-friend. We've been having a somewhat harder time with each other lately. I am so much more sensitive(in a bad way) to his need for independence and separateness from us, his parents, and especially from me his father. It was about 10pm. I had plugged my phone into the car's stereo and we were listening to "More Than A Feeling" by the group Boston (an old favorite of mine). Noah liked that song a lot and asked, if he could plug in his phone for some music. I said "yes" and thought at the same time "let's just drive a bit." And so we did. Instead of going directly home, we got on the high-way listening to Eminem, Linkin' Park even Elton John (Tiny Dancer) and, of course, Far, Far Away (Slade). Our windows were rolled down and we hardly spoke. And, yes, the moon was rising! Then it occurred to me: here it is again, that time. It's changed somewhat. I'm not singing German songs for him anymore, and I'm also not scratching his back. But we're engaged with each other through this medium, music, every once in a while even humming or singing along, together. It was magical, once again!

"I love you," I said as we pulled into the garage 45 minutes later. "I love you too," he said, then, ran inside to answer a text from his girl-friend. Only a few more years are left until he'll leave the house for good. I am hoping for--and feel reassured of many more surprising moments of magic with him.

Pedaling the Garden Walk

2011-07-04T22:24:00.003-06:00

About two weeks ago, a week after my camping trip to MI with my boys, the unthinkable occurred: I was indulged by an all-family outing, by bike (!), that was unconnected to a larger vacation. Nothing more than a simple Saturday morning bike ride that took us about four miles from our home in Urbana, IL to four lovely homes and their gardens in Champaign, IL, Urbana's twin-sister.

Annually,a group of folks who love gardening and who formed a group called "Master Gardeners" invites the public to visit about eight beautiful gardens which all of them have tended cooperatively for a couple of years. My friend John, a master gardener himself, had given me two tickets and, in so doing, he had reminded me of this very special treat for gardeners.

I did not expect to receive a positive response from my family, and there was a lot of back and forth about it in the days and hours before. But in the end everyone was on a bike (or in the trailer--Gabriel), helmeted (Noah resisted until the very last second to wear one because it would interfere with his admittedly cool hair-do and ready to go. I admit that I bribed them somewhat with the possibility of "lots of stops on the way for soda, ice-cream and the like." And while this was a clear bribe it also was a way of coaxing myself into a slower, more relaxed, pedaling pace. It should be fun, I thought, to check out beautiful gardens, pedal to the next one, have a drink or something on the way and spend a whole Saturday morning in that way. And it was.

As a child and teen I resented working in my parents' garden. The only thing I could really bring myself to do was mowe the lawn. I did so conscientiously. But neither planting nor weeding nor harvesting were activites I particularly liked. I don't remember ever feeling what I feel now when I enter someone else's or even my own garden: a sense of an intense and acute spiritual presence. To be sure, I also feel this way when I am in an ungardened natural environment or, for that matter, when I walk through our local Meadowbrook Park (a prairie park that features natural areas in combination with statues and sculptures). So this is a sense not relegated alone to gardens. Rather, it is a theme that seems to bring me back to nature, but nature seen not alone through its own prism but also through the lens of human activity, like gardens and parks. For me entering these gardens, in other words, was like entering a church. It was better than entering a church.

Three fifths of my family did not quite see it that way. There was a lot of giggling and jesting about the gardeners, their work, and the most inappropriate thing one could do in such a space (actually, not at all unlike what, at one time or another, goes through most people's minds when they are in an actual church). I was annoyed at first, but calmed down quickly when I reminded myself that the the "goal" of this excursion had been to relax, not to be serious. And in a way, just by cycling out of our drive-way together, the goal had already been reached. Everything else was nothing but the icing on the cake. But we all get greedy sometimes, don't we?

We ended up seeing four gardens, ran into a few friends (one of them, Alison, the woman who did our family photo-shoot in 2008). And even a relatively serious accident that happened to our son Jacob on the way to the frozen yoghurt store didn't change the mood. His front-tire had gotten stuck in the rungs of a rain-sewer lid (do city engineers realize what a hazard these things are when they're not put in properly, i.e., perpendicular to traffic flow?). He had lost his balance slipped of his pedal and scraped his calf on the crank and arm on the handle-bar. The front-tire blew as well. Fortunately I had my patch-kit on me and we continued after only a short few minutes (which my wife used to check out a few books from the Champaign Public Library, which is were the accident happened). The hole in the tire was big and the patch didn't hold up very well. We had to stop and pump a few times, but, in the end made it to the Frozen Yoghurt place and, afterwards, a bike-store where we picked up a new tube.

On the way home my wife said she wanted to do something like this again. Especially with a clear sense of destination, she thought, it was much easier to be on a trip like this. I agree. Noah, Jacob and Gabriel chimed in, in their own ways. We all were helped, I think by the admiring comments of some who saw us pull up to the next garden. One woman had seen us right after we had taken off from home. She voiced her surprise about how "far" we had cycled. I hope we'll do this again soon. I hope, too, that something about gardens, cycling, and family was passed on to my sons on this day. The sweetness of this kind of togetherness, disconnected from daily routines, but disconnected especially also from our gadgets and often very one-sided and isolated activities, that sweetness lasts for me and it was, I believe, a balm for all five of us.

Schnuller Stories: Losing his Pacifier

2011-07-03T20:29:00.005-06:00

Our youngest, Gabriel, is now five and a half years old. He will be entering kindergarten in the fall. We were glad to have him wait for a year. This last year was definitely important for him developmentally. This also means, of course, that it was important for us, develomentally. Having a third child--after seven years of going back and forth over whether it really would be a good idea or not--puts one in a very strange position of combined pragmatics and penchant to prolong one's child time of being small. On the pragmatic side Gabriel was allowed to do things, like be by himself on the trampoline or watch a full length DVD at a much earlier age than were his older brothers. The pragmatism of this lay more than anything in the fact that it made our lives easier. On the other hand, Gabriel required a diaper, every time he felt a "number two" coming on until he was four. He also continues to not eat most of the foods we normally eat as a family (except burgers). But most of all, until just two weeks ago, Gabriel had continued to keep his pacifier (or Schnuller as we lovingly call it in our family).

This did not happen unconsciously on our part, however. Leslie and I talked about it frequently and, yet, every time came to the same conclusion: not yet. How did we rationalize it? Well, mostly we told ourselves that Gabriel was doing enough things that made him seem more "mature" than his older brothers at that age. For example, Gabriel at 3 years of age, on his own, brought his plate to the sink, scraped left-overs into the garbage and made sure he didn't spill anything in the process. He slept well and often. Never much trouble getting him to go to sleep. Also, though he required a diaper for number two, he slept without a diaper early (compared to the other two) and in his whole life only had two accidents. The Schnuller was a way of "giving him a break." Gabriel was doing so many things right, we couldn't bring ourselves to take his beloved Schnuller it was. Even medical advice from his dentist and pediatrician didn't change that for us.

We had gotten to a theoretical point of only letting him have his Schnuller at night. But Gabriel was smart enough to beat that rule many times. Mostly what he said was he was tired and wanted to snooze a bit. Another thing he would like to do is say he just wanted the Schnuller by him, not put it in his mouth. Of course, minutes later when we returned to the where he was sitting the thing was in his mouth. If he heard us approach he'd try to hide it quickly. Many small dysfunctions in other words.

We had reminders, though, that by letting him keep his Schnuller we were not only giving Gabriel a break but also ourselves. Feeble attempts at "asking" him to try sleeping without it failed miserably. It just seemed easier to continue to hope he would outgrow it. Most importantly, however, our older two sons, Noah and Jacob, kept pushing us about it. It was annoying, to say the least. Our sons were giving us parenting advice for their younger brother? Come again? But the truth is: they were right. Gabriel needed to lose his Schnuller and we needed to make this possible. By the way, our older sons' criticism of the way in which we raise Gabriel didn't end with the Schnuller. They both feel that we baby him too much. According to them, he gets away with too much whining, we are not principled enough and we speak to him in a way not suitable for a five year old boy. I am not sure about these issues and I am curious to think more about "envy-issues" that might also be in the mix here. But they were right on the Schnuller issue.

Two weeks ago I decided to take matters into my very own hands. My sons and myself had decided to go to Michigan for a three day camping trip. This would be the time, I decided, to "lose" his Schnuller. (When I was 2 my parents took my Schnuller saying the mag-pie had stolen it. Apparently, I was upset, but mostly mad at the mag-pie. So it seemed easy enough to use the camping-trip for something similar.)
Gabriel had, as he usually does, taken all the "important" things with him. His blanky (a tattered old piece of an old tee of mine) a soft toy shark and . . . his Schnuller. As soon as we got to the camp-site and had set up camp. When he spread these items out on his sleeping-bag I knew this would be harder than I had imagined. While the boys were still out, I took the Schnuller and hid it in the car.

Gabriel was upset. The worst part about it was that he kept saying "I knew that it was here, I had brought it and put it here." But the worst part was when he said in tears "I lost my best friend." So, I had hit the jack-pot: I was a bad parent and a liar. I kept quiet though and told him I would sleep next to him and scratch his back for a very long time. He finally settled down and, after a relatively short time, fell asleep. Of course, when he woke up to pee he was looking for it again. He was surprisingly chipper throughout the following day, but asked me about it again in the evening. I simply reminded him of how well he had done without it the night before. He fell asleep and slept through the night. The following day, on the way home, he starting talking about the extra Schnullers he had at home. That was my chance to make things at least partially right. Instead of "losing" those too, I told him I would take them away because he had done so well without one on our camping trip. Gabriel was not happy, but he accepted it.

What has changed since two weeks ago? Well, much less than we had feared. Gabriel still goes to bed easily. If anything, he seems to have gotten more outspoken about his likes and dislikes. He may be a bit more clingy right now and his skepticism with strangers is a tad more palpable. But he is also more likely to explore and be curious about things, especially when it involves climbing, sliding and jumping. The other thing that has changed is that his brothers seem to feel some pride about having been catalysts in this process. I am happy for them about that. I am happy, too, that they felt confident and invested enough to make their opinion known. Their opinions about each other will likely not always be right, but they were intuitive in this case and helped us get unstuck. .

On Falling in Love, Freedom and Privacy

2011-05-31T20:57:00.005-06:00

One of my favorite American folk-singers, Jim Croce, sings the following words in his song Alabama Rain: "We were only kids but then, I never heard it said, that kids can't fall in love and feel the same . . . I can still remember the first time I told you I loved you." Here is the link to that song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc-ZbRjZzOU

Recently, my older two sons Noah and Jacob have fallen in love with someone. And since they would cringe at me revealing any further details, I will let it suffice with just that single statement. However, what I would like to think about in this blog is how very meaningful this first experience of emotional attachment to a stranger is.

There is, first of all, the very experience of romance itself. Aside from the fact that romance can work almost like a drug, that it can make us crazy and unpredictable, it can also be seen as the very generator behind change, creativity and transcendence of self. Cp. Doitsch's The Brain That Changes Itself on how romance enhances our ability to face obstacles and overcome our own hesitation about accomplishing things.

Falling in love with someone also marks a new stage in the detachment process between parents and children. Most parents I know, including myself, are fairly unprepared for this aspect of teenage love. And if they are prepared for it they are so in a defensive and apprehensive way that suggests they don't fully understand the developmental significance of their children's discovery of "love." If they understand it, they may very well still fail to appreciate it.

Connected to the detachment issue, but still slightly different is that falling in love is strongly associated with "freedom." Falling in love establishes our children as free agents in the world. One could argue that friendships with others have the same effect. But, I would argue, friendships rarely have the all consuming and powerfully mind-altering effect that love relationships have.

It is in this latter context, the context of freedom, that I am often consumed by an almost paralyzing grief. In a nutshell: The concept of freedom does no longer serve as a guiding light for those of us who are responsible for children. We have come to think of freedom as synonymous with teen-pregnancy, STDs, drugs, teen-suicide, failing grades, lack of motivation and many more.

And yet, the more we lean towards restricting our children's freedom the less likely we are to have honest and open relationships with them. Moreover, forcing our children into secrecy, for they will do what they desire to do with or without our consent, will drive them into a life-style that, ultimately, is toxic to them. Listen to Carl Gustav Jung on the subject of secrecy: "The maintenance secrets acts like a toxic poison which alienates the possessor from the community." And further down Jung explains that "every personal secret has the effect of a sin or of guilt--whether or not it is, from the standoint of popular morality, a wrongful secret" (Modern Man In Search of A Soul, pp. 31, 33).

It is no wonder, then, that teens tend to "share" these secrets, almost in a confessional way, with their peers. Sharing them in this way is a way of avoiding secrecy and, thus, avoiding the poisonous effects of their experiences. Without such sharing human beings, and teens in particular, tend towards mental illness such as depression, anxiety and other disorders. These often are followed by other behaviors that will certainly drive the person into more secrecy. It is a vicious circle.

As adults we have a responsibility to teach our children openness and honesty. Most of us will put their name under that statement I believe. But perhaps not under this one: in order to accomplish the first we have to learn how to be non-judgmental with our children. We do not have to understand everything they do, say or listen to. But we have to show and maintain interest when they do speak to us. We do have to learn, furthermore, that honesty and openness do, curiously, emerge from our acceptance of our children's privacy.

Privacy and secrecy are not the same thing at all. But they are often confused. Secrecy is always accompanied by a feeling of guilt and/or shame about the secret. Privacy is something I prefer to do in private, but don't feel ashamed about doing. While secrecy is usually linked to a serious unwillingness to talk about the secret, privacy usually is not.

Falling in love is, for a teen, a powerful way to catapult himself into both a new realm of freedom and a new realm of privacy. As parents we do encounter our own emotional complications when t his step happens. After all, so far we had still been checking their homework, whether or not they brushed their teeth and whether they made it to school on time. We are used to micro-managing them, in other words.

Curiosity About Males

2011-05-09T20:29:00.007-06:00

One of the greatly appreciated comments on a recent blog asked why I believed something to be only true about boys when it is/could be true about girls as well. This is a frequently asked question and I keep pondering how I can answer it honestly and with some succinctness.

The strongest feeling I have about this is that I am not primarily interested in how boys and girls differ from each other. I am sure they do differ greatly and I am equally sure that we have no way of saying how. I studied philosophy and religion for years. And if there is one outcome that I feel unhesitatingly convinced about then it is the problems we invite in when we essentialize.

Essentialization is, linguistically speaking, an unescapable datum of human existence. Every time we use some form of "to be" in a sentence we are referring to "essence" (the Latin translation of "to be" is "esse"). The problem with essentialization is that it wants to claim something as solid and unshakable truth every time it is used and about everything in its purview. However, when we make essential statements about say boys and girls or males and females or anything in the world at all we commit a logical error. This leaves us with the difficult proposition that, in order to speak truthfully about any subject, we will have to relentlessly revise what we're saying about that subject.

This is the answer to this problem that brings us close to the absurd itself.

There is another, more practical response. It goes like this: I am writing about boys and males not to distinguish them from girls and females. No, I am writing about them because I believe that in our culture we're guilty of stereotyping males in ways that renders them lifeless, uninteresting, moronic and one-dimensional. I believe that as a culture we have spent centuries on understanding women (not always favorably, true, and often by men themselves, also true), but we have largely failed to describe and understand men. I also believe that we are a culture that is afraid of males. (For good reasons, you may say, isn't the proportion of males who commit violent crimes much higher than that of women?) Yes, you're right about that. But if it's true, then isn't it about time we investigate this with higher goal in mind than simply to say "boys will be boys?"

My hope is that I can spark in my readers a new curiosity about males. My hope is that, instead of judging the 10 year old who threatens his peers or instead of dismissing the 50 year old who seems to have become too routine or perhaps arrogant, we begin to wonder about them, ask questions and understand the complexity of their existence.

We All Have A Terrorist Or Two In Our Life

2011-05-06T21:18:00.006-06:00

Now that Osama bin Laden is dead I may be allowed to say something that I have held back for a long time: we all likely have a terrorist or two in our lives. And the question is: Do we need to have them?

When I was the tender age of nineteen I sent an application to the German Diplomatic Service. Together with a small group of others I was invited for two days of interviews, tests, presentations and the like. One of the assignments we had to accomplish was to choose a topic from a list of 30 or so, put together a short talk about this topic and then present it to group of seven senior diplomats. I had the bad luck of a late draw. Most topics were already given to others. One interesting one was left: Talk about the meaning of Ayatollah Khomeini for the modern world. I had actually given this topic some thought before and had already come to the conclusion that Khomeini's appearance on the political landscape sent an important message to the US and its allies about the power and force of Islam. I warned in my talk that in order to maintain some reasonable influence in the middle east the US and their allies needed to learn from and about Islam. Khomeini's appearance meant that the western world couldn't always get what it wanted.

You can imagine that with this talk I had given myself the kiss of death. I realized it as I was speaking to the panel. Their faces spoke volumes. Honestly, when I wrote the talk, I had no idea. I was naive. I was only nineteen. I can assure you that the naivete has left me since then. 31 years later I have seen some things that can happen and I can honestly say that while the appearance of an other on our "scene" is an important event, nobody should have to deal with planes being flown into sky-scrapers. And, of course, nobody should have to deal with drones threatening to blow them out of their homes.

So, why, you may be wondering, why is he talking about terrorism, etc. in a column devoted to fathering? I can tell you why. I am talking about this because our children--foster, adopted, own--are others that have appeared on our "scene." And sometimes, when they instill fear in us, they're like little (or not so little) terrorists. So, the question is, when they attack us and tell us they hate us and say that we're the most evil thing they have ever known, when they openly or discretely wish us dead . . . should we blow them out of the water? Or can we give peace a chance by assuming:

a) they feel terror themselves proportionate to how they terrorize us
b) they actually have important things to say to us when they get like that.

All depends on how we can move on from the initial attack. Can we overcome the feeling of revenge and anger? Or is that just appeasement? All I know is that hate makes us blind. Blind is not the same as determined. We have had a lot of political blindness going on on all sides lately. But we have very little seeing determination to balance all the blindness.

Children and terrorists have at least one thing in common: they challenge our notion of power, self-assurance, our sense of entitlement and our vain certainty that only we know what's right. The lessons we have to learn are not always fun. They shake the foundations of what we might believe about ourselves. But they always seem to come from a place within ourselves that we actually know, but have attempted to ignore or suppress for a long time. Here are some of the lessons I had to learn:

a) I am often dismissive in tone and posture; dismissive of what my children are saying to me.
b) I interrupt and believe I have the right to do so.
c) I am micro-manage their chores, tasks, etc.
d) I am too friendly and, therefore, not necessarily able to stand up to a teacher of theirs or simply stand up for what I need.

My children, especially, the two that have now both reached teenhood, have thrown "bombs" at those things. Repeatedly. At times I did a wonderful job listening, but at other times shame made my attempts mediocre and unconvincing. My children, I realize, have the capacity to express the shadow-content of my soul. And if I neglect this fact and simply fight them for being obnoxious with me, if in other words, I act as if those charges against me are completely absurd, I risk fighting my children, repressing them and ignoring them like I have tried to ignore my own shadow. I will surely not be able to love them for who they are.

And the next time they throw a "bomb" at me I might be running the risk of "killing" them in a senseless act of revenge, anger and shame.

So, to answer my question from the beginning, we do need those "terrorists", those Others in our lives. They keep us honest in ways we, by ourselves, cannot. Let's greet them graciously and with respect.

Guantanamo Bay Strategies in Parenting and Other Relationships

2011-04-29T19:41:00.006-06:00

I have mentioned him frequently before in talks and blogs, Reinhard Mey, possibly the foremost German folk-singer and song-writer. In one of his more recent songs "Es ist alles okay in Guantanamo Bay" Mey criticizes a particularly resilient strain of infectious American politics and culture: this is the endless use of the good/evil dichotomy. It is no less American than is McDonald's and, I would argue, it is about as dangerous for your health. Some lines from the song will help illustrate my point:

Wir sagen schwarz ist schwarz und weiss ist weiss
Und wenn wir das so sagen, dann genuegt das als Beweis.

(We say black is black and white is white
And when we say it that way that's enough proof)

Another line:

Wir sind die Guten und die anderen sind die Schlechten
So einfach ist das mit den Menschenrechten

(We are the good ones and the others are the bad ones
That's how easy it is with human rights)

Unfortunately, as I mentioned above already this theme is rampant not only in politics but also in American culture in general. Think about how America continue to support capital punishment for example. Or think about the use of oil and gas as primary sources of energy. America widely believes in its natural-given right to do these things. America feels entitled.

One particular area in which I have noticed this paradigm is the area of parenting. Somehow, no matter how much parents in this country swear up and down that they're for democracy and equal rights, when it comes to parenting and child-rearing they will say "this is not a democracy." And they will act the part. When children open their mouths to voice their discontent, adults get impatient, condescending and often outright disrespectful of their children's human rights. Interestingly, these dynamics are often euphemized and excused as necessary parental reactions to transgressions of the child. By labeling the child as "talking back," "disobedient," "out of line," etc., the child is blamed for the conflict. The parent was only "reacting." Parents often forget to ask themselves and their children these very important questions:

How did I contribute to the beginning and escalation of this conflict?

Am I aware of my tone of voice, my body posture, my facial expressions and my use of condescension, sarcasm and irony when I speak to my child?

Have I modelled for my child how it is possible to get underneath aggression without shaming him/her?

Have I asked my child about their need(s) for trust, reassurance, love, etc.?

Am I willing to admit that I don't have all the answers either?

This list is not comprehensive. There are more questions, but all of them carry the same characteristic of humility, empathy and a passion to relate to the child eye-to-eye with a sense of parity and equality. This is precisely the point where Reinhard Mey comes in with his observations about American politics in Guantanamo Bay. Equality between adults and children when it comes to the respectful treatment of children is less than a fiction: it is virtually non-existent. And it is so easy to hide behind phrases like "as a parent it is my task to 'protect' my child." And in the name of protection we talk down to him/her and we make sure that they are simply less than we are.

I remember one particular situation in which a father during a family session treated his 15 year old son disrespectfully with sullenness, angry glances and exaggerations of the son's behavior. When the son finally was able to respond he said: Dude, you're making this really hard! . . .

Can you imagine the father's response? Yes, he flew off the handle. He did not want to be called "dude." In his mind, the father-son script just doesn't allow for such a way to relate to a father. Worse even, however, he could not (and, more importantly, would not) see how his behavior and actions contributed to his son's choice of words. He yelled at his son, put him down and humiliated him and thereby, in my mind, made 100% sure that his son would soon ignore him completely. Why try, right? Parents then often expect me to work with the child, to teach him/her to be more respectful. This is an impossible task, unless I can begin with the insight that parents can be wrong, that their anger and aggression is no more justifiable than their children's and that they, too, need to continually work on their ability to think and speak respectfully to and about others.

The problem with this dichotomous attitude is that it is intent on shaming and hurting: I am good and you're bad. It is never that clear. In fact, in my experience good and bad are almost always evenly distributed in every relationship I have come to know.

This principle also applies to marital relationships, friendships, etc. Unfortunately, very few counselors and similarly few couples have the verbal and communicative skills to uphold this principle and make it work for the relationship. In my own practice, when I sense that one person is shaming another, I stop them and ask them to rephrase what they're going to say (with a keen eye on not accusing, labeling or shaming the other person). But I, too, fail at this and fall back into a dichotomous attitude. It is very easy to side with the angry female (no matter how debasing and aggressive she gets) and to go against the angry male (male anger continues to be seen as worse and more destructive than female anger). We continue to expect males to be stoic in the face of female anger and females to fall apart in the face of male anger.

Right and wrong are by nature ambiguous and deeply intertwined states. This ambiguity and entwinedness holds true within the individual as well as between people. And it is why we must refrain from forcing others into statements that only state one side. We disallow "yeah, but . . . phrases", call them defensive when, in fact, they are more comprehensive and true to a picture of reality (an impossible picture, one that we must reiterate all the time, because our ears and eyes are only trained to see dichotomies). To be sure, such a yea-but-phrase needs to contain the meaning and thrust of the other person. But once it has done that it should be able to continue on to the "but" part.

All speaking while clarifying some things also obscures others. So, in the process of unveiling truth we continually veil it elsewhere. In other words, speaking itself requires trust, from the get-go. Trust that the other means-well, that his/her intent is to understand and be understood. That his/her intent is to come closer to truth without, however, ever claiming that truth has been reached. Human discourse is asymptotic, it only approximates truth. Such is the human condition. Shaming is an intent to suppress this ambiguity in the name of a truth that does not exist. It needs to stop. For in light of a whole nation claiming it has found the truth and is now called to protect it, in light of a nation that has proclaimed its intent on suppressing the voice of the other and the voice of otherness in its own voice, in light of a nation that seeks to reinforce this position by continually dropping bombs and threatening violence and retribution against those who veer from the "truth" what is left? How should the other respond to such repression?

The two images in the front of this essay--dichotomy and the yin and yang--perfectly illustrate the difference between a comprehensive and a dichotomous view. The reason why the yin and yang is not a dichotomy is, of course, the presence of the opposite dots. Can we do this? Can we learn how to be aware of the dot of the other in our own sense of self?

The Deep Search for Spirituality: Caves, Burrows and Other Places

2011-04-29T07:30:00.010-06:00

I must have been about 8, maybe 9 years old when my best friend Victor and I found it unbearable not to investigate the empty neighbor's house, just adjacent to my parents' property. Victor and I called ourselves "blood-brothers" because we had once scratched our arms with a sharp stone, pressed our arms together and, thus, mixed our bloods to become blood-brothers.

We circled the house a few times and concluded that the only way into would be by climbing up to a small window above the front door, breaking it, and wiggling through the small space into the house. I remember the awkwardness of breaking something on purpose. While I had broken things by accident breaking something with intent for the purpose of getting somewhere else is something I had never done before. I still don't prefer this option of making it to my goals. I would rather find a way around breaking things to get where I want to get. I remember, too, that it was more difficult to break the glass than we had thought. We tapped on it with trepidation at first, but then with increasing courage. The sound of the glass when it finally broke scared me. I couldn't help feeling something illicit creeping up my back. But the pull of the mysterious empty house and, perhaps, also Victor's presence next to me propelled me forward. We just "needed" to get in. And we did.

Once inside we explored the two floors, but to our dismay didn't find anything that would have truly interested us: no dead bodies, no hidden away stashes of food, no secret notes, not even a forgotten tool of some sort. Only empty rooms with stains on the walls and floors, a few old mattresses lying around. We were disappointed. Our need for adventure had been taken for a ride. This empty house, so full of promise from the outside, became boring very quickly.

Altogether we probably spent about 15 minutes in the house. We climbed out and went on to new adventures. The house was quickly forgotten, just one thing on a boy's neverending search for excitement, mystery and physical engagement. But that same evening, our door-bell rang a few times, impatiently. Our neighbor, Herr Pump, stood at our front door. I just caught the words "ihr Sohn" (your son) and "eingebrochen" (broke in) and something dawned on me that I had not conceived the time through this event: this adventure was actually a legal transgression! My dad, in his usual quiet way, just listened to Herr Pump (he did not confront me in front of him) and, after he was gone, briefly talked to me about it. I remember sharing my profound astonishment about the label Herr Pump had given the whole thing: "Einbruch" (break-in). Up to that point "Einbruch" in my mind had been for the purpose of "Diebstahl" (theft). We didn't take anything, right? We didn't even think we could take something, had we found anything. No, our intent rather was this ineffable, mysterious excitement that pulled us forward. "Einbruch" seemed inadequate all-around to talk about what happened in the afternoon.

I did feel ashamed though and tried, I think, to blame it on Victor, partially. My dad didn't go there with me however. In fact, I don't recall him even saying "mach das nicht noch mal" (don't do that again). He must have paid for the glass and Herr Pump never mentioned it again.

I am left to wonder about whether such experiences, such strong desire to go into caves and cave-like spaces, even when it is at the cost of breaking in, is part of the boy-code. I certainly have come across many stories of boys who, for one reason or another, have been attracted to caves, burrows, secret hide-aways and similar places. And, yes, for a while they hold out in such places, may even bring food, poetry, music and girls (Dead Poets' Society) to such a place.

But it's not just that we want to hide, I believe, it also is that we expect to find something there. But we don't know what that might be. On the beach we dig and dig deeper and deeper into the dirt, until there is water. But the water itself gives only a short-lived happiness. Then we make tunnels to see the water flow from one hole to the next. But ultimately we want to continue digging. And if we came out in China (as some like to say) that would be both an experience and a disappointment. Because even China is not what we're looking for.

So there is a profound restlessness in us. Some have called it a "wildness," other's call it ADHD. I believe that this is a "romantic" restlessness. And, ultimately, I believe that comprised in this romantic restlessness (my favorite label for this phenomenon) is our (males')search for spirituality, for in-spiration, for a palpable connection with the sacred. We experience this palpable connection not as "finding something," but rather as "looking for something." In other words, we will continue to look for it, because that's where our spirituality resides, in the search. It does not reside in the finding and we will never "find" the sacred. But we do experience the extreme pleasure, tension and ecstasy of our connection to it.

Shame and Anger, Cont'd

2011-04-05T20:51:00.004-06:00

In his book Die Jungen-Katastrophe (The Boy Katastrophe) author and speaker Frank Beuster writes this about a boy's vulnerability: "Especially boys who see themselves as weaker than others wish to have their sense of self-worth boosted continually. In order not to feel as complete failures or losers and, then, be pulled into a vicious circle of failure, boys clearly require more praise and acknowledgement. In order to solidify their personality boys have a continual need to be told about their strengths, even if those strengths are not always of primary scholastic relevance." Here is an example of what Beuster is talking about from and e-mail exchange I had with the parents of a twelve year old adopted boy (I call him C):

Boys in general, but especially boys like C [who are adopted], are in constant need of praise and acknowledgement, even when the things they are proud and happy about are not academically relevant. Without such acknowledgement they cannot develop a solid personality platform to stand on. It's about confidence. C does not have much confidence in his writing skills. Admitting that is an acknowledgement of defeat for C. Given his otherwise quite competitve nature, this seems almost counter-intuitive (except that his strong competitive nature probably also is a result of his confidence issues). So, his aggressiveness doesn't mean he is confident. It means the opposite. His throwing in the towel about writing is honest (his rationalization of it, i.e., that he won't need it as an athlete, of course, is not).

So, I would say to C "wow, you worked 35 minutes on writing and were distracted for only 15 min. That must have been hard. I am amazed you lasted that long." (Here I would insert a story about a boy who was so scared of writing he couldn't get a single word on the page). "I am sure many other people who, like you don't care about writing, would have given up much earlier." Then I would tack on, depending on his reaction to the first part, "so, was it worth it? Do you feel you learned something important about writing in those 35 minutes. Tell me what did you learn?"

I do not think that it is helpful for the teacher to personalize C's resistance to writing (by being hurt that he doesn't appreciate writing the way she does). In that same way I don't think that C's resistance is disrespectful. Low confidence is not a respect issue. Aggression, on the other hand, is.

Strategies for us adults to deal with our children's low self-confidence include things like

--willingness to experiment with a gentler tone and content; this can never be stressed enough.

--a willingness to be empathic (i.e., really understand what a situation looks like from the child's perspective),

--a willingness to tolerate that our experience with learning may not match theirs (they get to have their own feelings about learning and need not have the same feelings we had when we were their age).
--willingness to talk about how much we love learning. If possible compare that love to something we know the child loves to do.

--a willingness to tap into the child's passions and use them (but not misuse them) as vehicles for his/her learning. (For a child who is athletically inclined like C this could include essays about the history of the trampoline, teaching manuals for trampoline amateurs, autobiographies about his love of athletics, questions about acceleration when on a bike, calculating speed and height, etc. the possibilities are infinite.)

A long time ago someone published a book titled All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. I wonder if just the idea of a single experience leading to so many different learning opportunities could be useful also in order to understand how we can engage our children. This, of course, means that we have to know them enough to teach them.

In order to understand male aggression we need to understand more how a boy processes his subjectively felt sense of weakness.

First of all, 99% of boys feel weaker than other boys. And if they don't feel acutely weaker than other boys, they at least know of the potential of being weaker than their male counterparts. They will do whatever they can to avoid being seen as weak or to slide into weakness. The strong urge to be the strongest, a constant need to dominate and prove his superior qualities are, some argue, built into the male psyche beginning with the sperms' fight for dominance as they approach the egg.

Nature needs for boys to self-select in this way, i.e., through dominance and competition. And nature has developed a marvelous mechanism to ensure that no "normal" boy will tolerate his weakness and simply opt out of competition. For, while a boy who doesn't fight might not be a loss for the gene-pool, his very absence will also entail a softening of the fight for dominance and, therefore, make it more likely that a boy not quite qualified will reach his final destination. The more contenders there are, the more likely it is that only the truly strongest and most qualified will win the battle. This is why nature has developed "shame." Shame is so awful a feeling, so deeply and insidiously aggressive and torturous to the male psyche, that we will go to great lengths to avoid it or, at least, cover it up. Lying, anger, revenge are common symptoms of a male's attempts to process shame.

I sometimes like to explain shame to clients by refering to the biblical creation story: The quintessential gesture of shame (after Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge) is to cover up. If boys have not learned about and have not been reminded of their strengths, then, at moments of weakness, they will do whatever they can to cover up that weakness. The best way to do that is through aggression. The urge to avoid, at all cost, the awfulness of shame drives boys towards continual competition and aggression. It is easy to see that, given this link between aggression and shame, boys will likely not react well to being shamed about their behavior. Instead shaming will likely cause them to act out more, to be less willing to control their outburst, their learning or any of the other things we would like for them to learn.

What would it be like, I continue to ask myself, if we could see boys, and especially boys like C, with compassion. By compassion I don't mean "pitty." I mean, instead, what would it be like, if we could see that all he is trying to do is survive. He is trying to make it. What would happen, if we could see that when boys "misbehave" it might be their will to live, their will to be successful that is actually driving them? Of course, that seems ironic and paradoxical. How can it be that such a will to live and be successful could lead to so much havoc and chaos? But what if our task with boys (and men) is not to constantly resist their energy, but rather to figure out ways of how to make it useful for them? How exciting might it be for us as teachers to tap into that energy and witness the learning that can happen?

I think of how Robin Willliams teaches poetry (girls' stuff, right?) to a bunch of hormonal adolescent boys in Dead Poets Society: he taps into their sense of life and death (carpe diem), he invites them to celebrate poetry in the darkness of a cave (with cigarettes, etc. around), he connects poetry and action (reciting lines of poetry while kicking a soccer ball).

All I ever needed to know I learned from watching my fishtank. I encourage you to find your source of strength and to see how it impacted your learning and understanding of people, the world and all the marvelous things in it.

Father And Husband At 50

2011-04-03T21:08:00.003-06:00

I turned 50 two months ago. With all good intentions, really. Without giving it much further thought I had assumed I would continue to live just the way I had been throughout my forties: with lots of energy, with optimism, with a sense of growing understanding of how the world works and how I can work in it and for it.

But 50 was a higher step to take than I had expected. Imagine a staircase with uneven risers. This one was at least 10 inches higher than the ones before. How did that happen, I wonder. As always when it comes to connecting changes in one's mood or personality to a recent birthday I am skeptical. It seems irrational to think that it is the age and not circumstances of that change in age that really are to blame. Independent of what it was the last two months of 49 and the first two of 50 have been hard.

Here are some of the things that are on my mind and weigh me down:

It feels more challenging these days to have two sons who in many ways are young adults and one son who is still a child. It takes a lot of flexibility to respond well to everyone's needs, questions and moods. I am finding that it's not always easy to find the right tone for everyone. My two older sons are changing rapidly. It's not so easy anymore to find ways to connect with them. Today in the car, I had just picked up Jacob from a friends house, I just said that I sometimes would like to spend more time with each of them individually. Just to talk, to connect. Jacob, with characteristic directness said: I wouldn't really like that. I took a deep breath and just said I knew he'd say that (which was true). They both sense that something in their dad's emotional attitude towards them is clingy. And it is, they're right. They don't want to be clung to. Now, to be fair to myself, I am not clinging to them in obvious ways (like keeping them from going out with friends, exploring, learning new things, etc.). But I know that I am looking for the conversational connections with them. Connections that I have come to love so much over the years.

Also, I have a streak of melancholy in my personality. I experience this streak as a yearning or aching, especially when I am out walking or otherwise immersed in and enveloped by nature. At those times I experience my own smallness, my finiteness in ways that make me feel both blessed and sad. I am grateful for that feeling. But it is a very personal, perhaps even very adult feeling that cannot be shared (must not be shared?) with teenage sons. If I did share it with them, I'd worry they might feel responsible for me and that is the last thing I would want. But I catch myself wanting to hug them and not letting go. Of course, I do let go. I sense the awkwardness of their bodies when we do hug. More often than not the extend of our physical connectedness consists in two fists knocked together in a friendly way. It's okay. There is something almost noble and edifying in that gesture as well. It is manly. I like it for that reason. But I don't want to give the impression that a part of me still wants to ruffle their hair, pull them close (as if they could still fit in my arms they way they used to).

My youngest on the other hand wants to engage in wrestling matches, rough-housing and similar things all the time. I have never been with a kid who likes to be tickled as much as he does. He is virtually looking for that belly-laugh of his own. He loves being knocked around gently and goes down with a laughing groan every time. When he hugs, he hugs with his whole body. It's beautiful. But with him, here is the rub, I almost feel too old for all that activity. 15 more years until he is twenty. How will I feel then?

Despite all these things that clearly indicate that my sons are moving along the continuum of time and nearing adulthood, I worry about how they will actually launch into adulthood. College especially gives me a stomach ache. How do parents finance this these days? It is unreasonable to expect that one's children will share in the provision of funds for their education? Then I begin to sweat profusely and it is all I can do from descending into tirades against this country and culture in which it is implied that parents who raise their children with love and with values, but not with much money, are not good enough parents.

Another circumstance that adds to the weight of this change to 50 is how hard it is to feel a sense of shared happiness with my spouse. We could be happy, I believe, if only we could accept life as it presents itself (yes, with all its busyness). If we learned better to use the interstices of that busy life to show each other affection and love, if we could both agree to see love as the medium between us even when we're busy with work, children, friends, if, in one word, we could be soul-mates. I wish we could make moments count rather than always waiting for the grand gestures (for which mostly there is neither the time nor the money, and, as far as I am concerned, not the belief in their effectivenss either).

As I am re-reading what I have written so far I realize that part of my code of honor as a father and husband is to be responsive to my family's needs. I often am convinced that I fall short of that. This is the case especially in my relationship. At fifty my energy to even try is begining to wane. I would like to know, i.e., to be confident, that what I am providing and giving is enough. I would like it, moreover, if I could also think, without guilt, of providing for myself. This will be the challenge of this next decade, I know it: Finding a balance between providing for my family and for myself. My great hope is that what I can give to my family will to a large part also flow out of the things I will give to myself. My hope is that those two things will not continue to seem diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. My hope is that even through something like writing this blog (which is an act of acute self-care for me)I can also give something to my family.

My Grandfather

2011-03-31T21:22:00.003-06:00

I have never written about my grandfather in this blog. My maternal grandfather, that is. His name was Erich Rauch and he died exactly eleven days ago, on March 4th, 2011. A month after I turned 50. Born on December 26th, 1914, he lived to be 96 years old. Survived by his wife of 73 years, Liese-Lotte Rauch, nee Hinrichs. One of the most important things about his life is that he became somewhat of a substitute father for my own father whose biological father was killed on the Russian front in WWII.

I am writing about him today, on the plane on the way to his funeral, because I would like to figure out what he meant to me. What are my memories of this man whose life included two world-wars, the loss of his family’s farm in Eastern Prussia, the loss of two brothers in WW II, captivity by the Russian Army and a dramatic escape from what would have been certain Soviet internment in Siberia, followed by a weeks-long hike-by-night experience that eventually brought him back to Hamburg where his wife and three children had fled after Eastern Prussia ceased to be the peaceful island it had seemed to be for so long while WWII was raging elsewhere.

When my grandparents married, on November 30th, 1938, they were expecting their first child, my mother, who would be born in May of the following year. At the time of their marriage, my grandfather had already been drafted and was ready to enter the war as a German soldier. He soon had to leave his new family and wouldn’t see them again except for short visits during which first my mother’s sister, Heidi—in December of 1940—and then my mother’s brother, Hans-Joern—in January of 1943—where conceived.

My grandfather once felt it necessary to write a “last” letter from the front to his wife. This letter still exists and in it, above everything, it becomes clear that it was t his family around which his life really was centered. This is a beautiful, but also painful letter in which he confesses his love in a way that later he would be loathe to speak. He was a formal man, my grandfather. One would have to surmise his love behind this formality. My mother, I believe, to this day wonders, if he loved her. I am certain he did, her, the other two children, his wife and his grand and great-grand children.

What I remember about him:

A trip to the police horse stables near their home. This is really the only outing I remember taking with him. A sunny Saturday morning, I was, like so often, spending several days (if not weeks) at my grandparents’. He decided, uncharacteristically, to get out the bicycles and take me somewhere. It was fun. I can’t remember what we talked about. But the horses, the ride through the forest to get there and the sense that he had thought of something that I really did enjoy all that made for a great morning.

A scene where he gave me one of his blazers to keep. When I reached into the inside pocket, I found two 100 DM bills. He took them from me and said “you can keep the blazer.” And I wasn’t even angry!

A birthday and Christmas lunch of Roast Duck (my present to him for his 70th birthday) I had prepared for him and myself in my apartment in Hamburg. It lasted three and a half hours and when our time drew to an end, he liked to reminisce, “the duck was cold, but we had had a good time.” I had used this time to ask him all kinds of things about his past. But specifically I wanted to know more about his time in the SA and his dramatic escape from the Russian army in Prague.

I remember his passionately repeated assertion: I was in the SS (Waffen SS), but I never killed anyone.

The letter I mentioned already was written while my grandfather was stationed in France. The Allied invasion at Normandy had already taken place and France, suddenly, had turned from a sure German capture into an almost certain loss for Germany. My grandfather recalled a particular air-raid by the allies during which he hid behind tombstones in a French cemetery. Before the allies could get to where he was stationed he was transferred to Prague where he was supposed to finally finish high-school, take part in an SS training camp and, finally, be promoted to Fahnenjunker (Midshipman). However, shortly after his arrival in Prague, the city was taken by the Americans and my grandfather, for the first time, became a prisoner of war. Since at that time Prague was already thought of as part of Soviet territories all German prisoners of war were surrendered to them. My grandfather realized quickly what this transfer of power over him would mean: certain deportation and internment in a Russian concentration camp in Siberia. When the prisoners were marched to the train-station, my grandfather ducked away and hid behind some shrubs. His escape didn’t go unnoticed and several shots were fired. But in the fading light of dusk the Russian soldiers missed their target and they didn’t take up pursuit. My grandfather then decided to do what so many others had already tried before him: he walked home. 305 miles. Since he could only walk at night without risking certain re-capture by the allied troops, the trip took him almost three weeks.
My mother tells the story of his home-coming this way: Someone rang the door-bell. Mutti (my grandmother) said to go and see w ho was t here. So I opened the door and saw this man in uniform with a red beard. I didn’t recognize him. He was a stranger. Then Mutti rushed past me and, with a loud scream, fell into the arms of this stranger. It was my father who had returned home. Unfortunately this reunion didn’t last long. Only a few days later the allied authorities found out about his return and he was imprisoned again for a few months in down-town Hamburg.

I remember that after my 15th birthday I had passed him in height and, every time I’d visit my grandparents he would greet me by way of a triple action hug: embrace, push down on my shoulders and getting on his tippy toes. At the same time he’d say: na, mein Kleiner (hello, little one). We’d both laugh and go inside. Strangely, that same gesture is now something that Hans-Joern, his son and my god-father, is doing with me.

My grandparents lived in a tiny condo on the fourth floor, no elevator (my grandmother, at 93, still lives there). When we were visiting, as long as he lived there he would always come out to the top railing in the hallway and watch us coming up the stairway.

I still remember him bounding up those stairs, taking two steps at once, until his late eighties. He was a swimmer and cyclist into his nineties.

I remember the phrase (“das hab’ ich mir gedenkt”—that’s what I thinked) whose grammar he had purposely butchered. I still use that phrase now and delight in having my three sons correct me every time.

After I moved to the US my grandfather very much wanted to visit me. But my grandmother wouldn’t let him. Somehow this marital issue, men who want to travel and wives who don’t or only grudgingly let them go, continues to pop up in other marriages in the family, my own included. One may argue that my grandmother had had her life-time fill of my grandfather being gone during the war. But somehow something else must have been going on too. I suspect that behind this sense of “neediness and insecurity” of the wives may lie an equally strongly developed need to be needed on the part of the husbands.

During visits my grandfather often sat in enduring silence while my grandmother kept chattering away. At times he could be harsh with her. Despite his love it didn’t always seem clear to me that he really respected her. There was a never a doubt in my mind that she was his intellectual equal. She was equally tough. The main difference: she complained loudly while being tough. He preferred the attitude of the stoic. (We were all taken aback, in fact, when after his second broken hip, during physical therapy, he would scream out loud from pain. It was almost unbelievable hearing those sounds coming out of his mouth. After I heard those sounds, over the phone, I have never stopped wondering, if the many other pains of my grandfather’s life where mixed in with this one. Whatever may have been the source, this pain, in the end, concluded his physical therapy and he never walked again.)

My grandfather wanted to know everything about America. America was the great role-model, the country that had ‘re-educated” Germany after the war and seemed understand how one needed to live.

My earliest memory of my grandfather is from when I was four, perhaps five years old. It’s more an image than a story. My grandparents had not yet moved to their condo and were living in a rented house in Hamburg-Meiendorf. A garden, with a shed in the back, was part of this property. Not too far away from the shed where several red and black currant bushes. To this day I connect the shiny glistening clusters of red-currant and the single, almost somber seeming black currants with my grandfather. I remember the buckets we were filling with harvested berries. I remember his rubber boots, an olive-green shirt and pants of the same color. And I remember that it didn’t bother him in the slightest that most of the berries I picked ended up in my mouth, not in the bucket. I felt an incredible bond with my grandfather that afternoon. And I knew it then. Three decades later I found out that part of the garden had been sold to make room for another house. The currant bushes were gone and a pain I had not known until then took hold of me.

I remember an especially drawn out and somehow difficult correspondence with my grandfather about South Africa. During my first year in the US I had met Pat Naidoo, a south-african ex-patriate who talked a lot about the problems of apartheid and oppression in his home country. When I happened to write about this to my grandfather he reacted like a true colonialist: “it’s the whites who made South Africa what it is now. Nobody should think of taking this land away from them. Without them the “negroes” wouldn’t be anywhere near where they are now.

My grandfather had several dreams that didn’t come true. He never got his high-school diploma. After the war he tried to go back to school. But his family’s need for food, clothing and shelter made it necessary for him to go to work full time. He returned to the police (which he had joined before the war) and became a valued and respected colleague and later teacher of new recruits.

My grandfather always dreamed of buying a house. It never worked out. My sense is that it wasn’t a money issue as much as the stinginess factor. He would have had enough to buy a house, but he couldn’t face the “risk” of doing so. The more proud it made him that all three of his children ended up being able to make this dream real for themselves.

Up into his 94th year of life my grandfather continued to sell car-insurance for a company called HUK-Coburg. When, in 1980, I got my license and set out to buy a car, it was my grandfather who sat me down, did the math for me and, eventually, talked me out of it. I remember this feeling to this day: the disappointment on the one hand, mixed on the other hand with a strong sense of having made a solid decision. He was right. A car, though impressive to others, would have been very hard for me to maintain.

When I think of my grandfather’s passing, I think of a huge tree. Like a giant century old oak-tree my grandfather’s branches stretched out far around him. Under it newer trees have been growing, 3 children, 5 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren. The other oak-tree, my grandmother, is still standing. His though is gone. With him an incredible wealth of experiences and memories manyof which I never knew about are gone. Nevertheless, his spirit, his optimism, his strength and his tenaciousness continue to live with us and in all of us. Despite all that we sometimes felt in need of criticizing in him, he was a wonderful great-grandfather, grandfather, father, father-in-law and husband.

Shame and Anger

2010-10-10T08:45:00.004-06:00

There has been some activity in the comments section of my blog regarding my latest blog on male anger. One thing I am gleaning from these comments is that, perhaps, there is a need for me to be more specific about the kind of males I am talking about.

In my experience, the men who seem to most struggle with this problem of no longer knowing how to show their anger (and their feelings) are middle-class white men. I include myself in this group. This group of men (who have often been labeled the most privileged group in our society), in my opinion, has also best "learned" and implemented the changes feminists have been pushing for in the last 35 years. We have become involved in our children's lives, we are used to (and eager to) doing household chores, from cooking to doing the dishes to cleaning windows. We have learned how to be sensitive to the needs of our female partners. We are generally willing to share power in every respect with them, and, for the most part, also with our male peers. Some of us are liberals some conservatives, but really we share this new self-understanding of being sensitive, reasonable and open to being equal partners with our wives, peers and even our children.

All of us men have been told that our anger is bad. That it is toxic, destructive and demeaning of others. We have been told to manage our anger which to many of us seems to have morphed into "not showing our anger." Perhaps this was the fundamental misunderstanding. Perhaps men's solution to the anger problem, i.e., stoicism, was never intended. (Actually, I am sure it was intended.) But that's where it went. Right to what men do best: swallow their anger, not show they're feeling anything, becoming resentful, developing ulcers and other somatic issues--which will, in the end, kill them.

The men I have in mind seem to share a somewhat patterned experience: they experience some kind of negative emotion; they hesitate to voice it; they voice it anyway but feel awkward doing it; they are criticized by their partners, if not attacked, for being unreasonable, selfish, mean or controlling. What is going on?

When our partners are sad, confused, angry, stressed we have certainly learned not to judge, not to attack. (Which doesn't always mean that we do it. But we are under a kind of cultural pressure, I believe, to adhere to these new norms of male behavior). We listen, we ask questions . . . we are sensitive. Of course, we're not always perfect at it and so we fail. Our own stuff gets in the way of doing these things. But, overall, it seems clear to me that this group of men knows the right thing to do.

So, I think there are two things going on in this:

a) There is an unconscious (perhaps even conscious) wish or assumption on the part of women that men should not be helpless, confused, panicked or freaked out about things.
b) Men actually share this unconscious wish and experience great amounts of shame when they deal with these kinds of feelings.

a) Some women who read this might think "oh no, believe me, my husband acts confused all the time, especially when I ask him to do something around the house." Or, "partner really panics all the time, especially when it comes to thinking about buying Christmas presents for the whole family."

So, I would say let's forget about cynicism and sarcasm about men. And let's instead go with a more benevolent interpretation. Helplessness, panic and being freaked out are traits I encounter in men quite often. These are true emotional states for men, they're not a show. What might be a show is the facade they adopt to hide these emotional states. The facade often is a mix of stoicism and anger. Off-putting to anyone who experiences on the outside, sure. But from the inside, the male perspective, they're absolutely necessary as they protect the man from his greatest foe, shame.

b) This brings us to the second point. From inside the male brain, emotional states are identified as vulnerability (with the exception of anger). Bio-historically emotional states, i.e., vulnerability, are better avoided by men (whose responsibility of providing for and protecting their partners and off-spring forces them to circumvent vulnerability at all cost. Nature's fool-proof mechanism for such circumvention is shame. Shame, itself an emotional state, trumps all others and leads almost directly to anger (i.e., the male's path out of other emotional states). We conclude from this that men actually frequently experience two emotional states: anger and shame.

Now 50 years ago male anger was more or less considered a nuissance, but also a fact. That men would yell sometimes, that they might threaten and on occasion even raise their hand against their partners and children was minimized and not thought of as something that needed to change. Feminism as well as our increasing understanding of child development and child-rearing have change this. This is a good development. I don't know many men who would like to turn the clock back and return to the 50s of the last century. But, as described above, our justified intolerance of male anger has not always led to enlightened males who now feel lighter and better about themselves. Rather it has led to enlightened males who act the part, but don't have a clue what to do with their emotional states and their anger. In fact, they're worse off now, because the cultural response (which is both outside of them and inside of them)to their anger is to frown on anger, and thus the angry male experiences shame . . . which, in turn, leads to more anger . . . and more shame . . . and so on.

So, as far as knowing what a man might want is concerned, when he is confused, panicked or otherwise emotional, I would encourage you readers to either ask the men in your life about it or, if you're men, I'd put it close to your heart to think about these matters and what you need when you're feeling vulnerable.

One more thing, never confront a man about his shame. Even if the confrontation is meant to be "gentle way of opening him up." He will deny it at best and get angry at worst. Experiencing shame is itself shameful.

So, if the man/men in your life is upset tell them you adore them and love them, hold them, if they're willing, leave them alone, if they need that (but let them know you're right around the corner), and if they have been angry at you, and you, rightfully, need to hold them accountable, don't forget to start by saying loud and clearly "I love you a lot, honey." And don't forget to mean it either. Then, but only then, can you go into what's bothering you. You might think that men are tough, that they can do without these statements of love and and care. You might even think they will get arrogant and less inclined to listen to you, if they are treated in this gentle way. But, please, think twice: Have you tried this? Have you talked to your men about what they need?

Male Anger

2010-09-24T20:44:00.003-06:00

Over the last 5 years I have been seeing an increasing number of men who all come with a variation of the same issue: When I am angry about something my spouse has said or done (to me), I usually choose not to voice that anger. I swallow my pride. I don't want to trigger her anger. If I say something, things will get worse. These responses are becoming common-place among many of the men I see in my practice daily. My concern is how many men seem to rationalize their own silence. They seem to do one of two things: Either they simply assume a stoic attitude towards their own anger and decide that they shouldn't voice it (perhaps because they believe that men's should be able to keep their mouths shut); or some of them even assume an attitude of superiority by thinking they are the better person (better than their spouse) for not voicing their anger.

Consider a few snippets from counseling sessions with such men:

A. has been a client for two years. He and his partner are not married, have a young child and currently live together. Their relationship is highly conflictual. A often slips into an aquiescent role in order to avoid escalations with his partner.

A: I was annoyed when I got up this morning to find she had left so many things in the kitchen undone after she was finished. It would be so easy to put lids on things and to put them away. But she doesn't. It makes me angry and I want to tell her. But I know she will just use that against me, may even attack me right back. It is not safe to be angry, because she'll retaliate quickly.

M: You mean you would like to have the space and time to articulate your anger about something without feeling you have to worry your partner will hold your anger against you?

A: Yes, that's exactly right. It just feels like I am not allowed to have those feelings.

Consider T. He and his partner have been married for 10 years. Both have good jobs and their fights often revolve around child-care issues and responsibilities for home and family.

T: I feel like these attacks are coming out of the blue. We may just have a great evening and the next morning she will accuse me of being the worst husband, of not doing anything, of being a bad father, of leaving it all for her. If I fight, that is, if I get angry back, because I feel accused unjustly, she will push me away even more and likely threaten divorce.

M: So it feels like you don't have an opportunity to voice your perspective on the issues she is bringing up?

T: No, I don't have that space. If I do, I am tacitly or openly labeled as anti-feminist if not as a misogynist.

And one last example, S. He and his partner have been married for about two years. They have had a complicated dating period prior to their marriage involving lots of family of origin issues on both sides.

S: I am angry that she is not seeing how much I do for our relationship, for her comfort. I make a lot of money, enough for both of us. I work on the house. But she keeps not being content with things. I am afraid of really voicing these things, because she would get quite angry with me and accuse me of not really wanting to do anything for her.

M: So, essentially what you are hearing is that you're not good enough?

S: Yes, that's how it feels at least. I wish I could say that to her, but I feel strongly that it would only make things worse.

These are just three out of whole slew of male voices I have heard in the past years. I am concerned because what I keep hearing is that men feel defenseless when their spouses attack them (emotionally and physically), flame them on e-mail, bully them, threaten them and belittle them. It concerns me because I don't really believe that men are defenseless. But their sense of not wanting/not being able to fight back is increasing their anger at their spouses and might, in the end, lead to worse explosions.

I have a suspicion about what might be going on here and I want to voice it, even though it might be perceived as highly politically incorrect. Over the course of the last 40 years men have been told that the only emotion they express really well is anger. However, they were also told that their anger is destructive, dangerous and self-centered. They, therefore, were asked to reform their emotional lives, become better at expressing other emotions and, finally, to be less angry. This goal of reducing their anger was especially important for the relationships between men and women. An increasing number of women refused to deal with angry men. Connections were made between a man's anger, domestic violence, rape and even murder. If men wanted to avoid falling in the category of the suspected batterer, etc they did well not to even let on they might be angry at their partner. To top this all off, men were told they had to drop their anger and begin to listen to women.

What we see now is a generation of men who have absorbed these lessons. They choose not to show their anger, not even to let it be known they might be angry. They listen (though they come to their limit quickly) and many of them are tremendously resentful of their partners and the sense of enslavement they feel as they try to make it in their relationships.

It seems so clear now: In all our concern for women and for their enslavement (which helped launch the feminist revolution) in and through patriarchy, we forgot to remind them they, too, had to listen to their male spouses. We forgt to remind them that, though men have in the past often been seen as synonymous with patriarchy, that they are indeed not. In our concern for women we gave them a card blanche for expressing themselves and for having every right to expect their partner will listen to them, will tolerate their anger, their outbursts and threats, and hold still. As a result we have an increasing number of men who are keenly aware of their spouses need for them to listen. But those very same men are keely unaware of their own need to speak about themselves and their concomittant need for their spouse to listen. What they are aware of is the increasing power of their anger over them.

So, while I believe in the continued need for men to learn more about expressing their feelings in a whole and non-threatening way. I believe that it is also high-time for women to learn how to listen. It is too easy to dismiss a man's feelings, particularly his feelings of anger, panic and general crisis as relics from an ancient male past which we believe the cultured male should have overcome by now. It is even easier to label those feelings as dangerous and risky and to outlaw them from our daily discursive interactions with each other.

Can we do this differently? Can we envision first and then implement a culture of mutual respect and awareness of each others' emotional expressiveness. Can we spread the word of a culture of mutual respect, tolerance and acceptance, especially also when it comes to our respective feelings. Women, I believe, have a lot to learn in this respect. And, perhaps, men themselves have to learn how to trust and believe in their feelings rather than estranging themselves from them.

As I am writing this I find myself hoping intensely that my sons will find women who are willing to listen to them, even when they're angry. These women could be friends, spouses, bosses, co-workers, etc. I hope for them that they will not feel they have to check their feelings at the door before they talk to a female.

2010-08-31T19:28:00.005-06:00

Recently I was asked to give a talk on the Limits of Rewards and Punishment in Child Rearing and Education. This topic is an intriguing one for me and I have thought about it almost as long as I have lived in the USA. The differences between my native culture, German, and my adoptive culture, American, produce nothing short of a culturual clash in my thinking. I may, in a later entry, talk more about those differences. Here my goal is to get a handle on a phenomenon that I find observable on both sides of the Atlantic. It is an increasing unwillingness on the part of our children and youth to accept and comply with traditional authority.

Perhaps I am already in the process of rose-coloring things as I look back to the past. If I am, I would like to receive some feedback about that. It seems to me that children in my generation were more pliable, less prickly, more receptive of adult opinions and advice. My sense is that when I was a child and teenager being an adult automatically lent authority to a person. Add to that their profession--for example, if they were a teacher, professor, doctor or pastor--and you the person had every reason to expect that their word would be heard and that others would be inclined to believe them and follow their advice.

I am sensing that this has changed significantly in the last 25 years. Just because the adult in front of the class-room is an adult and a teacher does no longer guarantee their students respect for them. And if that person is a doctor or pastor, they can no longer rely on their insight being accepted by those they address. Rather, what they say and who they are as persons will be scrutinized and put in question. For how long I'm not sure. Maybe for ever. Because it almost feels as if nobody these days gets a free pass anymore.

There are a few exceptions to this and I want to briefly talk about them. One, of course, is the president of the United States. It seems that everybody respects every president. A rare exception this is, where respect simply comes with the role/office a person holds not with their accomplishments, intelligence, courage or wisdom. To some degree police officers seem to partake in a similar form of respect. Although one might be inclined to believe that this is due more to the fact that they are armed than to the fact that the police is "Dein Freund und Helfer" (Your friend and helper). Yes, and then there is one other large group: athletes. Most super-athletes seem to enjoy a certain kind of respect that is related to their physical accomplishments.

Size, by the way, seems to play an important role in the respect these people are given. Being the president of the whole US, or being a particularly tall or big basketball or football player, a fast race-car driver, etc. seems to result in spontaneous expressions of respect for such a person. The police-officer might be small (few are, however) but what makes them big anyway is their gun.

Here is the thing, though. Do I wish teachers, doctors, etc. were respected the way many in this country still respect the president, police-officers and athletes? No, I don't. In fact, I find these forms of respect somewhat repulsive and atavistic. They're mostly emergent from the fact that the other person could literally or metaphorically whoop your ass and, thereby, force you to respect them. In other words, the respect we give to these people is generally not freely given. We must, at least publicly, give them respect no matter what they do, what they say and how they behave.

Respect is a freely given offering of admiration and appreciation to another person. Respect should never come from the view-point "I am less than you, therefore you should have my respect." Rather, respect is about a certain equality that exists between us because we are human beings. A person worthy of respect can accept even being disrespected. Because such a person knows that there are as many things about them that are worthy of disrespect as there are things worthy of respect. A person worthy of respect is a person who can admit to his/her mistakes. Such a person will hold themselves accountable to exactly the same standard they also hold others to.

Respect is a democratic value. It can only exist in a democracy. For respect in a monarchy or tyranny (be that a political tyranny, educational or a tyranny of parenting) is never really respect; it is nothing but fear.

Having said all this I am, now, in a position to move closer to my original topic: the limits of rewards and punishment. I have often heard parents say or repeat that "this (i.e., the family) is not a democracy." And, this is the thought behind such statement, because it is not a democracy you (child) ought to respect me (parent). This principle of respect in a non-democratic family structure has worked for centuries (with exceptions never managing to upset the principle itself). However, my observation is that this is finally changing for good. While children and youth may still obey in fear and to avoid negative consequences, they are no longer confusing such obedience with respect for the person they're obeying.

I have wondered for a long time what might be behind this. It seems as if the last 25-35 years have given us not only a new appreciation of the role and signifiance of women, minorities and others. Young people, too, have come to the forefront more self-confident and more convinced of their own rightful place in the world. What is intriguing about this latter development is that is has had few supporters, few observers, few advocates. Most young people could not really speak for themselves in the academic and cultural ways in which other movements garnered support for themselves. So, what gave them the strength and energy to move ahead in the ways they have?

This confidence may have started roughly 40 years ago. The anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-many other things movement(s) were mostly fueled by young people, teens and young adults. They had no advocates, only themselves and their vision of a different world. If they didn't affect older generations much, they did affect many of their own peers, even those who didn't want to or weren't able to join the rest at Woodstock. Many things were buried during this time, one of them was the notion of "respect simply because someone had power." When that generation began to have children, they had an overwhelmingly different take on the role and place of children in the family and in society. Their children's younger age was reason enough to be protective of them. It wasn't, however, reason to discriminate against them. Children were members of a democratic system and society and as such had the same rights any adult would have.

It would be worth following these strains of thought to the present time, if only to see how they have mutated and how, also, there has been a kind of back-lash, a new authoritarianism, with which parents and teachers are trying these days to teach their children and students to behave properly. But I don't want to do that here.

Rather, I would like to shed light on another source of power that, in my mind, has greatly enhanced the confidence and authority of children and teens in our time. This source of power is technology. While I haven't researched this in detail I think it is safe to assume that there has never been a point in history when young people, children, have had more technological know-how than the adults that were raising them. However, this is exactly the point at which we are presently. Our children have, with a sweeping motion of enthusiasm and intrigue, learned to use and build on the communicative technologies that have been developed since the mid-eighties. Yes, I am talking about cell-phones, computers, i-pods, and the like. And I am not only talking about how much children and teens know about these items. I am mostly talking about how they use them to form a social net-work that provides them with friendship, opinions, news, gossip, culture, etc. The speed at which they know how to handle these things is dizzying. They rightfully look at us as near extinct mammoths, beings from a different age, who can only be taught so much about these new ways of communicating, before they simply stumble, give up, fall to the ground decrying the seeming lack of "real" ways of communication amongst kids.

The educator, speaker and author Marc Prensky coined a helpful distinction for this phenomenon. He refers to this technology savvy generation as "digital natives" to whom we are mere "digital immigrants." We will, that is always, lag behind a true cultural understanding of technology, we will always "speak" with an "accent" and we will always indulge in nostalgic glances back to the "home-country."

There is one marked difference, however: We are still their parents. We do have a responsibility to introduce our children into the values and tenets of our society. this is a formidable task of which we cannot let go. We have a kind of cultural power which, if used in the wrong way, i.e., to squelch kids and their new confidence, will quickly wane. If this happens, then what started as a strong potential for mutual respect, will turn into mutual disrespect. As we begin to teach our children, we will need to articulate our respect for them. This is no longer simply a respect grounded in our common humanity, but a respect that recognizes our kids' high level of (often self-taught) technological skill and know-how.

But there is a shadow cast by all this. This is the shadow of fear. As our children grow more knowledgeable about technology we, their parents and teachers, grow more fearful of them. Therein lies the problem of respect, of course, because as I said in the beginning, respect should no longer be based on fear.

So, here is the thesis: our high emphasis and hope for strategies of rewards and punishments for our children may be a function of how afraid we are of our children and their increasing power to overtake us. We are increasingly fearful of losing control of our children and to the extent that we are we have begun to search frantically for methods that will reign in our children (but that in truth are designed to alleviate our fears). However, the problem is that these methods rarely do alleviate those fears. At best they create a habitual system of vigilance, of checks and balances, that functions like a house-alarm: if someone enters or leaves without prior notice the alarm will go off. My question is, whether we can learn to trust our children. My answer is "we can." But not before we have learned to respect them and not before we have learned to trust our own modelling of respect and love.

When Things Are Broken

2010-08-11T19:20:00.003-06:00

How long does it take us to replace something that is broken? How long does it take to even notice that it's broken? Do all things broken need to be replaced? Or does it make sense that "broken" things might actually be intact and complete in and of themselves? Is our perfectionism driving us to be inherently and increasingly intolerant of brokenness?

These are some of the questions and thoughts I have been thinking about lately, following a rather mundane--but apparently rich in meaning--occurrence. Here is the story:

This past March, after about a year of ignoring it, I decided to replace the broken handle of the freezer compartment of our fridge. Actually, by the time I decided to replace it there was no handle anymore. Just two screws that had held it in place previously. The handle itself had had a total life of about 7 years. It was fine for the first 5, then it started to crack, first just a little bit, but eventually so much that touching the handle, let alone using it, meant taking the risk of breaking it completely. I had glued it several times, each time getting about a day of solidness out of it before it would crack again. When it finally broke off completely I tried glueing it one more time, but it wouldn't hold anymore. So, I unscrewed the rest of the handle that was still attached to the freezer door and threw it out. The freezer door opened fine without the handle actually, one only had to pull the door on the side. Really, the door didn't need a handle! That was in January. For two months we lived with a freezer door that didn't have a handle.

I am not sure what actually changed in March, but I decided to get the serial number of our fridge, call the store where we had purchased it and order a new handle. Two weeks and $25 later our new handle arrived. It fit, was the right size and I attached it with a sense of accomplishment and relief. Clearly, the broken handle and then its complete absence had bothered me. But I only could see that when the new handle was there.

In the next couple of days and weeks it occurred to me that inherent in this story about the freezer door handle was a larger and richer story about me and how I look at life (and possibly about others too). I had, apparently, been yearning for something, for completeness and perfection. But I had, in spite of the obvious and easy solution to this yearning, not even allowed myself to feel this yearning other than through uncounted attempts of fixing what was cracked. And even in the face of an increasing brokenness my response kept being to fix it and, lastly, improvising and circumventing the problem altogether: we don't need that handle at all; actually, there never was a handle!!

I would like to convince myself that hope was the main motivating factor in my not simply replacing the handle. And, perhaps, to some degree hope was involved. But I am not closed off to the possibility that fear and apathy may have been involved in equal proportion to hope. Something about not wanting to acknowledge loss and, possibly, death is in this experience and I want to know more about it.

The flip-side of this is that I don't easily give up on the viability of something (a plant, a tropical fish, a tool, a relationship, etc.). I see the crack, the illness, the closeness to death, but I will keep nursing it, watering it, feeding it and, quite often, I succeed. There are uncounted plants in our yard that many would have thrown out and replaced. But for me a single tiny leaf is enough to pour my energy into it. I have been rewarded many times.

So, denying death can be a powerful instrument in healing. But what worries me is that, sometimes, that denial can also be motivated by or result in a kind of complacency. Sometimes death and loss have to be acknowledged before something new can emerge. As a father of three sons I want nothing more than being able to teach my boys the distinction between and value of all of these: the value that lies in fixing something (even if it is repeatedly), the value that lies in accepting something as it is without fixing it and the value of replacing something that can no longer be fixed or accepted. Stamina, acceptance and tolerance, inventiveness and creativity as well as the ability to walk away from something, the ability to not tolerate everything, the wisdom to distinguish when something can be fixed and when something is, indeed, a lost cause.

Bad Manners

2010-05-30T20:51:00.002-06:00

Today my son Jacob and I drove my sister, Katja, to O'Hare Aiport in Chicago. After a business meeting in Cedar Rapids she had flown to Illinois to see us for two days before returning to Frankfurt, Germany. It was a short but lovely time.

As Jacob and I were leaving O'Hare he asked "what are we going to do now?" "We're going home," I said. "But there is nothing to do at home," he said. "Well," I said, "there is the lawn for you to mowe." Jacob made a face, but didn't say anything. "Isn't there something we can do in Chicago?" he asked. "I'm sure there are lots of things one can do in Chicago," I said, "but I wouldn't want to just try them without planning them first." I started talking about the traffic, the people, how crowded it would likely be on this beautiful Sunday before Memorial Day. But Jacob wasn't deterred. A quiet voice inside my head kept saying "Why not? He's right! Are you really just going to drive back to Champaign? Have an adventure!"
I pulled up on the shoulder, looked at him and said "what would you like to do?" How about he Sears Tower," he said. "Okay," I agreed, "let's try that."

As soon as we pulled back into traffic and drove past the exit ramp that would have taken us home we hit dense traffic. I moaned quietly, more to myself than audible to him, but he did hear it. "See," I said, "this is what I expected." Secretly I was hatching plans to turns around and escape. But traffic became more fluid within a minute and soon were driving towards Chicago's down-town with the Sears Tower in full view. "You know," he said, "it's not called 'Sears Tower' anymore. They renamed it 'Phyllis Tower.'" "Really," I said, "that's an aweful name for this tower." We both joked about who this 'Phyllis' might be and what was so great about her to have booted out the name 'Sears' for the tower. There was more dense traffic, actually, but we kept on talking and pretty soon we were close enough to the tower to consider getting off the high-way.

We pulled off at Jackson Blvd., drove one block and parked the car for two hours. Sears--Willis-Tower as it is actually now called--was in plain view and we walked there in less than five minutes. The streets were pretty empty on this Sunday and I already thought I had been wrong about crowds, etc. There was a short line of about 30 people in front of the street entrance to the Skydeck, but it resolved quickly and before we knew it were beckoned into an elevator by a nice young man with long dread-locks. Just as the elevator doors closed the young man looked at us and said--as if overcome by a sudden need to tell us the truth--"it'll be about an hour until you get there." Jacob and I looked at each other in disbelief but agreed we'd give it a try. The elevator doors soon opened into a large lobby-like area containing about 300 people. This line, too, moved relatively quickly. About 15 minutes later we had made it through their security detail and past a commercial photo-shoot for everyone who wanted to later buy a photo of themselves in front ofthe photoshopped Chicago skyline. We were ushered into another room, still no elevators in sight. This room contained a line of about 500 people. Much slower moving this line started to contain an increasing amount of people fanning themselves with their programs, parents carrying their exhausted children and other people who looked dazed and seemed to quietly ask themselves why they had made this choice.

It was here that our "new behavior" started. Jacob had spotted a few open spaces in the line in front of us and he quickly and in his usual agile way wove himself through the people standing in front of us with me following right on his heels (not quite as agile). We had moved past about 30 people and felt great.

A sign on the wall said "Time until movie starts" underneath a digital clock counting backwards had just crossed from 10 minutes over to 9:59. We didn't know this, but before we could get to the elevator we had to sit through a movie. 9 more minutes to go, though, and Jacob used this time to explain some of baseball's ground rules to me (as there were large flat-screen televisions in this room two of which showing base-ball games). I found out that my son, in spite of his German father, is truly also an American boy who knows about baseball. Thank you, Jacob, I now know more about baseball (including to which teams the batter, pitcher and catcher belong) than I knew just minutes earlier.

The movie we were waiting to see lasted, fortunately, only seven minutes. We left through a door different from the one we had come in through into yet another room, crowded as the previous one, containing about 300 people. This line was not moving at all when we first entered the room. People looked uncomfortable and somewhat a bit like they had been had: this entire journey to the Skydeck was taking too long, no doubt. Jacob, again scouting out the situation, pointed to an open door that, strangely opened to the front part of the queue of people at whose end we were standing. "We could just go through there and be almost at the elevators," he announced. I was undecided. If we walked through there, I thought, we would likely cause a rebellion and risk being lynched on the spot. We inched closer to the door. And when the line seemed to move just a bit, we quickly slipped in and, suddenly, were almost in front of the elevators, only about 50 people in front of us. The elevator left once more without us, but then we got in and were taken, in less than a minute, to the 103 floor of the Tower.

As soon as we exited the elevator we saw what would expect us on our way back: another long line. Approximately 150 people were waiting to get back down. Perhaps, we said, we could take the stairs and race each other down the 2000 plus steps. Unfortunately, after spending about 10 minutes on the deck, the stairs had been closed and, instead of leaping down those steps, we got in line for the elevator down. Quickly Jacob spotted another opportunity to speed things up for us. We briskly moved into the lacuna that had opened up passing about 40 people. We had just relaxed into our new position in the line, when someone tugged at my arm. A stern looking African-American gentleman looked me straight in the eye and said "You know you just cut in front of us." He was the kind of older man you know won't hurt you, but he had that authority about him that said "don't mess with me." So, I didn't. I said "yes, I know." His wife, standing next to him, was visibly angry saying something about entitlement and false privilege. "I know," I said, "and I can appreciate you being mad about it, because I would be too, if I were you. But we have somewhere to get to (I didn't say that it was our car we had to get to which I worried would be towed, if we ran out of pre-purchased parking time). They got into the elevator with us, but no more words were exchanged. However, in the second elevator (again with a line of about 50 people forming in front of it), he stared at me, clearly communicating his disapproval. I stared back a moment, but then opened my mouth to say what had been on my mind since we first starting talking to each other: "You know," I said, "otherwise,if not for this, we would be friends." He smiled. "I am Martin," I said. He didn't answer me and he never gave me his name. He did say "You're teaching your son bad manners."

Oh, how much I wish I had had the courage to say "No, you got that all wrong! It's my son who is teaching me bad manners. And I'm really enjoying it! Because on my own I would have never tried this. But my intuition had left me stranded at that moment. It wasn't so much his final comment that got to me than it was the fact that I didn't want to seem like I was blaming my son for our bad manners.

"Bad manners?" Jacob said in the car. "I wasn't teaching you bad manners. I was teaching you survival skills."

Yes, Jacob, you taught me survival skills in many ways today. You didn't only do that by showing me how to effectively cut in front of people. You also reminded me that it can be fun to do something on the very spur of the moment. That it is not always necessary to plan, that all it takes is the wish to do something, that even standing in line for long times can be okay when peppered with comments an observations about all the people around you. You reminded me, Jacob, that when the goal is a peak (or a skydeck) or some other pinnacle it is often the journey there and back that matters the most. You're an awesome teacher!

Playing The Game?

2010-02-14T01:03:00.012-06:00

Free Will (Joseph Thompson; Oil on Canvas)

There are few decisions a parent can make that are either just bad or just good. It is this insight that has had some come up with the very useful notion of the "good enough" parent. In it we recognize and validate the good/bad ambiguity inherent in most parenting decisions. This recognition usually comes quite easy for me. However there has been one decision that, until recently, I had a significantly harder time reconciling in this way. For years I have felt mostly regret about our decision to send our older two sons to catholic elementary and middle school. I have, actually, been ashamed of it because I felt strongly that I had agreed to this move out of a fear I myself didn't understand or see at the time. I leave it up to my readers to give me feedback on this question. Clearly Catholic schools don't evoke the most unambiguous feelings and memories and most people's minds. But when my spouse and I made the decision we were in need of the promise of something solid, something that would help our two boys, Noah and Jacob make it through elementary and middle school without necesarily having to be exposed to violence, drugs, and familial disruption.

It was the summer of 2005. We were expecting our third son, Gabriel, in November. The school year had just started and Noah, our oldest, came home telling us that his friend had not returned to their public elementary school but was now attending a local Catholic school. Although both our sons had marvelous teachers at their public school we had grown increasingly uneasy about their general school environment. Many of the classrooms reflected a thinking that made individual discpline seem like an academic accomplishment, rather than a basis for learning. Even in first grade the level of aggression and coercion among some students was disturbingly high. Many parents did not seem as supportive of their children's schooling and academic progress as one would wish. It wasn't uncommon to see parents yelling at their children as they were dropping them off in the morning. One parent came to school with a shirt that read "Would you like to know about my day? Call 1-800-FUC-KYOU." We did not see how much time each teacher spent understanding and working with the unique abilities and strengths of each individual student.

The promise (and premise) of the local Catholic school was that discipline, structure and solid academic routines would lead to steadiness and a rich learning environment for our boys. They would be wearing "uniforms" (Khakis and Polo shirts), they would go to Mass every Friday, their class-rooms appeared to be more structured and less cluttered with "learning materials." Their teachers seemed to have a kind of authority and confidence about the effectiveness of their brand of teaching (the Catholic brand (to the point of one teacher not seeming particularly engaged with the students at all)) that felt reassuring to us. With a third boy on the way, we were happy to have placed our first two in an environment that promised shelter and protection from many of the developments that plague public schools.

What we didn't consider enough, in my opinion, was the fact that we ourselves would not have wanted to go to a school like this one. Here are the changes I would have to undergo in order to go to this school right now:

Cut my hair;

Take out my ear-ring;

Go to church;

Be willing to engage in dogmatic religious routines on a daily basis;

Never challenge a teacher;

Accept a uniform dress-code;

Accept that teachers don't have to comply with a dress-code;

Accept that students are fed messages like "God doesn't like long hair" or it is "sinful to go a religious service other than a catholic one;"

Accept that learning is an undemocratic process, i.e., one in which students should not feel empowered to challenge teachers and test their ability to voice and defend opinions;

Accept that students are expected to "play the game;"

Frankly, I'm not sure anymore what made me think that it was okay and even functional to immerse my children in a thoroughly authoritarian structure while creating an authoritative home-life structured around discussion, dialogue and insight as well as choices. I can't but diagnose a deep-seated parenting insecurity that had befallen us (or at least me) at the time we made the decision. Even more frankly, I think these might very well be the same feelings that persuade one to choose dictatorship over democracy. Utter insecurity combined with worry about the future. Did the new baby make us feel weak, in need of protection? Did the fact that both our families of origin live so very far awayfrom us play a role in this?

Well, things are now coming to a head. Especially our older son who is in eigth grade and, thankfully, soon transferring to our local public high-school has not been doing so well since about 6th grade (by his own counting). He has always been an outspoken guy who much rather deals with the consequences of having gone over-board in stating his opinion than preemptively editing such opinion. However, Noah has had to learn that his teachers, most of them frighteningly unprepared to deal with strong teenage opinions and position-taking, did not like him better for this. In fact, they formed opinions about him and began to dismiss him as the trouble-maker, the one who always rolls his eyes or shows his disrespect otherwise. "School is not a democracy," Noah was recently told by one of his teachers, revealing, in other words, that school is about power and status rather than reflection and thoughtfulness. Only one teacher has maintained an attitude of respect for him, not because he would be more respectful with her, but simply because she can look through his disrespect and she can see his intelligence, sweetness and courage. She, too, though would love it if Noah learned to play the game. Does she know that this is not a matter of learning but of submission?

What she means by "playing the game" became clearer as she was talking about Noah during a parent-teacher-child conference she had called last week. She presented us with a letter Noah and his class mates had been asked to write to a retired diocesan priest. I am quoting from Noah's letter:

"What is it like to be a priest?" It must be tough to live a solitary life. How many massess do you serve a day? Don't you ever get bored? I get bored before I even walk into church. But that's probably my fault; I don't really make an effort to even try to like it."

Further down Noah asked him about his decision not be confirmed:

"The important thing I'd like to ask you about is Confirmation (sic.). I chose not to be confirmed because my school teaches very conservative Catnolicism which I don't like at all. I'm a rebelious (sic.) free-thinker, and I would like your opinion on this. Should I be confirmed later in a more liberal faith, or not be confirmed at all?"

Noah's teacher showed us the letter because she, like us, finds much evidence in it that Noah is a critical and reflective young man, with lots of potential. However, she also told us that--worried Noah's letter would be seen as "offensive"-- she didn't send it along with his class-mates letters.

My heart was bleeding. I wanted to say to Noah "come love, there is nothing here for you and us." Noah was right when he wrote in his letter that this school teaches very conservative Catholicism. Instead, I said to his teacher that I, too, didn't see anything offensive in this letter. "You don't?" she asked. No, I said. My wife and I both know "offensive." And we have certainly seen and heard Noah be offensive. This letter, however, demonstrated to us that we had indeed reached an important goal of parenting our children: their ability to think on their own feet and voice their opinion without being swayed by a majority (or an authority) that seems to think differently.

There is a subtext to this story; one that I'm not so proud of. It's about wanting my children to think like I do. I recognized this when, later on, Noah and I chatted a bit more about the meeting. I still felt quite agitated about the whole thing and Noah said, with some impatience in his voice: "You're always so critical of others!" I had to swallow hard. Just a minute earlier I had thought we had formed an alliance over the drudgery of this school. But he reminded me that he is, indeed, a rebellious free-thinker: Unlike his father, Noah knows himself loved enough not to shy away from stating his disagreement, even though it could "threaten" an alliance. In fact, it seems that our love for him may have been an important ingredient of his fearless outspokenness.

So, as it turns out, this experience, too, is a dialectic one: Wrapped into my feelings of regret are feelings of pride and accomplishment when I look at how my eldest has been developing. I recognize, too, that "regret" contains within it, the seeds of an unhealthy kind of revisionism, an urge to make things undone, to erase them. This one, and all others, cannot be erased; and it shouldn't be. It is what it is and it carries within it a pleasure and intensity that could never be felt by perfection.

"Dumbass"

2009-12-19T17:02:00.009-06:00

Our oldest son, Noah, is known to the family and his friends as someone who rarely shies away from using strong language. Partly this is a consquence of his impulsiveness. He is one of those persons who is very quick to react (though not always in the way we would like him to). Another part of this, however, cannot be blamed on his personality or character. Rather it is a deliberate and conscious effort for him to fit into the world as he perceives it. Two separate incidents should illustrate this.

Incident I:

Noah and I were driving along University Avenue in our hometown, Urbana. I had just picked him up from his evening swim practice. It was shortly before 9pm. As we were driving and talking (this is often a perfect time to chat a while and find out things that happened in school, during the day, with friends and in his life in general), I noticed that another car--going in the same direction as us--had not turned on their lights. I pulled up next to the car, honked very briefly and, when I had the passengers attention, gestured towards the light. They got it right away, smiled, waved a "thank you" and on we went. In the mean-time Noah was getting quite agitated in the seat next to me. In fact he tried to stop me from letting the people know about their light. We went around with this issue for a brief while until, finally, I said to him: I don't understand why you would want me not to tell them about their lights? He, still angry, said: YI don't understand why y,ou always have to criticize others. My thought process came to a quick halt. Criticizing? I hadn't even considered this possibility. In my mind I was being helpful, helping those people avoid an accident. I told Noah this and he calmed down a bit, but insisted that I was being critical of others (and, the implication was, of him). I listened carefully. Noah was telling me something I hadn't even remotely considered: Being helpful could be received as a kind of criticism. While this didn't so much dig at the foundation of what I believe to be an important part of communal livig, I was beginning to understand something about Noah that had, up to this point, eluded me. Noah's sense of the world, including his family, was not so much that they were there to support him. Rather, he felt that support and help, though he could recognize them as such, always also came with a hidden agenda of criticism. My most important realization about this: Noah was right. Especially when he or his brothers are concerned. Helping them always also carries with it a didactic component, i.e., a kind of correction/criticism of how they are doing a certain thing.

Incident II

It was a typical school morning. We were not rushing, but moving with the usual morning pace. Noah had forgotten something in his room and needed to go back inside to get the item. He came back to the car with his shoes in his hands, muttering to himself about something. He threw the shoes in the car, sat down and slammed the door shut. When I asked him to put his seat-belt on before he put on his shoes he started to yell at me. When I insisted Noah uttered The Word: dumbass. Contrary to my general intention and calm and quiet demeanor in situations like this one, I did not take this one cooly. We drove off and I, in a louder voice than I would have preferred told him he couldn't use his computer and I-Pod that afternoon and that he had to apologize. Noah refused. I escalated. Okay, I said, I'm going to turn around and you can stay home. If you need to go to school figure out a way to do it. He was still resistant, but on the way back to our drive-way he gave a pro-forma apology. I turned around and we were, once again, headed to school and work. I had also calmed down somewhat by this time and told him:

When you get home today, I want you to sit down, and write an essay about this word, "dumbass," and why you used it. It should contain a definition of the word, an explanation of why you used it, whether you think your father is a dumbass and whether you will use it again. And, I said, you will write it in German.

I decided not to let my wife know about this because I wanted to see, if Noah, on his own, would remember to do this. When I came home, he was in bed--complaining of a head-ache--seemingly only remembering his assignment as soon as he saw me. He tried to argue with me again about writing it, but I insisted, and he finally sat down to do it. When he was finished, I asked him to sit down with me and read it to me.

The result was captivating. Aside from the stuff one might expect(explanation: my friends and I say this to each other all the time; apology: I didn't mean it; clarification; you're not really a dumbass) Noah also explained that calling me a dumbass was courageous. Again, like in the first incident, this brought me to a complete stop. I had considered a number of things. Courage was not one of them. And yet, as soon as he said it I understood: Aside from who I think I am and who I think he sees when I speak with him, he also seems to see in me someone against whom it is hard, if not scary at times, to speak up.

We talked about this for a while. I told Noah how much I appreciated him taking the time to write this down and think it through. However, I also told him that using epithets of any kind to demonstrate one's courage is generally a bad idea, as it tends to escalate a situation, sometimes beyond repair. Courage--and I was taking notes for myself as we were talking about this--takes two things: a) clarifying what it is I am scared about, and b) speaking up about it. We had arrived, in other words, at a topic so central to boys and men, it is almost stereoptypical:

Boys and men struggle with expressing anger in constructive ways. It is our responsibility to support them in this struggle. If we shut down as soon as they get angry and/or get angry back at them, we have missed an opportunity. We have to unlearn and relearn just how to react when boys or men seemingly disrespect each other. In some families both stories would have warranted a verdict of being grounded for a while. But, while that might have shut Noah up, I have to wonder, if it would have helped him get to the bottom of himself. My sincere hope is that Noah learned through these interactions with me not only to act properly, but more importantly, that he learned to know himself better.

I have to admit that the label itself--dumbass--didn't insult me at all. Rather the insult was to my parenting. Would Noah, I wondered without knowing it, end up not knowing how to properly address others? And would that, in the end, reflect on my parenting? I had to remind myself, as I often do, that he is his own person. He is not just a product of our combined parenting efforts and failures. All we can do is help him understand himself as best as possible. And, yes, in that sense parents are guinea-pigs for their children.

These two stories together remind me of a number of things: the need for me to stay alert about how I come across to others (especially my children), remembering my sons' vulnerability (to criticism, to not measuring up (including to their father's expecations)), their need to understand courage and see it demonstrated in ways that are respectful and mindful of others. They also remind me how important it is to stay connected to them, to continue a conversation (even when it seems headed for stubbornness and nothing but stubbornness). Last but not least, they remind me of how wonderful it can feel to have made it through an issue like this with your child and to have come to an initial level of a truly mutual understanding.

Fatherhood Manifesto

2009-11-22T20:47:00.005-06:00

Florida, oil on canvas, 152 x 355 cm (60 x 132 in), 2003, by William Conger

Fatherhood is an act of self-determination. It is a stunning redefinition of what it means to be a man. It is a recasting of the biological, social, political and spiritual intersection for any man who finds himself in fatherhood.

Biological: At this intersection a man understands that not only can he be a participant in the conception of a child, but also, this child will leave him physically and emotionally vulnerable and sensitized.

Social: Spurned by the reponsibility for his child, a man might, for the first time, reflect on social norms (e.g. that men don't show affection with their children, or that men don't find joy in the mundane tasks of child-rearing)and consciously oppose them.

Political: Again, spurned by the responsibility for his child, a man might for the first time opposed war (as he is faced with the very real possibility that his own child will have to go to war).

Spiritual: Having a child is more than a merely material act. It is a spiritual adventure that begins at conception and will not cease again. Fatherhood reaffirms our rootedness in an ineffable beginning and end from which we come and towards which we go without, however, ever getting there.

2009-10-26T12:43:00.006-06:00

Anita Testosiero, "Immersion" Oil On Board 30 x 30 cm

Having a purpose. I just returned to my office from having lunch with my friend and colleague, John. We have lunch once a week, at noon on Mondays, at our favorite coffeehouse, for an hour. It has become a ritual. A ritual for two men nearing fifty who are always looking for meaning and purpose. What is the purpose of men our age?

What is my purpose? One thing I know about myself that may surprise many who have read this blog and/or know me personally is that I don't think of my children as my purpose. Fathering is a role that I have been exposed to (like exposure to a virus, as I explained in my last piece). But it is not my purpose. I enjoy this role tremendously, learn from it about myself and the world. But I cannot come to any sense of internal congruence by thinking that fatherhood--or grandfatherhood for that matter--is my purpose.

So much for what I feel about my purpose. The more difficult part is understanding what my purpose may actually be. My purpose almost feels like a person, like a being with a sense of self and its own integrity. What I know about it is that it has been watching patiently while I have been so very much immersed in the role of fatherhood. It is standing by, looking, nodding at times, waiting its turn. At times there is a glimpse of what that that "turn" might look like. It always has to do with a felt sense of deep comfort with what I'm doing. This is a comfort I normally don't feel when I'm responsible for others (including my children). Such responsibility can give me a feeling of accomplishment, a sense of productivity and getting things done. But it does not match the comfort of a purpose that is very much driven from within. In fact, writing for this blog comes much closer to this sense of purpose than any of the things I "do" every day.

I used to feel such comfort in the context of making music when it was often accompanied by a sense of obliviousness to time passing. I also would routinely get into that comfort of purpose while watching the goings-on in my aquarium. I still feel it when I ride my bicycle. It often comes when I sit with the men of the group I am a part of. I also feel it when I put on my gardening clothes and go out into the yard, even if it's just to pull weeds. As I am writing this down I realize that the comfort of having a purpose is very much tied to these things: immersion, loss of sense of time, absence of responsibility.

I guess I am realizing that "purpose" is more (or less) for me than simply having something to do or being needed. Too much of those feelings is tied up with doing things because others would like me to do them. Purpose means that "I choose." It means that my Self is involved by using its poetry, pleasure, sensuality, desire and longing to find out what that choice might be. Finally, having a purpose means to me that poetry, pleasure, sensuality, desire and longing are all present as I go about living.

The issue is not that I just want to be there for myself. I thoroughly enjoy the company of others. Rather the issue is how "responsible" I feel in my need to be for others.

Exposed: The Virus of Fatherhood

2009-08-19T14:04:00.008-06:00

My last blog is seven months old. Lots of things have happened and I wish I had written more, recorded more, reflected more. The process of writing about being a father has helped me tremendously in coming to terms with questions, doubts and riddles I have had to confront about fatherhood and myself as a father. My last blog was particularly helpful to me in that I took the risk of being honest in a way I hadn't been honest before. It brought me further along the journey of fatherhood and of understanding a kind of crazedness that took hold of me in the wake of being "exposed" to a new baby. But I have to admit that it also undermined, if not destroyed, a more idyllic picture some others had of fatherhood and of me as a father. It probably destroyed my own idyllic view of fatherhood and myself as a father.

Lying awake on a recent camping trip with my three sons, with Gabriel my youngest sleeping tightly nestled into the curve of my body, my mind kept being pulled into a maelstream of thoughts about my experience as a father. It was a stream that, at times, seemed to take my breath away. The thought that kept coming back, the thought that made breathing possible, though not easy, was this one: "But I only wanted to help! I wanted to help her, Leslie, my wife. I wanted to be a good husband, a thoughtful partner. I wanted to disburden her, make it easier for her." Certainly I wasn't thinking anything along the lines of "I want to be a good father." It didn't even cross my mind. And when a good friend and her husband visited the day my oldest, Noah, was born and greeted me warmly with the word "daddy," I balked telling her in no uncertain terms that I was still Martin and not to be called by this new function that had recently been bestowed on me. Little did I know that already at that moment and increasingly so in the next months and years I would be continuously exposed to the virus of fatherhood. I had no idea that I would undergo one of the most effective forms of brain-washing and change of mental attitude I can think of.

Before I go into more detail about the ways in which I was exposed let me briefly describe how as a culture we help men avoid exposure: a) we tell them that there sperm is nothing but a minimal contribution to the life of the baby; b) we discourage them from showing up for prenatal visits; c) we enoucrage symbolic fatherhood (catching the baby, cutting the cord) but discourage actual fatherhood (doctor's visits, diapering, feeding, meetings with teachers, etc.); d) we make sure fathers go back to work no later than two weeks after the baby's arrival; e) we foster a complex system of concepts that is based on the distinction between a primary and a secondary caregiver (i.e., making the father as the secondary caregiver less important); e) we continue to depict fathers as incompetent buffoons who smear themselves with shit as they try to change a diaper, who vomit at the smell and/or sight of a full diaper who handle the child like a foot-ball, who sleep through the baby's crys at night; f) we tell the father to run for cover as quickly as possible. Culturally we do everything we can to inocculate fathers against fatherhood. It is a miracle (or is it testimony to the strength of the virus?) that more and more fathers are catching on to fatherhood. And they're not only catching on to it as a concept. No, they're experiencing it as a truly life-changing, personality changing, relationship changing process.

So, what happened to me? How was I first exposed? Well, there are plenty of "story-moments" to recount: reading to my first-born in utero, feeling him kick my hand in utero, looking deeply into his eyes seconds after he was born, cleaning him after he was born, hearing his voice for the first time, and and and. All of these are photo-op moments from a story perspective. They look like so many photos in so many fathers' albums. But I'm not convinced they really did to me what I call "exposure" or even "brain-washing." Too many fathers have these moments and, still, soon fall into a more distant relationship still. Too many fathers walk away (or are walked away) inspite of these experiences. These moments are not enough to create the kinds of bonds that are needed to keep a relationship going and growing. In the same way that a family picture may not be a realistic representation of the family, these moments are not a realistic representation of the father-child relationship.

What really got me "hooked" was continuous care for my son. The circumstances of Noah's birth(viz. I had just become a graduate student again, we were used to living with very little, my wife was dealing with the beginnings of (post-partum) depression) gave me time and forced me to step up to the plate of continuous care of my child. That is when and how I became a father. Night after night of lying with him, holding him on the couch (just like Gabriel was lying next to me in the tent), soothing him to sleep, often with my finger in his mouth (as he would only suck on Leslie's breasts or my finger, not a pacifier). Hoping, too, that Leslie would find some rest and sleep (yes, during those first nights and days, my taking care of Noah was still very much guided by the idea of "giving mom a break.") Day after day of putting on him those bulky cloth-diapers, cleaning them out, washing them, hanging them up in our back-yard (four lines of lightly stained rectangular pieces of white cloth billowing in the wind). Day after day of pushing him in a stroller to a near-by park and, there, doing the same things (the things he liked) over and over again. And, not to forget, having him on me in the sling virtually anywhere I was going. Noah accompanied me to the store, to teach, to study and even to mow the lawn.

My exposure to Noah, in other words, was relentless. At some point it caught. I realized I could no longer step away from the plate. Nor did I want to. What seemed like a responsibility at first, something I had to do to make things easier for someone else, had turned into something so routine, natural and joyful that I would not for a second think about giving it up anymore. So, when our second son Jacob was born two years later, my exposure to Noah had formed me in a way that seemed irreversible. For one, my sleep-patterns had changed. I was sleeping very lightly, waking up at the slightest stir from either of my sons. I also had begun to snore quite badly (likely a side-effect of the light sleeping patterns and my exhaustion).

About six months after Jacob was born I took them both to Europe to visit my family and to celebrate my grandparents' sixtieth wedding anniversary. A unique experience in so many ways, but especially in as far as spending time with my sons was concerned. We were together virtually the whole time. They relied on me completely and the bond and need for that bond became even more reinforced. My state of exposure only increased. It was during this trip that I recognized for the first time a secondary pattern of exposure, viz. that I was seeking it out rather than just passively receiving it. I wanted to feel the pull that comes from my sons, wanted their trust in me as their provider, protector and loving father. It was a kind of wanting that goes beyond the mere expression of a wish. Rather, it's the kind of wanting that comes in response to a felt lack. I was missing something, missing being with my children. And so I sought out as many moments as possible to be with them. It hardly felt like a choice anymore.

Gabriel was born seven years later. My sense of wanting to be with my children was still there, but it had also changed significantly. This change was about choice. Over the years, wanting to be with them had changed into choosing to be with them, and, more important, choosing to be with each other. Their ability to choose, i.e., their ability to be independent, added the joy of a mutually willful and mutually intentional being together. Gabriel's birth felt confusing. The old sense of passive exposure to something I couldn't avoid came back fast. There was no choice in it, only a magnificently powerful pull towards him. No longer was the question even one about "helping" Leslie. Rather it was about the sweetness of the connection with Gabriel, the sweetness of my submission to his presence. But, despite the clarity I have achieved about this now, it felt deeply confusing at the time. A kind of partum experience seemed to take hold of my relationship with all three of them. With Gabriel it was the old, and somewhat familiar sense, of wanting to be with this baby. But with Jacob and Noah it was a new sense of parting that had to do with me being pulled back into a relationship with their baby-brother while, at the same time, releasing them into a greater and wider realm of independence. I was becoming afraid of losing them all. That night, when Leslie and I wrestled over who should hold Gabriel, was, for me, about that fear. A primordial sense of my own passing role as a father, a sense of my eventual death and my sons needing to be in the world without me, a sense of needing to cling to my son(s) and never give him(them) up took hold of me more powerfully than I had ever experienced it before.

Why does nature do this to us? Why does this process come as the promise of "forever" only to quickly morph into "for a while?" And, if this has to be so, how are we to bear the pain of this change? For me this pain has never (and, I suspect, will never) resulted in discouraging my sons from being independent. I am not a "clingy" father. But my exposure to this virus cannot be made undone. Below my jubiliations about their bountiful steps towards self-sufficiency I often hear the grieving tone of a another voice. It is about a man who is still deeply connected to his sons and who will not stop feeling the depth of that connection. It's about a man who sometimes finds himself with the odd and very sad thought of his sons being without a father when they themselves are old and fragile.

A last reflection coming from the philosophical corners of my brain; it is about the term "virus." I have asked myself, why I chose to describe fatherhood in terms of a disease. It wasn't until I was already in the middle of writing that something about that word occurred to me. The word "virus" and the word "virile" have a common root: vir. This root is a Latin word for "man." Is it possible that exposure to this virus is about our manhood? Is this virus perhaps underming our manhood in one way and rebuilding it in another? Being exposed to the virus of fatherhood, then, would be the ultimate process of "deconstruction." It would be a destruction coequal with a construction. In becoming fully exposed and attached fathers we are becoming different and new men.

Hormonal Fathers

2009-01-17T21:41:00.012-06:00

About ten days after my third son Gabriel was born, something happened that likely has impacted the way I think about myself and others as fathers. It certainly has had lasting ramifications for my marriage.

Gabriel was born by Caesarean Section. Ten days after his birth means, in other words, about five days after my wife and Gabriel had come home from the hospital. It was the middle of the night. Gabriel had already begun to sleep through long periods of every night, but he didn't quite yet make it through the whole night. My wife had nursed him just a little while ago and he had fallen asleep fast. Just about forty-five minutes later he woke up again. I picked him up and started walking with him, humming quietly. Just as I was leaving the bed-room, my wife said "give him to me." I responded saying he was fine and that I would just rock him a while. "Give him to me," she insisted. I said "No, I want to hold him. He is fine,and besides, you need your sleep" and walked out of the room. What ensued was an almost unreal seeming pursuit. My wife got out of bed and slowly, because of her incision from the c-section followed me through the house first saying I should give him to her, then screaming, then wailing. I finally surrendered him. I was sobbing. He was crying again (he had immediately calmed down when I first picked him up). My wife turned her back to me and started comforting him. I stayed back, attempted to calm myself, trying to understand what had happened.

The most poignant part of what I realized was, perhaps, this: the whole time through this incident I heard two voices. One kept saying "give him to her, she is the mother, he should be with her." The other kept asking "But why? He is fine! I just can't give him up right now. I want to hold him!" I also felt a tremendous amount of shame, feeling that I had broken an unspoken contract that supposedly exists between every woman and her non-pregnant partner. Essentially this contract says

"I am the birth mother. This child was with me for nine months. Therefore I'm closer with him/her and should always be the first to have him, when he is in distress."

My wife has recently retold this story emphasizing those aspects that give the impression that I acted like some kind of a baby-thief. Someone who carelessly and selfishly took the baby and, not paying attention to the mother (who was in pain and far from being completely recovered), refused to surrender the baby to the person who should rightfully have him. I feel the sting of humiliation and embarrassment in this description because it so accurately matches what one of the voices I heard at the time seemed to say to me. That voice also says "Fathers should never be so arrogant to think that they can do what a mother can do."

But the problem is, aside from my wife being so very upset about this and me second-guessing myself as she was following me throughout the house, nothing felt wrong about the situation. In fact everything felt as it should. I was rocking Gabriel, he was falling asleep in my arms. I felt a seemingly un-ending rush of love for him. I felt connected and inseparable. After nine months of waiting for him, he was finally here. He had been born into the emptiness I had been feeling throughout the pregnancy and he was beginning to fill it.

This doesn't mean that I would, at all cost, want to do and be everything for him. If my wife had picked him up first, I would not for a second have argued about it with her. But this time I had picked him up, had begun to soothe him; and the small bond of 'parent-comforting-fussy-baby' that forms and increases in strength every time we pick up our babies and children to comfort them, this small bond had already begun to develop in those first minutes. It is, in a way, no different from the first few moments when a mother has her baby latch onto her breast. The connection is beginning to form. It would simply be cruel, if someone tried to take the baby away at that very moment. And so, every time I sit down with Gabriel to eat, read, sing or just diaper him, this bond is there immediately. I don't like for it to be disrupted. Disruptions range from being told he shouldn't eat what I'm feeding him to having his brothers interrupt the reading with questions about something unrelated. Disruptions also include another person talking to him, while I put a new diaper on him. Diapering makes for an intense connection with our babies and toddlers,as does all physical contact with them.

This episode also makes me think of hormones again. The research is still small that supports the possibility of hormonal changes in men who care for their babies and children. It is clear that it happens in certain mammals. To my knowledge there are two studies that have, with a very small sample size, researched this phenomenon in human males. But if I had to choose a label for my feelings, their intensity and their absoluteness, then I would choose the label "hormonal." I felt hormonal in a way that seemed to successfully short-circuit my frontal cortex and lead me directly down into a primal region of fathering and caring that had, up to this point, perhaps served as a source of my fathering, but that I had never encountered this directly before.

Further evidence that hormones might play a role in this is beginning with puberty I felt strongly also that I could be, would be and wanted to be a father. I have certainly not ever heard another man talk about this as something that they experienced as well. It might very well be that in my case becoming a man and becoming a father were synonymous because of the role my father has played in my life. The upshot of all this is that men can be affected by their future or present babies in ways that might make them seem irrational and, to some, perhaps even dangerous. We have yet to understand this phenomenon in men, not to speak of the fact that we have to find out how to respond to it. The article that can be accessed at this link might enhance our understanding somewhat. http://www.slate.com/id/2168389/

In Two Different Languages

2008-12-25T20:57:00.010-06:00

My native tongue, German, has always been a strong part of my fathering my boys. I spoke to them in that language from the time they were conceived. I greeted them in German when they were born. I have spoken German with them ever since. German has created an intimacy for us that I have come to associate with being a father. It has connected my sons and me in ways that reach far into my own deep past, my childhood, my upbringing and my roots in Germany.

What about my wife? My wife understands German, but she generally does not like to speak it with me or the boys. On occasion she will speak a word with us. At times she may pronounce my first name in the German way, "Mahteen". For a little while my middle-son attempted to give her German lessons. However, her German is not bad. She took a couple of classes when we first met and she took private lessons from a fellow German student. Most of her German, to be sure, stems from having been around German speaking folks for the last twelve years (i.e., the time since our first son was born). When she speaks to them, she will speak English with them. All are fluent in English as well.

So, everything should be fine. But it isn't.

We spent this Christmas at my on-laws' house in NJ. Neither speaks German. For the past 12 years we have done while visiting with them what we also do at home. I speak German with the boys and Leslie speaks English with them. With one difference, however, I do a lot more translating for my in-laws and so do my sons. Yesterday, after what now looks like years of stewing, a pretty heated argument broke out between them and us. My in-laws felt offended, excluded and marginalized by my sons' and my German conversations and exchanges.

I took in a lot of information. Most importantly how important it is for my in-laws to connect with my sons and how deeply they feel disconnected from them when we speak German with each other. There suggestion to me, out of politeness, was to speak English only when they were around. I was shocked. Shocked by the contrast between their feelings, which make so much sense, and the seeming absurdity of their request when I listen to my feelings about it.

It was clear to me that they were well-meaning about this "German thing," but that they were not really getting it either. Mention was made of German things they had done to please me (i.e., get a tape made by a band with a German sounding name, marinated herring-filets as they're sold in North Germany). They offered how "impressive" they think my achievement of "teaching" them German is.

Did they know that in asking me to speak English with my sons they were asking me to give up my home? I mean not the home I still remotely have in Germany with my parents, sister and other relatives. I mean the home of my language! Did they realize that their request amounted to nothing else but a final refusal to enter that home? Did they know that my convictions, objectives and outlooks have a home in that language as well? Did they know that their request feels like a request to cut myself off from my boys? Did they consider that it was Christmas, a time of deep-seated rituals, songs and stories all mediated in German? Did they understand that, not having those songs, rituals and stories already made things emotionally complicated for me and that I am yearning to recreate at least some of it with my sons?

For a while I was considering giving into their request. Well, perhaps, I thought, this would be easier than it seemed. We'd just speak English with each other and then, when we're among ourselves, switch back to German. But I couldn't. And the more I thought about it, the more I recognized something I had never really figured out before about my speaking German with them: I saw my anxiety about losing them. I realized that this anxiety had been with me, and still is, since the time they were conceived them.

It is odd to see this as it is. At the same time it is the most normal and known feeling to me. It comes as anxiety to release them into a culture that to some degree still feels foreign and inhospitable to me. It is a culture that pledges allegiance to a flag and sends their children into unjust wars. It is a culture that proclaims itself highly ethical and moral but still hasn't come to terms with the holocaust-like treatment of Native Americans. It is a culture that proclaims itself to be highly religous but has little tolerance and interest in faiths other than their own garden-variety Christianity. It is a culture whose values I still can't trust. After almost 25 years!

This is, in a way, a chicken-and-egg situation. I can't figure out, if my anxiety is a result of my cultural observations or if it is the case that my cultural negativity is a result of my anxiety. Am I dealing with a prolonged case of post-partum anxiety? Have I been afraid of losing my children for the past 13 years? I am almost positive that this is the case. I realize that speaking my language with them has become some kind of insurance, or better some kind of immunization from this potential loss of my children.

What did I tell my in-laws? I told them that I respected and appreciated their feelings. I told them that I didn't want for them to feel or be marginalized by my German interactions with my sons. I told them, too, that the solution to this problem could not lie with me simply giving up speaking German with my sons while they are around. However, I told them, that I could see myself be less dominating in conversations. This means that I would interact with the boys less frequently, redirect them to their grandparents when they had questions and only answer questions that were clearly only answerable by me. I voiced my hope that this conversation alone might sensitize us enough to behave differently in our ways of interacting with each other.

My in-laws, to their credit, responded graciously. He pointed out, however, that I had all the power in this (meaning only I could decide to switch and that made them dependent on me). I thought, but did not point out, that he and she had the power of the dominant culture and language. A fact that would only be different, if we lived in Germany.

What is worse in all this is that it has made more visible a crack that is going through my relationship with my wife. I don't believe in relationships with no cracks, by the way. Relationships are like houses: when they settle cracks will develop along the ceilings, walls and floors. These cracks speak of incompatibilities, of arguments, of hurt, of confidence, arrogance, of a lack of understanding, etc. This crack is more visible and more in need of real construction work, though. It seems that my anxiety about losing my sons may have contributed to my wife's feelings of being marginalized. It may have contributed, even, to feelings that I was taking the boys away from her. This, I am certain, was never my agenda. She and I have mostly agreed on things, especially cultural politics, etc. Though we often do disagree on parenting issues (discipline, clothing, food, etc.). For my part I can say that my opinions about some of these issues (discipline and clothing are over-rated, food doesn't always have to be organic, etc.) are mostly just in need of a healthy compromise. They're not in need of dominance.

It's easy to see that speaking two different languages may increase the risk of the crack getting or seeming wider than it actually is. Differences of opinion suddenly more look like manipulation by the children as they attempt to speak to the parent with the more lenient attitude in that parent's language. They will also switch to that parent of the two who is less likely to fly of the handle, to be sarcastic or otherwise off-putting in their responses to them. Often, I have been the parent in the role to whom they boys switched. There are some famous examples to the contrary, however. When my sons wanted to join a community of internet gamers, I refused. They switched to my wife and she agreed. My sons wanted a new cat after our last one had died. I had said no, they appealed to her and got their wish fulfilled (that one made me mad, by the way). My wife has in the past more often agreed to McDonalds than I have. (Although my disagreement is in no way a claim to healthier food-choices at home.)

Imagine that these disagreements and moments of single parent domination always happen in different languages and it is easy to see that the language could be mistaken as a the culprit. It is easy to see, too, that especially with respect to their children (where couples need to show utmost unity), two different languages could amplify a sense of disunity and make it seem that the parents work against each other. Aside from the two languages, though, it is likely that the kind of anxiety I described above is one that other fathers feel as well. I do not believe that this is just about my being a foreigner (though that might add to it). Rather, I believe that fathers may have these feelings quite frequently. They begin to feel protective and quickly turn out to be over-protective. Paternal anxiety about losing their children may be a strong factor in how fathers act towards their children and their spouses

How can we begin to speak about this anxiety? It's something I feel. It is something that's real. Is it acceptable that, as a father, I feel these things? How might other fathers feel about this? How can mothers begin to understand this without feeling that fathers are trying to dig away part of their territory?

Further Thoughts On Death

2008-09-08T20:38:00.005-06:00

One of the thoughts that has recently been going through my mind is triggered by watching our kitchen-timer run down the last 45-50 seconds. One day, I keep thinking, one day 45 seconds will be all I have left to live. Who, I wonder, will be there besides me? Will I have made peace with all those I need to make peace with? Will my sons be on their way towards their own accomplishments, families, love, passion and happiness? Will those last 45 seconds be filled with regrets and worries or will they be filled with gratitude. And what are the things that will truly count?

And no, this doesn't feel morbid to me. It doesn't feel like fear, more like wondering. A deeper sense of what is, what will be and what will be without me.

Philosphers and other thinkers have remarked on the fact that we cannot think our own existence. I agree, thinking I don't exist is a paradoxical concept bound to confuse us and, ultimately, not make so much sense. But, I hold against this, we can feel what it means to exist no longer. I am deeply interested in this feeling. Nothingness is palpable emotionally and it is, perhaps, this experience Irvin Yalom refers to when he reminds us that death is no different from not being born. In other words, it is a state of being we're already deeply familiar with.

Thoughts on Death

2008-09-07T20:38:00.002-06:00

Lately, meaning for about the last 6-8 months, I have been thinking about death. It is not a thinking beset by fear. Rather, it feels like a deepening, a knowing that dying, that my death will come in the future. Near of distant, I don't know. I do know that thinking about my death comes to me at times directly, but at times also indirectly. Today, for example, I was walking through a small forested area near our house. It was one of those pre-fall days, where despite the brightness of the sun, a certain coolness pointing towards the end of the summer could already be felt. But it wasn't the temperature that got me thinking and feeling about death again. It was the smell of the forest. As I was inhaling deeply, memories flew by me, almost too fast to catch. Memories of hikes taken in other forests. I saw myself on my grandmother's hand, walking by a huge fallen tree. I saw myself riding my bike through a forest near my hometown in Germany. I remembered a two-week hike through the Teutoburger Wald in Germany. I remembered: I have always loved the forest. And with that feeling of overwhelming love, just nestled right between the "o" and the "v" came the longing, the desire to do it again. To walk in the woods. And with that longing came doubts: will I? Mostly, will it be long enough? Or will it just be a few minutes, like today? Will it always feel too short?

And while I am thinking about these things, my three boys are walking in front of me. They are talking about Runescape--a multiplayer internet game--and I want to shout to them "stop it, smell the forest, before it's too late." Of course, I don't. They wouldn't understand. Not in that way at least.

I have recently taken to routinely spending time with friends. Several times a week I sit down with a friend for an hour of tea or coffee and....just hanging out. Beautiful times, really. But why do they seem so short? I remember doing this with my friends in high-school. Just for the ten minutes we had between class-periods, we would go and lie down on the grassy soccer-field, let the sun warm our limbs and faces and . . . just hang. Usually, we wouldn't say anything. What bliss! And it seemed endless despite its finite nature. I didn't know how short it all would seem. How after a few decades of life I would yearn for just those moments and wonder, if I would experience them again.

This "again" is central to what I'm experiencing about death. In it lies the question whether certain feelings, if not certain experiences, can come to us again. This I often feel: one more time I'd like to experience what it was like to lie in the sun like that, what it was like to kiss Bettina, my first girl-friend in seventh grade. One more time I'd like to know the pleasure of successfully playing through a self-composed song with my band, once again I want to harmonize with my friend and co-band member Katrin. (The first song we sang together was Cat Steven's Father and Son. I remember it to this day, the goose-bumps running up and down my spine. I never experienced such pleasure before!) I've sung in many other situations since, but this first time, well, it has stayed with me in ways none of the others have. I wish that one more time I could enter my old high-school as a student. Simply to feel what it was like. I wish I could one more time see my paternal grandparents walk from their house next door to ours, across our lawn to our back-porch, knocking on the window to join us for breakfast.

So, yes, I feel greedy. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish I could experience my life once more. Not to change a single thing about it. Not even to be more aware of it--I have so many vivid memories--no, just to experience it to reassure myself, perhaps, that these moments, strung together as my life, aren't lost. And yet, I know they are. In some way at least, they are. As such, they exist only in my brain. When I die, they will go too. There is no satisfying answer to the death of my experiences. No book, no memoir, no amount of photos, letters, and other documents from my life can substitute for their experience.

This is what I'm thinking about these days.

Christmas--A Prism For Looking Into a Boy's Soul

2007-12-25T00:01:00.000-06:00

It's Christmas. The night before, to be exact. But for me it actually is Christmas, because the event during my boyhood and adolescence was Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. To this day I have a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit in the morning, during broad day-light, when everyone is still dressed in their pajamas, bath-robes or some other lounge-wear. My Christmases are "feierlich". We're dressed up. It is dark outside, some trees are already lit inside other people's houses. We see them on the way back from church. While we get so very excited just seeing this and thinking about our own impending "Bescherung" (the giving of gifts). We also become increasingly solemn. The moment we're looking forward to is a moment both of utter silence and utter jubilation. The songs that course around my head are not pop-Christmas songs sung by some cartoon figure or munchkin of some sort. They're often centuries old songs sung by honorable choires, lending to Christmas an air of festive ancientness. Unthinkable that anyone on a day like this day would want to sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or even the muppet version of The Twelve Days of Christmas.

No, the Christmas I know and grew up with is a Christmas of deep "Innerlichkeit". It's a day of deep meditative internalization. But this does not mean that it is a particularly Christian feeling. Rather it is the sense that the story of Jesus' birth gives a sense of timelessness and momentary standstill of everything that lends itself to my own strong feelings about this time. I still love that many people refer to the time between Christmas and New Year's Day as "die Zeit zwischen den Jahren" (the time period between the years). This, too, gives a sense of interim, with everything being put on hold.

It would be sheer impossible to exaggerate the impact this holiday had on me during my childhood. Only now can I say with certainty that the time of Advent and Christmas--through its tunes, lights and festiveness--gave me a sense of shelter and safety from an otherwise quite relentless seeming life. Just everything seemed to slow down. How hard it is to replicate this effect now! Even in school everything was moving at a different pace, slower and with more intentionality. Teachers would allow us to light candles in our class-rooms. Even in the higher grades teachers would read or tell Christmas related stories. We would also begin to prepare for our Christmas concert.

Why am I talking about this so much? (Other than just indulging in my romantic notion of a childhood in Germany?) It is because I believe that my feelings about this holiday are, perhaps, a rare opening into a boy's soul. The view we get is precious and, perhaps, a bit unexpected. Check it out:

need for silence

listening inside

being still (physically)

allowing for melodies and words to reach softer spots deeply buried inside his soul

Wanting to feel safe

Being serious

Suspended competition

A strong sense of purpose regarding others (helping, fixing, providing for others)

I am struck now that during this time of the year all the boys, even the trouble-makers, the eternal failures, the ones that nobody really paid much attention to--in short: all of them--seemed to change and absorb some of this festiveness and quiet seriousness. It seems so obvious now what the decisive factors in this seasonal change in boys' attitudes were:

parents spent more time with them

teachers seemed more personable than any other time of the year

more time was spent on non-competitive things like crafts and singing and, especially, conversations

a generally more nourishing atmosphere pervaded everything

schools often prepared concerts or plays allowing boys to be part of something larger than themselves

gift exchanges between class-mates gave a sense of connectedness with others

being quiet was not a punishment but rather something like a gift

To be sure, as an older boy my attitude towards Christmas didn't just stay the same. I became a more critical person, not easily convinced that the story of Christmas interested me so much. But the conversations we had in school and at home helped give a kind of historical and sociological substance to the story of Christmas that made interesting to me even today. As a maturing boy I would have hated feeling like I was being fed a fairy-tale. At the same time I never wanted to lose Christmas. I loved it and was given a way to continue loving it and enjoy it even more deeply by being taught to see the story analytically, i.e., historically--geographically--sociologically--scientifically.

Christmas also became a prime occasion for helping and giving to others. My sense of my own privilege and the misery of others often grew particularly strongly during Christmas times. I found it very satisfying to sing for others, to perform for them, to go shopping for them or just to fix something around the house for them. It felt so incredibly good to be needed in this way: needed not as a form of parental decree but rather emergent from my own choice.

Christmas provided me with an impetus for many things I now value in my life. More than anything else Christmas helped my restless boy soul to settle down, become still and hope and have faith in others and feel safe from most challenges. This is what, as a father, I would like to pass down to my sons. I am not sure that I will be able to do it through Christmas. But if I can help them experience the joy of settling their restless boy souls, if only for a brief period of time, then I have given them something so valuable they will draw from it for the rest of their lives.

As Time Goes By

2007-09-28T21:10:00.000-06:00

For a few weeks now, our beloved outdoor pool has been empty. The blue crystal that shone over to us even when we were just passing by, on the way to school perhaps, is gone. Left are the empty pool itself, the benches we were lying on all summer, and, of course, the high-dive. It is hard to imagine, but also hard to forget, how filled with laughter and activity this now empty place was. Yes, it is fall again. The grassy areas around the pool are turning yellow, the trees under which we lay for a few hours each time we came here are turning color and, then, shedding their leaves.

For me summer hours at the pool are at the nadir of my experiences with my boys. We have come here for the past five years. How much have they grown during this time. Neither could swim when we first started coming. This year Jacob, my middle son, challenged me to a head-first dive off the high-dive. He is not afraid to jump and he is not afraid to dive down all the way to the bottom of the pool to fetch a rubber block or just a quarter he sees. He even tried a summersault off the high-dive, but didn’t land as well as he had intended.

When I walk down to the fence around the pool I feel as if I can literally see us in there, Jacob jumping, Noah plowing through the water like a dolphin, and Gabriel still with me, almost. He, too, likes to jump, off the edge of the pool into my arms. I know the ache I feel all over my body is about wanting to hold on to these times, these moments.

Compared with modern entertainment standards for children (and, perhaps, adults) this pool has nothing to offer. The high-dive and well, a few lap-lanes, and a larger area for general play and messing around, and a rather small kiddie-pool. Yes, there is a small concessions stand and it is possible to sit by that stand and look down to the pool area. No lazy rivers, no tubular slides, no artificial waves, just a pool. But we love this pool. It’s the one place where we can go as a family, almost always, all of us.

“We”, yes, it is the sense of togetherness that almost haunts me in all of this, as I fear, I know, that it is temporary. It is finally dawning on me that these moments from the summer and the previous summers are precious moments. They are, in this shape, not going to return. I used to say to myself and others how strange it was to realize in the present that an encounter or event in the past was perhaps the last of its kind. Now I have to say that I am beginning to be aware of this possibility at the very moment something is happening. There have been uncounted moments this summer when I was reminded of their momentariness.
Lifting up Gabriel to the hoop so that he could throw in the ball, playing some Frisbee in the drive with Noah, going for a bike ride with Jacob and hitting out local labyrinth for a meditative walk with him, seeing Noah zoom around the drive in his roller-skates, Jacob—in Houdini-like fashion—sitting on scooter following Noah around.

Perhaps, what I am sensing, too, is that despite these moments of appreciated togetherness I will not be able to stop the process of knowing my children less and less. This is a strange concept, perhaps, but one that makes intuitive sense to me. As our children unfold, more and more of their personalities begin to take shape in definite thoughts, expressions and behaviors. I realize: these are my children, but they are not mine. They belong to themselves. What is inside them, what compels them is far beyond my knowledge and anticipation. All I can do is be prepared to be surprised.
If all goes well, this process of decreasing knowledge of each other will not mean mutual estrangement from each other. Rather, it will be funneling into the mysterious gift of friendship based on familial ties, based on deep familiarity. If all goes well, we will remember our hours at the pool as those moments of shared physical and emotional closeness with each other. If all goes well, we will recognize in them the closeness and romance inherent in any relationship that comes, stays for a while and then leaves. If all goes well, we will always be able to build new romance and closeness with each other.

Celebrating the Impossible—My Sons Are Soon to Complete a Year of Electronic "Fasting"

2007-02-28T11:19:00.000-06:00

In four days a very special year will come to a close. It is the year my wife and I will always remember as the “year of no picture screens”. A year ago, just a tad after the beginning of lent, my older son came to me with a challenge he had heard his class-room teacher speak about. Her son, when he was a ten year old had apparently struck a deal with his father that he would receive $100, if he didn’t watch tv for one year. My son Noah, likely not believing that I would consider it, asked me: Wuerdest Du das auch machen? (Would you do that too?). It took me a second to do the math, $.30—roughly—a day, and a lot longer to consider the ethics of it. In fact, I’m still not through with that part. Before I go more into that, let me tell you briefly the agreement we came up with

Noah and Jacob would, for one year, not watch any videos, play any game-boy, play-station or computer-games (our whole family has not watched tv for over ten years). In return they would each receive $100 in cash on March 4th, 2007. Noah stipulated he wanted his money as one single bill, Jacob wanted his in 100 singles (go figure!). Exceptions: a) a one week car-trip to the Jersey Shore during which game-boy and videos were allowed (in part because all their cousins were going to be there playing and watching a lot). b) Family videos: every once in a while, it turned out to be about once a month, the family would watch a video together; c) just two weeks ago both boys had caught a severe stomach flu. That combined with a three day lock-in because of blizzard conditions in Champaign-Urbana led to a conversation and subsequent agreement that they could play with a play-station like game for a limited amount of time (30 min each/day; again by their own design).

So, I could talk about the things they did instead. The incredible amount of reading they engaged in both in German and English, the time spent playing piano or practicing Tae-Kwando moves, the many “forts” they built using all available furniture in the family room, the time spent learning about fish-tanks, the extra energy that was there for homework and other school-projects, the drive towards independence that took place during this year (both boys have begun to look at their bikes as vehicles that can take them places rather than just two-wheelers that are nice to use on the drive-way), time spent with friends, outside, playing in the yard. It has been mind-boggling. Note, too, that all this happened during the first 15 months of our third son’s life, a time-period in which it would have been “easy” for my wife and me to just rely on tv, etc. as welcome assistance in the task of occupying the boys.

About the ethics: I struggled with this “deal”. The idea that there is a monetary return on this experiment bothers me. It’s not stinginess, I hope, but rather the question, if my sons should/need to learn to do things because they’re right, not because they’re paid well. A friend of mine asked me rhetorically: “would you do things without an incentive?” I agreed in the rhetorical mode of the question that, no, I probably wouldn’t either. But deep down I knew that at their ages (8 and 10), I would have done it for no money (though I would not have suggested it on my own). It took me a while to overcome my sense of ethical superiority (about the no-incentive attitude) to realize that I would have had an incentive as well, one perhaps a lot more problematic than the money my sons asked for. My incentive would have been that it would have pleased my parents (a big issue for me that, only in the last few years, has begun to dissolve). Realizing this felt like a huge relief: Noah’s and Jacob’s decision was not connected to any sense of something they were doing for us. They were doing it for themselves.

Now what? you may wonder. Both boys are considering the celebratory weekend of indulgence with videos and games as well as a the possibility of going for another year—at a raised price, of course! We’re okay with whatever they decide. We will celebrate with them on the 4th their huge achievement. And we will quietly admire their stamina, persistence, willingness to endure, their initiative and self-motivation and their openness to trying new things even though they might seem uncomfortable at first.

Flags Of Our Fathers--Some Thoughts On Heroism, Friendship And Fatherhood

2007-02-26T08:43:00.000-06:00

Clint Eastwoods film "Flags Of Our Fathers" is certainly worth watching. In its critical stance towards heroism it rivals and equally haunting German film, "Die Bruecke", directed by Bernhard Wicki.

I do not want to provide a summary of either movie here. Rather, I'd like to give a brief reflection on what Eastwood seems to think of as the central message of this work. The message is given twice in the beginning and the end of the movie. Paraphrased it runs something like this:

We would like to think of war and the soldiers who fight it as heroes involved in some kind of heroic action. However, it is much more complicated. What is identified by bystanders as heroism is, for the individual soldier nothing but the friendship he feels for his fellow-soldier. Soldiers fight to protect each other from harm, not to commit heroic acts directed at the annihilation of the "enemy".

I find Eastwood's message courageous. Though I hesitate to say "heroic". While I'm not his friend, my hope is that his message is intended to protect me and my sons. Proactively protect us.

There is, however, a rather unsettling question that goes along with Eastwood's message.

The friendships of the soliders he portrays are all make-shift friendships (though not necessarily shallow). They didn't predate the war and they ended when the war ended. They were friendships of necessity, emergent from the fear of the nearing battles. They were friendships that came to be over a few card-games, a few shared cigarettes, an off-color joke or two and perhaps a shared moment of shared forgetfulness while listening to a few beats of music coming from the army ship's sound-system. But, essentially, these men are all lonely.

This loneliness is not bettered by references to each of their mothers and assumed girl-friends and fiancees. Rather, it's made worse by the loneliness and isolation from other men, from fathers, brothers, uncles and friends. Eastwood portrays all other men (those who are not involved in the actual fighting) as either estranged or perversely out to exploit the war for its heroic content. Those men become the seducers rather than the help-mates.

The question that haunts me is this: would these men who became soldiers and who "protected" each other--perhaps in an attempt to learn about real friendship between men--would they have chosen not to go to war had they been more strongly attached and connected to other men? Would real friendships, real conversations, real connections with other men have made the difference?

I am unsure if Eastwood wanted to go that far. Interestingly, the narrator of the story in the movie--the son of the main-character "Doc", a corpsman--doesn't know anything about his father's experiences until after his father passed away in old age. However, Eastwood shows a scene between father and adult son in the hospital. Moments before the father passes away, he worries "where is he". His son, assuming his father was missing one of his friends from the war, responds by saying

"Iggy, isn't here. He is dead."

But his father, in his last lucid moment, tells his son:

"I wasn't looking for him, I was looking for you. I worry I wasn't a good father to you. I'm sorry."

His son responds:

"You were the best father I could have wished for."

In an obvious gesture of abandonment of all stoicism rather than abandonment of each other, they half collapse half embrace each other crying, with the son's head coming to rest on his father's chest. A moving gesture of paternal nurturing and care (as opposed to the stereotypical handshake and perhaps a sentence that begins with the equally stereotypical words "Son, I'm proud of you . . .").

Eastwood is careful not to overstate the point. But it seems clear that this scene is meant to heal the wound of father absence. Often this wound continues to be passed on from father to son from one generation to the next. It is, perhaps, at the very root of all the loneliness men experience in their lives. It is the male wound most exploited by patriotism (the love for one's "patria" or fatherland ) for, under the guise of "heroism, it substitutes for the lost or absent father patterns of aggressive and self-destructive acts.

Is it possible that peace, "Pacifism", is intimately linked to the existence of deep and lasting nurturing connections between fathers and their sons?

A Sign For Mark--A Friend I Only Knew Through Another Friend

2007-02-25T20:20:00.000-06:00

Last Wednesday, in the locker-room of the indoor aquatic center of my home town, Urbana, a recent aquaintance told me that a friend of his was dying.

The recent aquaintance, Barry, is the friend of another aquaintance whose children go to the same school as my older two boys. This is how it is here, in Champaign-Urbana. Strangers are often people who know ten people you also know. So, they're not really strangers in the full sense of the word, because, in many ways, our worlds overlap. This is why, even though I never knew Barry's friend, I am sure I did know him in many ways.

I had met Barry perhaps four weeks earlier and gotten to know him some through short conversations in the locker room. I found out that he and his friends go swimming on Wednesdays and running on Saturday mornings. I found out that, like me, they do these things early in the morning, between six and seven, to be back and ready for family life and work. I found out that they're all about my age, mid to late forties and early fifties. All of them, I could tell from Barry's descriptions, very engaged and loving fathers and husbands.

On Wednesday he was alone in the locker room, his friends were not there. We chatted for a while then Barry told me about his friend, Mark. A great marathon runner and athlete, funny guy with a good sense of humor, two children and . . . struggling with brain-cancer. He had been diagnosed 15 months earlier and now was in hospice care at home.

Barry said he and his friends were taking turns helping Mark's wife and simply sitting by his bed-side. Barry knew, it seemed, that this would be Mark's last week. There was in his face and voice a complicated mix of acceptance and anger, of stoicism and despairing . . . of sadness. Perhaps it was shared age that build the bridge between us at that moment, but it only took seconds and I began to feel those things too. How could we begin to fathom what was happening to Mark and to us?

The feelings are not simply vicarious. Yes, this could happen to us too; we're about that age. So, yes, there probably is fear about that; about our own unknown fate. And, yes, this fear is usually something we'd rather not talk or know about. We have a right to not know it, right? We have a right to live, after all we're only middle-aged not old. Though these feelings are strong they account for very little of what is creating the real struggle for those who stay behind while Mark is off on his last big journey to the eternal hunting-grounds.

The real question is this: How is it possible? How can someone, a man bursting with vitality, strength, openness and love simply cease to exist?

Since I was a little boy I have wondered about the passage from something to nothing. My first experiences of it were seemingly mundane. I would storm forward into a space where just a second ago a person or a car had passed. And I would wonder about the absolute lack of resistance that space gave me . Just seconds ago a solid thing, a person, was there . . . now it was empty.

How could the thing I had just seen, heard and smelled have vanished so completely? How could it have gone so absolutely? How could the only thing left of it be in my memory? Why was I now filling up that space, feeling the weight of my own presence more than anything else that might have come before?

When people die, no matter if we know them or not, they leave these spaces, they pass from something to nothing. Often the spaces they inhabited are quickly taken up and filled by other things and other people, sometimes wanted, sometimes unwanted. We gasp at the emptiness of such spaces at first. But if we don't take great care to preserve them, to draw boundaries around them, they will get filled again. It is in this way that life layers itself through time and in time.

So, Mark, wherever you are right now, we will draw some boundaries around the space you once inhabited. Your friends will continue to tell stories about you, your children and wife will treat your absence as a presence of sorts. I will have simply written this piece for you, a fellow man, fellow father, fellow lover of life.

I did one other thing, Mark. Yesterday, when I knew you had passed on, I dedicated a Chopin Mazurka to you. A space in time for you, while I played.

2007-01-12T00:07:00.000-06:00

Almost 11 years ago (my wife was pregnant with Noah) my father and I took a bicycle trip through southern Wisconsin. On our second day, we briefly met another cyclist. He was a man in his early seventies who took note of us because we were speaking German.

"I was a gunner on a fighter-plane that hit targets in Germany," he told us. "Still have an injury from it. One of those damn German FLAKs hit the bottom of my plane. The projectile went through the metal and right into my left foot."

He went on for a while, complaining about his injury and those "damn Germans". My father listened quietly. When he finally opened his mouth I expected him to say something diplomatic, something along the lines of "yes, it was a terrible time" or "I'm sorry about your injury." I was not prepared for what he did say:

"When you were flying above those cities in Northern Germany, I was a little boy. I was one of those 'damn Germans.' I remember a particular day when the air-raid sirenes had gone off again. The first planes began dropping bombs. This time the bombs didn't simply destroy things, they set things and people on fire. I remember those burning figures. Running down the street. Towards the water. Jumping in. Desperately trying to extinguish the fire that had enveloped them. But it wouldn't go out." Here he started to sob. He turned away and walked behind a weather shelter nearby. The man looked shocked and dumbfounded. I quickly bid him farewell and went to find my father. He was still upset. Shaking. I had never seen him like this before.

My father later admitted to me he had never, never intended on saying any of what had come out that day. In fact, he felt certain he couldn't have said any of this other than in this very situation. Deeply buried in his unconscious, repressed by my father who never wanted to see these images again, they came surging up anyway when he had to face the heretofore faceless perpetrator of so much pain and chaos.

My father was, of course, not the only one who suffered. Many more Germans suffered, many more Germans suffered more. It is has only been rather recent that Germans have begun to feel a sense of permission to look at and process their own pain and trauma that accompanied those air-raids. The number of civilians who died in those air-raids lies somewhere in the millions. Hundreds of thousands of them children.

The ruthlessness with which the allies attempted to root-out all Germans and all things German comes to light in these attacks. The terms NAZI and German had become interchangeable. Not unlike, perhaps, now the terms Muslim and terrorist have become interchangeable.

It is with this background in mind, then, that I received with particular shock the following short reports from my sons.

Jacob, my middle son, came home and told me that his best friend--truly a very nice boy--had told him that he, Jacob, had "Hitler-blood" in his veins. When my oldest, Noah, heard this he remarked that a boy from another fifth-grade class regularly taunts him by asking are you a NAZI or are you Irish (Noah has red hair)?

It would be easy, too easy, to ascribe these comments to what I consider to be the general public ignorance among many Americans of how Germans have processed their own involvement and responsibility for the effects of National Socialism. Ignorance can be fought. Teaching could help, running workshops could help, speaking more openly about these things could help. Perhaps it will. And, of course, the comments by those classmates weren't completely off-base. By being German my sons, like all other Germans born during or after the war, do share in a kind of post-war responsibility for and connectedness to what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. That of course doesn't make them NAZIs or part of the blood-line of Adolph Hitler. But it puts them into the position of having to account for how evil arose from inmidst their own people. This, I believe, is good training for anyone, for evil can arise from within any people or nation or religious denomination.

What's more disturbing to me about these incidents is the simplistic world-view that informs such thinking. This is a world-view that borders on a kind of magical dualism between good and evil. It is a world-view that, still, almost 75 years after the NAZIs came to power in the Weimar Republic, holds that they, those "damn German", are evil and we, proud Americans, are good. That belief, in and of itself (there is no other way to describe it) is NAZI propaganda at its best.

I am not defending Germans or Germany. Each German will have to speak for himself or herself. Hopefully, when it's all done, the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts and Germany will be recognized as a nation of people who prefer peace to any kind of warfare.

I am protecting my sons though. I'm protecting them from the poison of this kind of magical dualism, so alive in most expressions of patriotism in this country. Evil, I tell them, and good, are not bound to any particular religious creed, any particular national interest, culture, language or political system. And although a whole nation may seem to have fallen behind a president or dictator, they are not all evil. In fact most of them are not. I teach my boys that the potential for evil resides in all of us, as does the potential for good. We need to be aware of it every day in order to prevail over our more vile instincts. It is hard work. It is work that is best accomplished not by labeling others as evil (or good) but by honestly identifying the evil and good parts of one's own thinking and existing.

2007-01-10T06:22:00.000-06:00

Recently, I took my boys on a walk again. All three of them, Gabriel on my back, Noah and Jacob walking along with me. Once again, too, we walked in our own extended neighborhood to a nearby park. As we were meandering back from the park towards our home, we decided to take a different route through a small nature preserve. In order to get into the preserve from where we were, we had to walk along a high chain-link fence and then crawl through some very low underbrush before we would reach the back entrance to the preserve. Jacob was in front of me, Noah behind me. Gabriel, still on my back. When we got to the underbrush part I had to almost lie flat on my stomach to prevent him from being hurt by some of the branches. Suddenly, Jacob recoiled. Just outside of the underbrush sat a large wooden box:

"There is someone lying in that box" he cried.

I came out of the underbrush at that moment. He was right. Two large feet, clad in huge black boots were sticking out of the box. Twitching. The person was not dead.

"Don't look into the box, I said, let's just keep walking. Over there is the entrance to the park."

So, we kept on walking and, except for a few words about the fact that this probably was a homeless man, didn't talk more about the incident.

It wasn't until several days later that I had a "day"-mare; since I don't have night-mares, never have--I can't decide what would be worse: sleeping comfortably and being hit by a nasty vision of something that could/could have happened or go through the motions and routines of a regular day and suddenly being violently stopped by my own thoughts. What happened? Well, whatever triggered my body to go there, I was remembering the part where we crawled through the underbrush, my body low, with the additional weight of Gabriel on my back. I could not have straightened up at that moment, had to wait until I came out into the clearing, were the box was. I physically felt this sensation of being pressed down, of not being able to stand straight. Then the thought came:

"What if this person in the box had grabbed Jacob, who was only a few steps in front of me? What if he had harmed him?"

I was so close, and yet, because of my position, so far from helping him. Violent thoughts and images (images I will spare you) of him being harmed rushed into my mind and it seemed as if the branches and vines through which I was crawling had laid themselves not only around my body but also around my heart.

"Too late, too weak, too late," these were the words that kept floating up.

I tend to think that these kinds of thoughts--they're coming more and more often now--are part of my ever growing awareness of my ever decreasing power to protect my children from the dysfunctions of the world. I feel powerless when images of a state leader being led to the gallows flood the news. A leader, moreover, who was once heralded a friend of the US. I feel powerless when my children ask how it is that someone dies when he is hanged. I feel desperately powerless when my son, in his usual style, is trying to think of ways that he could avoid the unavoidable:

"I could hold on to the rope."

"I could spread my legs really far, so I won't fall through the trap-door in the floor."

I feel powerless because I know that he already has absorbed the fear of that person at the gallows whose picture he saw somewhere. Now it is his fear. Oh, how I wish I could stop his train of thought.

"Not you my love," I want to say. "That guy deserved it," I want to say, "you won't ever deserve something like that."

But I don't believe in the logic of deserving. I am teaching my children that nobody deserves to be killed, not even a murderer. But that belief makes the world a messy place. A place where right and wrong are connected rather than neatly separated. It becomes a place where the unimaginable can happen: A good person, a little eight year old boy even, could be attacked and killed, by a grown man, while the boy's father looks on helplessly.

I know not to be true what he still most fiercely believes:

That I, his father, could protect him from all harm.

I know that not even my thoughts about this issue are clear-cut enough to protect him. I cannot offer him a philosophy of life that is simple and easily applied to all life-situations. I so wish I did have that to offer. Instead, I only have me to offer. The warmth of my hugs for him, my smiles of encouragement, the song I sing for him every night. Though this also is what makes it hard to think of them as old men. It's not their age, but the fact that I will not be there anymore to protect them with my love.

This, it seems, is the only viable alternative to falling into deep desperation: to protect them, yes, to immunize them, with love. I am not sure it works, to be honest. But I will not stop doing it.

A Walk After Dark

2006-10-23T21:24:00.000-06:00

Yesterday evening, after a long day of work in the yard, some difficult overseas phone-calls and other things that make a Sunday seem long, I decided to go for a walk in our neighborhood. It's something I used to do a lot in our old neighborhood where there are many side-walks and trails that connect with each other. While our current neighborhood features beautiful and individualized single family homes, it is almost completely devoid of sidewalks and other amenities that help pedestrians and bikers alike. So I walked down some streets at first, but then--getting more courageous and defiant--I walked across the newly developed campus of a nearby children's home, then through a recently razed neighborhood. I was getting excited. Simply walking already had let me see houses and yards I would otherwise have ignored and overlooked, but walking through this old razed part of my home-town almost made me feel that I'm no longer in my own town. Some of the foundations of old buildings were still left, but all the trees had been taken out. Many already had been shredded and along the eerie shapes of roads there were piles and piles of woodshavings. Further down I found something that looked just like a tree grave-yard. Huge tree-trunks lying next to each other, waiting for the shredder.

I kept walking, came back to the road I know, then to another construction area. Here, too, former buildings had been razed and what is left is a huge open space, a sudden clearing in an otherwise urban and quite dense context. I saw small houses along streets I drive down at least once every day, but had never seen before. I took short-cuts through people's yards and, finally, back onto the children's home campus, across another wide open area that soon will be developed and gone. I finished my walk by taking a short cut to our house across the local country-club, seeing--for the first time--the back-sides of all the houses I drive by in the morning. Huge glass porches, patios, etc. all looking out onto the country club.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, mostly because of two things. First, this walk brought out the boy in me. I always knew he was there, every time I had passed those construction areas and old neighborhoods I had thought about what it would be like to walk into them. Everytime I drove across the bridge that crosses the salt-fork I had yearned to stop and crawl under the bridge to explore. You get the drift of this . . . this walk felt like an adventure, an exploration of sorts.

Secondly, this walk cemented the thought that I would take my older sons--Noah and Jacob--on this walk. Would they come, I wondered. They're not spoiled, but sometimes, when I suggest a walk, especially when it's in cold weather, they balked at the idea. Not so this time. Both were gung-ho. Likely also because it would be after dark, a time we usually spend at home getting ready for bed, the next day, etc.

So, today, just a day after my own first experience, we went. Oh, it was so much fun. The boy in me had had a the right sense. The things I found exciting yesterday were the things they saw today. The huge tree with five trunks, the front yard that was filled with junk, the old fifteen feet sun-flower, some very weird halloween decorations and of course the razed neighborhood. I had described it to them as similar to the "badlands" in the Lion King. As it turns out, that was the perfect description, stirring their sense of adventure and their curiosity. Of course, they climbed on the piles of mulch and debris and jumped onto the tree-trunks. And, although it was dark, they "found" lots of things.

We walked for over an hour in 30 degree weather. We had fun. There was agreement, quiet agreement nothing big. Just a sense that one just has to step out of one's own door to begin to see things. Everything just depends on how we look and how we move. Plenty of times we had driven by those places, perhaps we had all even seen them. Yet they had reminded profoundly empty and meaningless to us until we entered them. Entering these places, old houses, thick woods, steep hollows that lead down to a creek and entering them on foot changed how we saw these things and created a new connection between us. Doing this after dark, of course, only heightened the effect of the experience.

I am proud of my sons and of myself. Proud of them for simply saying "yes" to this small proposal. Proud of myself for connecting a part of my own very alive boy-ish-ness with theirs. I am proud, too, because I sense that this experience helped them feel earthbound and connected to their own neighborhood. As much as I would also like to take them overseas, explore the territories north of the polar circle, etc. this experience gave them something different. It connected their home, our house, with other places around it. But it was necessary to walk it. Had we just driven or even biked something about this connection would have been lost. My sons, I feel, learned something about marking their territory by walking its perimeter. They made it real for themselves by entering it.

I consider this a profound and existentially necessary "vehicular tunnel experiences" in which our feet never reach the ground.

My Father's Legacy

2006-10-20T22:09:00.000-06:00

A recent interview on a local radio-station got me to think more about what exactly is the impact my father’s life has had on my own life. What is his legacy? I know that for many sons fathers are the ones who pass on skills—how to hold a hammer, how to throw a ball, how to fish, etc.—I don’t think this is the case for me. I could make an exception for “how to bicycle”. Except, my father didn’t teach me how to bicycle. It was my mother. I still remember the day, as a matter of fact. No, my father’s legacy, i.e., his presence in my life has a lot more to do with how his life began to shape up about five to six years after he was born.

My father was born in 1937. He was five or six years old when his own father died as a soldier on the Eastern Front. From all I can tell, Bruno, his father, was a simple man. He worked for the postal service in Germany, but had fallen into some sort of disrepute for stealing. He probably wouldn’t have, on his own, chosen to be a soldier. But serving in the military meant that he would get out of prison and, certainly, that was better than having to serve time. He became a Red Cross medic. In 1943, he was shot in the leg by a Russian bullet and bled to death on the battlefield.

I could never get around how non-heroic and senseless his death was. I wondered, why wasn’t there anyone to help him? Weren’t there any other medics around? Didn’t anyone know how to stop his bleeding. He must have been lonely when he died. He must have wondered, too, why am I dying from this kind of wound?

There are only two pictures of my father with his father. Both were taken on the same occasion, I believe, a visit home from the front. One shows my father with his mother and father somewhere in the city of Hamburg in the winter, next to a bare tree. The other shows my father on his father’s lap. In both pictures, my grandfather is wearing his soldier’s uniform.

I knew very early how my grandfather had died. I think I knew it from my father. He also told me about the stealing. I couldn’t help feeling some shame about all this. Why did he steal? Was he poor? Did he do it to help out his family? Relatively early, too, I had an experience with my grandmother, his wife, who showed me a picture of the white cross that had been sent to her after his death. It had his last name—Srajek—in big black letters on it. Strangely, my grandmother believed that this picture was a photo-montage that had been sent to her to appease her. About twenty years later I read a letter that had been sent to her after his death. The letter spoke of his heroic death for the fatherland, it spoke of how he had “fought” until the last breath, how he had saved his comrades, etc. Bullshit, my grandmother said. She was disgusted. She knew him well enough, she knew how he had died. How scared he probably was, how very lonely.

Perhaps my father’s legacy begins here. But, no, it begins earlier. Somewhere where he, already as young boy, couldn’t stand being asked to join large groups of boys and girls gathered to swear allegiance to a flag, the flag of the NSDAP. There are no stories about the impact of his mother’s distrust of the Nazi’s on my father’s life. I imagine that she radiated it with every gesture, every breath. My father, rather than becoming a child recruit of the NSDAP, joined the church. He found a strong group of people, led by a young aspiring pastor, who carried him through his fatherlessness as a young boy and gave him a sense of belonging he didn’t have anywhere else. This affiliation saved his life. Not in the sense that he would have died without it, but in the sense that it gave him a horizon beyond what he had seen and experienced as a boy. Much of his determination to graduate from high-school and, then, to go on and get a university education originated with his connection to this group. With this group also came a strong antipathy to war, violence and aggression. He never served in the military and to this day abhors and criticizes military and other aggression around the world.

When, in 1980, I became a conscientious objector my father’s life and experience had a huge impact on my decision. By the way, he never had to “object” in the way I did. His generation had been exempted from serving in the new German military because of their closeness to the war. Had I not objected I would have served in the German military for 15 months. Since I objected I had to serve in National Service for 18 months (three months more, because, though the German constitution allows for “objection”, it still “punishes” objectors with an increased length of service). I worked in a home for severely physically disabled children. Children whose parents had “dropped” them off and, essentially, didn’t want anything to do with them anymore.

The thing is I don’t recall a single time that my father and I actually talked about this decision. Rather, I remember my mother repeatedly telling me she hadn’t brought me into the world to see me end up as cannon fodder. She was right, of course. But my father’s silence was still strange. When I “passed” the military court session that would approve me as an objector there was no praise, no pride, no celebration. Perhaps, it was simply expected.

All this has changed with my children. Living in the US, means that we are living in a country that has repeatedly put itself into situations of war since the end of WWII. Living in the US also means that my children go to American schools and participate in the daily ritual of pledging allegiance to the flag. My father balks at these activities. He worries about his grandchildren, more than he had to worry about me.

My father’s legacy is peacefulness. Not just the conditional peace “If no one attacks me then I’m peaceful”. Rather it’s the kind of peace that rather leaves than fights. It’s the kind of peace that argues that nothing, not even one’s love for one's country, justifies or makes plausible the move to go to war. And as far as defending your loved ones is concerned, my father has always believed that such defense is possible in many other ways than to have to go to war. My father’s legacy, I realize, is in many ways a much more stringent version of America’s cherished individualism than most American’s have to offer. It argues that being an individual means that we have to object to all forms of patriotism because they will inevitably lead us into aggressive and defensive relationships with others.

Principles

2006-10-05T07:50:00.000-06:00

I don't usually think of myself as a man of principles. Rather, I believe that I go about dealing with issues in a contexual and situational way. In so doing I pay attention to the concrete details before me, the moods and emotions of others and myself. I find great pleasure in doing so and often leave a "situation" with a sense of having listened and truly responded to the problem.
So, it's with a bit of surprise in myself that I'm writing down this story about the way I handled the following situation.

Both my eldest sons, Noah and Jacob, are taking piano lessons (so am I, by the way, and from the same teacher). I have noticed that Jacob, my middle son, had lost his practicing energy. He would hardly sit by the piano. While before he spent long hours working on figuring out the quite complicated pieces I was playing he now wouldn't do anything anymore. I didn't say anything about it, figuring Rachel, our teacher, would soon enough notice and talk to him about practicing.

Well, she did. I was in the next room and heard some of it. Rachel wasn't angry or threatening. But she was firm. They agreed on a practicing schedule for Jacob, three times a week, after homework's done. I was relieved and felt, in a way, that Rachel had made it easier for me.

Not so. When Jacob was done with his lesson he came to me and said: I want to stop playing the piano. I was tempted to ask "why". But I didn't. Rather, I said: well, you can't. Mama and I believe that playing the piano is good for you, it's a little bit like going to school, there really isn't a choice about it. Well, he asked, how much longer will I have to do it? I thought about this question for a second. Intuitively, I wanted to say "until you're 12" (he is 8 now). But I pushed myself and said: Until you're 16. At this point, he began to cry, overwhelmed, perhaps, by the sheer infinity that seemed to stretch before him when thinking of himself as a sixteen year old and how long it would take him to get there.

I said: I'm sorry you're upset about this. But I think, Jacob, the issue is not really that you don't want to play the piano. I've seen you play, I've heard you play. I've heard how much fun you have and how much energy there is in your practice and playing. So, I don't really believe that you don't like playing the piano. I think you're upset because you haven't practiced and playing the piano simply cannot be much fun without practicing. If you really want to find out whether or not you like something you have to do it first. There is no way around it. And you have to do it with attention and focus.

Jacob stopped crying. I'm not sure what he felt or was thinking about. I refrained from asking, fearing I would dilute what had just been achieved: there are principles of living and learning, some of which we set for ourselves, but some are set for us by others and we have to allow ourselves to treat them as tasks for us.

Jacob has begun to practice more. It's not a sea-change. But truly, all real change is slow. But he is doing it and, often, I'm somewhere near, so that he can ask, if he has questions about it. Rachel has noticed too and is giving him strong and encouraging feedback. I' m sure there are reasons why he is feeling this impasse right now. The birth of his brother, a bit less than a year ago, might be part of it. Feeling the strong urge to forge his own path through life, wanting to be different from both his older and younger brothers. A healthy need, perhaps, also to emancipate himself from the strong impact of his father, me. The point of this is that all these things are real and important. I'm hoping that what he's learning from it is that often feelings are contradictory and that processing them means to figure out solutions as they emerge from those contradictions.

2006-09-18T13:42:00.000-06:00

What follows is an addition to the blog I published just a few minutes ago. A colleague had sent me a list of things men said fathers need to teach their son. This list had been compiled by a female who felt that her nephew needed to have more direct fatherly input in his life; the list contained items like learning to shoot a gun, canoeing, building a fire, etc. Here is what I wrote:

Yes, I'm impressed too. It connects to a continued sense I get that in our time it is females who impress upon males the need to step up to the plate of fathering/fatherhood. But there is something in that force that also makes for "predictable" answers. All the men asked now come up with somethings (sic) that a father must/should do. They're all true and kind, in a fatherly sort of way. But I believe that something much larger and less concrete underlies fathering. Something that, perhaps, fathers are scared to face and scared to name.

Just minutes ago I finished a piece on my blog--www.fathersfromthebeginning.com--a meditation, really. Things just seemed to come out of me as I was writing. In it I'm saying this: fathering is an exercise in facing, enduring and embracing the unknown. As fathers what we teach our children when we nurture them is to face, endure and embrace the unknown.

So, if I connect that to the list below, I would say "canoeing, yes, because who knows where/how far you will canoe"; "building a fire, yes, because who knows when and where will you need to build fires"; etc. It's the skill connected with the unknown.

I wonder what you think about this.

Martin

2006-09-18T12:14:00.000-06:00

I return today to the question/s of what happens to fathers just around the time of the birth of their children. It's a question that keeps coming up for me, partially, I believe because who fathers are, how they're going to feel and present themselves in the lives of their children is hugely influenced by how they're coming into fathering at this early stage of their fatherhood experience. Certainly, early perinatal experiences are not the only factors that set the stage for fathering, but they are, I believe, among the more important and yet more ignored ones.

In a recently published manual The Importance of Fathers in the Healthy Development of Children the Department for Health and Human Services points out that the significance of paternal nurturing behavior starts in infancy because "fathers exercise a critical role in providing their children with a mental map of how to respond to difficult situations." (21) The authors continue to point out that fathers should "hug and kiss their children often and comfort them when they are sad or scared." (21)

These are important insights, of course. But one wonders how one can go about fostering them in fathers? The ability and willingness to hug and kiss, it seems, is already an outcome of a more fundamental sense of connectedness between a father and his infant-child. I'm thinking that we are looking for and trying to formulate a kind of organic connectedness between father and child. It's an organic connectedness that is non-organic in its organicness. This is another way of saying it's mystical, in large part, rather than material, which it is to a lesser degree. This is another way of saying men do not get pregnant. Something else happens to them, something that's radically different from pregnancy and yet parallels it in many ways: men get lost in nothing.

While it is in part necessary to get lost in this way, it is our task also to find men in that nothingness. For if we don't find them, they might lose themselves in ways that will forever bar them from becoming effective fathers in the way the above manual envisions.

What might it mean to say that men necessarily need to get lost in nothing in preparation for the birth of their child? To me, getting lost in nothing, can mean that we learn in a fundamental and life-changing way to embrace the unknown of fatherhood. When we enter fatherhood, we're entering uncharted territory. The nothing of this experience, its uncharted nature, is both its character and its point of orientation. Entering the nothing of fatherhood is an ad-venture. Something that's coming towards us, yet remains unknown. Men necessarily need to enter this mystical ad-venture because in it and through it they can find themselves as fathers, i.e., as men willing to continually risk the unknown as it presents itself to them in their children. This is where we can come back, with ease, to the statements from the Manual. A father's ability to nurture, i.e., his ability to hug and kiss his children and comfort them when they're sad or scared comes from his fundamental ability to face, endure and steer through the unknown. A father, then, who has confronted the unknown himself, can, through his nurturing, teach his children about enduring the unknown. However, this ability is not simply a trait of male behavior. It is a trait that's gained and concretized while a man is "expecting".

What might it mean to say we need to find men as they're attempting to make their way through the nothingness of fatherhood? Entering this nothing is a scary experience. This does not stop once a man has entered it. Rather there are lots of ghosts and demons to encounter, steep cliffs and overhangs to climb, deserts and frosty regions to cross. In order to face the unknown, men need to be "hugged and kissed" and "comforted when they're scared or sad" by men who have already faced the unknown and nothing of fatherhood. Fathers need to be nurtured to make it through fatherhood. This nurturing cannot begin early enough. I believe it begins early in a male's live while he is still deeply immersed in boyhood.

A father's ability to nurture does not come out of nothing, it is learned and handed down to him by men who have been fathers before him, men who, themselves, have been nurtured through that nothing--in order to face and endure the nothing as the unknown.

2006-08-18T06:26:00.000-06:00

August 19, 2006

To me, one of the processes most fascinating about my children is their growing independence. It's a powerful and potent mix of emotions I grapple with as I watch my children take their steps out into the world.

Recently, my middle son (he is eight years old now) has had to deal with a spill of boredom, bad mood, temper outbreaks and just being upset at his older brother (he is ten years old). Part of me knew that this was simply just a case of "too long a summer". All camp activities had ceased, play-options had been exhausted and repeated too many times. Some friends and their families were taking this last opportunity before the school-year routine would take over again to grab a few more vacation days.

One evening, after another day of visiting different activities without really getting into anyone of them, my son came up to me and simply announced "I'm going for a bike-ride." I hesitated for a moment. It was after 7pm, it was getting dark, and he would only have about 45 minutes before biking was no longer an option for the day. AND--MORE IMPORTANTLY--HE HAD NEVER BEFORE GONE BIKING BY HIMSELF. But I saw the spark in his eyes and consented. "When you come back, I said, dinner will be ready." I watched him take his bike out of the garage, put his helmet on and off he went. One quick glance to the left and right and left again and their he was riding out of our drive-way.

I watched every minute go by. Meanwhile, my older son was sitting in the kitchen reading through the latest novel of "Warriors" and my youngest (eight months old) began, at the same time, to pull himself up on the various chairs, drawers and other things he could find to hold on.
It was a strange experience. Of course, I started to worry after about 15 minutes. But I forced myself to be calm. It doesn't last long though. I calculated: If he isn't back by the time the baby is in his crib sleeping, I'll go look for him. And he wasn't. About 35 minutes had passed. It was still light enough outside not to worry too much. But I worried nevertheless. My older son barely picked up on my thoughts. I just told him to watch the baby, in case he cried (he never does, just goes to sleep) ran into the garage and was just pulling out the van, when he arrived back. There he was proud, smiling, sweating and so incredibly happy. Of course, he wondered where I was driving. In the briefest of possible ways I just said "Oh, I just wanted to look for you." But I was curious, where had he gone? So, the two of us drove together the path he had taken from our house. He remembered every turn. When we came back--after about two miles--I said, but how come it took you forty minutes. Well, he said, I came back once, but nobody was looking for me out of the window, so I went around another time!

There it is, he came back, he did look for me, he turned around (just as they say those first steps away work, when your baby checks in with you, but keeps crawling away). I didn't feel bad that I wasn't waiting by the window. In fact, I think it was good that way. He knew I was thinking of him, he knew that it would be okay. He did feel strong and confident.

2006-07-18T13:45:00.000-06:00

July 18, 2006

You are not, a seven-year-old female client pointed out to me, a father of girls. You are a father of boys.

So, I said, you mean you're different. You mean I don't necessarily know about that difference.

She nodded and continued, You don't know about girls.

---------------

She is right, of course, her observation is correct. I am the father of three sons. I don't know what it's like to be the father of a girl. And yet, I am reminded of a song by a German song-writer, Reinhard Mey, who in one of his more recent songs sings (roughly translated): "I am the son of a woman, married to a woman, the father of a daughter . . . how could I not be a feminist? Likewise, I'd like to say: I am the son of a woman, the brother of a woman, the husband of a woman . . . how would I not know about girls? Quite to the contrary, in an odd paradoxical kind of way, I feel like saying, I've always known about girls, but it's only been in the last 10 years that I have come to know about boys. But, frankly, that doesn't help removing the sting of my client's observation. As a father, I know so preciously little about girls. So, I ask myself, what have I observed?

I have observed, often, how a certain tenderness passes between a father and his daughter. Something of indescribable lightness and affection. A glance that one could confuse with romantic love, if noticed sans context.

I have observed, and bashfully looked away, the kiss that's exchanged. Somtimes on the cheek, sometimes even on the mouth.

I have observed the call "Daddy"/"Papa" and its sweetness. A call that, all at once, suggests closeness and intimacy, distance and difference, a sense of place that is separate yet able to find long periods of congruence.

I have observed the response, "honey"/"darling"/"sweetheart"/"Schatz"/"meine Suesse" and in it I have heard a sense of fullness and satisfaction . . . a sense of completion.

I have observed, rare though it has been, the fury and rage that can come to pass between a daughter and a father. Forces of nature released that tranform each into something almost akin to an animal.

I have observed, too, that such anger often comes connected to the desperate struggle for a resolution between the forces of protection and independence.

Even less frequently I have observed distance, an insurmountable chasm of nothingness that stretches out between a father and a daughter.

Never have I observed, though I suspect it exists, loathing between a daughter and a father.

Am I romanticizing? Am I projecting, transfering, hoping? I don't know.
As I'm writing this, it is becoming clear to me that I miss having a daughter. I miss it in the way you miss something you know will never come to be.

I wonder,
how many girls would I have had in me?

I wonder,
what would they have looked like?

I wonder,
who would they have looked like?

I wonder,
how would I have loved them?

I wonder,
what would I have found in me?

I wonder,
what would they have found in me?

Please, don't say/think/suggest/believe I don't love my three boys. I love them!
It is just that, sometimes, I yearn for that otherness of love.

2006-07-04T06:03:00.000-06:00

July 4, 2006

It's 7am. Our infant son woke at 5am today (unusual for him as he normally sleeps between 10 and 12 hours every night--yes, we're blessed!) But he was quite wet and, then, discovered he was hungry too. So, I sat, with him cradled between my legs, sipping my first cup of steaming coffee (which I had prepared along with his bottle of warm formula) both of us very content.

As he was concentrating on his bottle, trying to hold it with his arms while tracing with his hands the wrinkles in the sheet that covered him, I picked up the book I had been reading for the past week and a half: Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.--I don't want to summarize this book here, don't want to analyze it. Rather, I'd like to say simply what so fascinated me about this book and makes it one of the most powerful stories I have read in my life: it is the stunning, sometimes painful, yet--in the end--redemptive ways in which this story weaves together themes of maleness and fathering. As I'm writing this, I realize that there is no such thing as maleness and fathering per se. So, it is through the many facets of human existence--shame, guilt, loss, fear, courage, perversion, discipline, love, surrender, secrecy, denial, faith, respect, confidence, torture, hate, humor, wisdom, skill, creativity, ambivalence (and more)--that being male and being a father come into view.

In an indirect and--even to me--mysterious way,this book helps me connect with an insight I had just a few nights ago as I was sitting on the edge of the nightly Atlantic Ocean, watching white crested dark waves crushing against the shore, numbing my ears with their sound. I realized that I was filled with a sense of infinity. Then a picture from earlier that day, of my sons sitting in a big boat-shaped swing at the local amusement park, laughing euphorically as the swing--for just a few short seconds--brought them into perpendicular motion towards the earth. Arms raised, mouths wide open, hair flowing--remembering this while sitting by theocean this moment of seeing them up there tasted bittersweet. The relentless infinity of the ocean allowed me to see the precious finiteness of that earlier moment, yet that earlier moment then fed back into the relentless infinity of the ocean. Life forever--they are my sons, but just for a moment, I am their
father, but just for a moment, they are my boys, but just for a moment, they will be men, but just for a moment, I love them, but just for a moment, they will succeed, but just for a moment, they will fail, but just for a moment, they will surrender, but just for a moment, they will assert, but just for a moment, but just for a moment, but just for a moment, but just for a moment . . . life forever, infinite.

Another insight rose from this: I cannot believe in God without material momentousness. It is through my ears, my eyes, my skin, my mouth and nose, that is through continued experience of the finite, that I hold on to--yes, that I behold--the infinite. When--with all my senses-- I touch my sons, when I hold them, when I lift them up . . . I am touching God. When they hug me, talk to me, punch me, run towards me or away from me . . . God touches me.

2006-06-19T07:26:00.000-06:00

June 19, 2006

Often fatherhood is an issue that is talked about more from a personal/anecdotal perspective. This makes a lot of sense given the still pervasive lack of solid scientific insight and information about what drives fathering.

Increasingly, though, there are pieces of research that point us in the direction of bio-physiological anchors for fatherhood. Here is one such example:

http://www.health-news.org/breaking/7025/us-researchers-determine-men-have-biological-clocks-for-fatherhood.html

2006-06-18T08:02:00.000-06:00

June 18, 2006

It's Father's Day. We woke up at 7:30 am this morning. Our six months old son, Gabriel, had woken up to the sound of our neighbor mowing the lawn. It was okay, though. He had slept his usual 11 hours and, certainly, we had had enough sleep (at least objectively). Still, our neighbor out on his lawn-mower, at that time on a Sunday morning, got me thinking. He is a father, too. Though his children are long moved out, living their own lives. Could it be that a kind of "Father's Day Loneliness" had contributed to his early morning activity? Or was it just that he was trying to get it done before it started raining?

While I was feeding Gabriel, sitting on our bed, my wife still sleeping next to me, with Gabriel perfectly nestled in the rhombe-shaped space made by my legs, I suddenly felt deeply embraced. This Father's Day my sense of what I had been given, rather than what I had done turned to sensation. Three beautiful, healthy sons. With wave after wave of goose-bumps washing over me, I took in the whole of my experience.

Later, after Gabriel had eaten and fallen back to sleep, I went down to where Noah's and Jacob's quarters are. Both were awake, lying in the middle of the "camp" they had built in their room, reading. I said, leaning against the door-frame: Ich habe euch beide so lieb! (I love you two so much!) Noah responded: Na, dann setz dich doch zu uns (well, then sit down with us). I did and we shared a few moments, with them reading and me just scratching their back and heads. Again, sense turns to sensation. I love it when being a father turns from thinking about it, from doing something to simply feeling it.

2006-06-16T21:26:00.000-06:00

June 16, 2006

Fathering that begins with the birth of our children rather than at their conception is a fathering that gets a rather late start. It becomes a reactive kind of fathering rather than a proactive one. We react to the cues we get from our partners (who really no longer act as partners, but as gate-keepers). They "teach" us how to put on diapers, what foods our babies like, how to calm them, how to best hold them, etc. It's a kind of fathering that can never, of its own power, become self-confident. Reactive fathers are complaining about never getting things with their children exactly right, about being criticized by their partners for how they do things. Reactive fathers might believe they have joined a child-care team. But really, what they've joined, is a primary/secondary care-giver relationship in which they become the recipients of orders and to-dos from the primary care-giver.

Many men seem comfortable with this way of handling it. It's a little like the initial resistance of women to becoming drives, voters, providers, etc.: it was just easier the old way. If women do the main job of child-care, men will certainly have to bother less with it (it will be easier for them). There is less responsibility, less chance of failure, and less expenditure of energy. A personal story might exemplify this:

When my oldest son, Noah, was a new-born, my wife and I were visiting her
family's long-time family physician. I was holding Noah and actually had
to change his diaper in the waiting room as their office was not equipped with a
changing table. As I was going about this task an older guy who was
waiting for his appointment approached me and said: " Just pretend you don't
know how to do it. That's how you get them. If they believe you
can't, they will never ask you again and you'll have a lot less to worry
about."

I was so stunned I could hardly say anything to this man. In retrospect I feel sorry for him, because if he did what he advised me to do, he caused himself to miss what I would consider one of the most intimate and direct connections a parent can have with his children.

What are some of the arguments that lead to fathers ending up with the role of the secondary care-giver?

--fathers have to work

they don't have enough time

fathering responsibilities would slow down their career

--fathers lack the instinctual basis to care for their children

they are not nurturing

they cannot read their babies cues

they will endanger their children

--fathers don't nurse

--fathers are not connected to their babies (because they weren't pregnant)

--fathers think of babies as cars, i.e., objects rather than human beings

--fathers compete with the babies for attention from their mother

--fathers are aggressive and likely to willfully hurt their children

--fathers, ultimately, don't want to spend time with their children

--a father's responsibility only really begins when the child begins to separate from his/her mother

My own perception of these preconceived notions of what fathers can and cannot do is that many of them are still latently present in how we approach parenting culturally, developmentally, and biologically. For example, fewer and fewer people are likely to openly assert that fathers don't want to spend time with their children. However, our employment laws still essentially assume that fathers don't want to spend such time with their children and therefore do not make it explicitly possible for men to go on pregnancy leaves, to take sick-days when the children are sick, to allow work at home days in order to be home with the children (say on a school holiday, etc.). Because these structures are often not implemented and, where they are implemented, not explicitly supported by most employers and companies throughout the US, fathers are less likely to take advantage of them.

2006-06-14T06:27:00.001-06:00

June 14, 2006

In order to make pregnancy into something he can talk about a becoming father is almost forced to make it into something that is "empirical", something, in other words, that can be physically verified at the doctor's office. But from the doctor's perspective there is nothing to be verified. We as far as ob/gyn medicine is concerned, we are nothing. Makes sense that we keep being overlooked at those office-visits. We might desperately (and I mean desperately, i.e., without hope) want to talk about the baby, questions, expectations, worries. But the nurse, mid-wife, doctor might not even acknowledge our presence, let alone our participation.

This is a deeply humiliating experience. It's humiliating because we already feel awkward and foolish for feeling something based on nothing. We, too, would love to bring forth empirical verification for what's going on with us. But it's humiliating too, because not being seen, not being acknowledged in the doctor's office actually confirms the non-existence of our feelings: what we feel is nothing and what we are is nothing! I believe it is not a surprise that many men react to this experience not just with a sense of resignation, but--driven by a sense of almost unbearable shame about feeling something that's nothing and, and by being ignored, by being exposed as nothing--with a need to distance themselves from their pregnant partner in search for a safe place. However, in so doing they often go far beyond finding saftey into denying their partners' pregnancy and feelings about it as well. This is a shame-driven arrogance and gloating that, I believe, has its roots in our inability to empathize with becoming fathers.

So, what about sacrifice and support? Shouldn't becoming fathers focus on supporting their pregnant partners? Shouldn't they pay attention to their dramatically changing bodies, the exhaustion that comes with those changes, the worries, the anticipation, etc.? I believe that should doesn't even capture how an expectant man could relate to his partner. The right term would be need ! In order to feel whole--in order to feel connected with his growing child and with the love and care that comes from his partner--an expectant father needs to be connected to his partner's pregnancy and experience thereof. Pregnancy has potential to be a triangle of love. In this triangle there are no predetermined directions of energy. Energy could go from the child to the father and from there to the mother. But it could also go from the father to the mother and from there on to the child, etc. Such an omni-directional flow of energy in the love-triangle assures, I believe, optimal physical and emotional health for the whole family system. In other words, by focusing on the mother/child (or mother/unborn child) dyad alone, we are, inadvertently, weakening the family system.

2006-06-13T06:28:00.000-06:00

June 13, 2006

About Distance between Fathers and Sons

Generally, I believe that fathers stay far too uninvolved during the time of pregnancy. Culturally, we have come to know the reasons for this based in emotional issues, perhaps jealousy, on the part of the father. However, we have paid little attention to the question if these emotional issues might not be the symptom rather than the cause of father distance.

Pregnancy is a heart-wrenching and soul-searching time for a becoming father. While the kind of soul-searching might change from the first experience of a pregnancy to the second and third, it remains a time of many mixed emotions and feelings of ambivalence. I believe that biological and cultural/social factors play together in creating this very potent mix of ambivalence. So far, we have believed that biologically a pregnancy for a man is precisely not an experience. Rather, it is a non-experience. Men don't get pregnant, they are not submitted to the constant roller-coaster of hormonal changes, changes in their body-weight, emotional stability, etc. They just coast, right? This cultural view of biological factors is largely guided by an empirical fault. We tend to believe what we see. We see pregnant women and we see their growing bellies. Founded on what we see, their talking about other changes "makes sense" (i.e., it meets the senses, is congruent with them). Expecting a child, i.e., pregnancy in a man, is invisible, the man looks the same--in some cases he looks way better and more "relaxed" than his partner--ergo, we assume he is unaffected. We ridicule men for talking about symptoms of pregnancy, because what they are talking about is un-seen. It is non-sensical (i.e., doesn't meet the senses).

2006-06-12T16:13:00.000-06:00

June 12, 2006

In my previous post I argue that being a man is a synthesis, perhaps, of both being fathered and fathering. Two days later, I still believe this to be true. Yet, I wonder. Why is it that so many men have an estranged or, at least distant relationship with their fathers? Why is it that when I recently read a book about mothers and sons by Evelyn Bassoff (Between Mothers and Sons) I felt "She gets it, she understands boys and men"? In other words, how do mothers and how does the feminine figure into the relationship between fathers and sons? How do they figure into my fathering? Are mothers and the feminine the same thing?

Distance Between Fathers and Sons

Perhaps one of the most important factors about this confusing issue is that of time spent with our children. Many articles on day-care, their effects, benefits, etc. stress that day-care is not harmful to children. They emphasize that children who go to day-care will, given intensive, if short, quality time with their parents, still have strong bonds with their parents. I have always believed this to be true. But, in the case of my own three sons, I must wonder if, in part, the very strong relationship I have with them is not also a product of the many hours I spent (and am still spending) home with them, playing, working, studying, etc. I keep thinking that had I chosen a profession that comes with a 9-5++/day expectation, I would likely feel more distant from them and they from me.

I believe one of the most telling indicators that quantity of time spent must stand in some kind of proportional relationship with the quality of the parent-child bond is my own sons bilingualism. From the time of their conception (!) I have only spoken German (my native tongue) with them. My two older sons (now 10 and 8) are fluent in spoken, read, and written German. My youngest son is only six months old, but with him,too, I speak German only. German, being German-thinking German, is a matrix of comfort that I can provide for them because I am spending, an average of 5-8 hours with them every day.

2006-06-10T21:49:00.000-06:00

June 10th, 2006

For many of us fathers fathering begins when our children are born. But, perhaps influenced by many Derridean readings of beginnings and ends, I believe that the beginning of my fathering is infinitesimally removed. My fathering began, well, long before I ever saw the light of this world. It began as my fathers' fathering--it began as a man's primal and instinctual desire to nurture and protect his children. It began as a subversion of the inside/outside binary that often divides fathers and mothers (fathers being outside of the pregnancy dynamic and mothers being on the inside of it). This subversion made inside and outside the polar ends of one single continuum and put fathers on the
inside of the pregnancy experience.

I father because I was connected with my sons before they were conceived.
I father because it is an expression of a primal connection with men in my ancestral line.
I father because my connection with my sons and with the men who came before me gives me presence.
Presence as a man, is achieved at the intersection of fathering and being fathered.
To be a man it is not enough to be male. We have to be fathers to be men.