Six years ago today, I watched you come into this world. You gave me a scare, first by taking so long, then by coming out with a weak pulse – while your momma waited exhausted and anxious, I tried to play it cool as the doctors and nurses quietly but with firm intent suctioned the amniotic fluid from your mouth and nose, and used a mask and bulb to get you breathing. In an instant your skin tone turned from blue to pink, and you coughed and breathed for the first time. In that moment, my heart soared and I breathed with you.

Beautiful boy, ever since you came into my life, you’ve changed it, and have given me meaning. You’ve erased my existential angst, and assured me that no matter what goes wrong in my life, as long as you’re in it, I’m going to be just fine. Every day has been a beautiful journey, some days are easy, some are hard, but each one of them have been worth it.

I’m constantly amazed at who you are becoming, with your intelligence, your grace, your wisdom, your love and caring, your goofiness and wit. Your will and your trust amaze me every day. Some days I don’t take full advantage of your presence, and for that I am truly sorry. Other days, I drink you in completely and we laugh together, knowing the beauty which is each other. Tomorrow we celebrate your birthday at the exploratorium. I hope it’s as fun and exciting as I think it might be for you. It’s 3 AM now, so I am going to get to sleep, and hopefully have enough energy to be fully engaged.

So, my little rock star, let’s have a great time tomorrow, what do you say? Let’s paint the town red, and show those folks at the Exploratorium just how it’s done.

Isaac is at the age now when his height is just about perfect for banging his head on the corners of tables, and his combination of overconfidence and lack of general coordination places him in situations where he can fall from heights that can hurt him as he climbs into his high chair on his own, or onto the chair by the sink in order to wash his hands, or onto the bathroom toilet to get his toothbrush. In truth, his balance and coordination are better than I give him credit for, but I’m his dad and it’s hard for me to let go and not be so protective. I know that a blow to the head at his age, or at any other age can be life threatening, and sometimes I worry, perhaps a bit too much. When I was in college, in my freshman year, a freshman girl who was rushing a sorority and who drank to the point of losing consciousness, passed out while walking down the street, fell and struck her head on the curb, killing her instantly.

What’s been haunting me lately is this image in my head from an event that happened around twenty years ago; I was playing mud football with a bunch of friends (most of them older than I) at the grade school near my parents’ house, and for some reason there were local kids hanging out around us as we played — a kid that was perhaps 11-12, I think perhaps a younger one around 8-9, and a very young boy … just about Isaac’s age, around 2 or maybe 3. The guys that were there playing football with us, the older ones, were maybe 17 or 18 years old (I was 14 or 15), and full of competitive testosterone. At one point, one of these older guys gets the ball, and feeling the impending tackle on his heels, starts to sprint, and notices only too late that he’s got the young boy directly in his line of approach. He’s got moments to react, and makes the decision to jump over the boy. Well, he doesn’t quite clear him, and as he’s attempting to clear the boy, one of his feet catches the boy in the front of the forehead, and slams him back. At this point, all action stops, and we all huddle in. I’m young, I’m not really sure what’s going on, but I remember that things didn’t seem right. Being teens, and perhaps less responsible than we should have, we’re of course looking to cover our asses in this situation, so we send the boy home with his siblings. There’s a noticeable goose egg rising on this kids forehead, a thick rectangular red gash about two or three inches long and about a half-inch wide – the shape and dimensions of our friend’s cleat. To this day, I have no idea what happened to that boy, and if he was okay or if something more sinister developed from that incident. As a parent, I’m outraged at our own irresponsibility, and at the irresponsibility of the parents who let their children take out their two year old without supervision. As a parent, I’m frightened of that sort of thing happening to either one of my boys. We’re such fragile creatures, and while we can bounce back from minor injury without a scratch left on us, it’s so very easy to cause permanent lasting damage. The fear of the dangers of the world can be paralyzing if you let it, and so we all ignore it and live our lives the best we are able — life is fatal, after all. What’s important is living each moment with meaning, alive to the possibilities and the actualities around us. To hide from the world is to die to it.

And so the ghosts of my past quietly amble through my life, silently pointing for me to notice what I should, what I can, what I could, what I shouldn’t, and what must not be. We’ve already had a close call with Isaac when he was just starting to walk, as he stuck his hand into live ash under the barbecue and gave himself second degree burns on small embers left in the cooling ash trapped on the catcher. We feared that he might have had permanent damage, but with a bit of Neosporin and clean bandages, he healed up without leaving any marks at all. We were lucky. Hell, raising a child from infancy to adulthood is a long string of lucky events, considering just how much we seemed genetically driven to put ourselves in danger. Childhood is nature’s proving ground, where the herd is culled of the weak and the unsuited, but to deny the tests are to deny life, and just as you can’t crack the shell of a chick lest you deny it of the strength-building exercise of birthing themselves, you can’t save a child from childhood. Scrapes are gonna happen, and there are blessings in a skinned knee.

Nonetheless, when I close my eyes at night, sometimes on the black screen of the theatre of my mind plays a silent reel of these moments, quietly warning to look alive, stay sharp, and be on my guard, lest history repeats itself and that which is most important to me is hurt. However, when I stay up until a quarter-of-two, mostly the lights go out and the theatre closes for the night — only to reopen for the dream time, but that, my friends, is another blog post.

Today and tonight have definitely been thought provoking in the philosophical moral arena, revolving around the concepts of moral culpability, redemption and forgiveness, and the sources/causes/reasons for ‘evil’ action.

I began my day with an intense gaming session with my good friends Jason and Bryce, playing one of our long-standing favorite revolving around the lives of two young men in the knightly service of their lord (now king). Without going into too much detail (because there are others out there that play the same game with Jason, and I don’t want to give away too much of the plot points), we found ourselves performing as part of our duties field trials for those who had committed crimes, some of them capital offenses, for which we were expected to carry out punishment. In the abstract, it is very easy to think in egalitarian terms, but when faced with real crime and real victims with which you have to get up close and personal, it evokes emotions of anger and righteous vengeance that can play heavily into your decisions as judge. Let’s just say I was deep in character and had moments when I was living the moment, and I was not merciful. Crimes of violence are easy to punish when you take the side of the victim.

After wrapping up a very satisfying gaming session, with a feeling of moral (if not medieval) authority, I had the pleasure and fortune to go out to theater with Julie after a lovely Sushi dinner at Kamakaze, one of our local haunts, and what is the subject of our evening’s entertainment? The psychology of criminal behavior and the exploration of the possibility of compassion for the criminal, even when that criminal is guilty of capital offenses. The play we went to see was Frozen, put on by the Marin Theatre Company, written by Bryony Lavery and Directed by Amy Glazer, which to quote the copy from the web page is “a haunting play about three people whose lives are connected by the disappearance and murder of a little girl” — in specific, the mother of the child, the murderer of the child, and the psychologist who is studying the murderer as part of a thesis she is advocating that the violent criminal behavior exhibited by serial killers is based in brain structure and is outside of morality — is a compulsion that the killer is incapable of mediating or avoiding. Throughout the play we are introduced to a horrific act of child molestation and murder (of course occurring off-screen and off-time) and then left with the aftermath, as a mother tries to cope with the loss of her daughter, and finally with forgiveness and release, as a psychologist tries to discover the root causes of this violent behavior and ultimately gives strong evidence to the claim of brain trauma and early childhood abuse and neglect leaving the murderer incapable of attachment and identification with others, and with the murderer himself, who through contact with the psychologist and ultimately the mother, comes to understand the seemingly obvious but to him completely incomprehensible reality that when he raped and murdered this girl, he actually hurt her.

At the end of the play, I found myself thinking of so many things, and questioning my black and white moral superiority from the game previously in the day — not that I truly identified with my character’s actions directly, but there is part of me which is compassionate of the viewpoint of the simple equation of punishment for crime, and responsibility always laying in the hands of the acting party. The line to walk is difficult, and it is summed up so beautifully in the play, with the quote:

“The difference between evil and illness is the difference between sin and symptom”

If those of us who commit the most heinous of crimes, violence and murder against other humans, are through nature or nurture rendered incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong action, and are effectively impaired from human reaction, are they ultimately to be held morally responsible for their actions, or are we to look upon them with compassion as incapable of functioning in society as the rest of us do. Do we murder the murderer, or do we help him try to understand and cope with his disability? And if we decide to recognize these severe criminal actions as symptoms of disease, how does that affect our system of justice and our sense of retribution for acts that in their base reality destroy lives and shatter realities?

It leaves me reflecting on the idea that none of us are born with evil in our hearts, and so very often (if not universally) evil action is born from a person’s inability to cope with their own childhood abuse and trauma. The evil of the world is born of the evil we inflict on children. And so many children of this world are abused and damaged, so very very many. How are we left to feel about the child who is molested, who grows up and molests other children, or the child who is beaten as a child and grows up to beat other children or worse? Do we feel compassion, anger, hatred, or all of the above? Do we try to reach across the chasm of our own grief and rage and into the reality of the person who is the source of our destroyed world?

The play does not provide an easy question to ponder, nor does it provide and easy answer to the question, and perhaps that’s why it has received such tremendously good reviews. One subject matter the play does not even try to address or discuss is the place of faith in a just god in the face of such amazingly tragic reality. Can we believe in a God that allows a world to exist where children are hurt in so many ways?

It’s ironic that lately I’ve been listening to a podcast from UC Berkeley which is the recordings of lectures from a course entitled ‘existentialism in film and literature’, taught by one of my former professors from Cal, Hubert Dreyfus, and a course I’ve actually taken before just over thirteen years ago. I’ve really been enjoying the re-thinking of the questions and problems proposed by Pascal, Kierkegaard and others, but in reference to this question of God the father of an evil world, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov postulates through the voice of Ivan Karamazov the argument that the world cannot be the creation of a God that allows the torture and gruesome deaths of so many children. While Ivan’s motivations in the argument are not altruistic, nor does his argument necessarily hold up to scrutiny, it is a common enough theme in modern theological and moral philosophical thought that it bears taking seriously. How can we as rational and ethical creatures maintain belief in a loving and protective creator God that also created the means of such great suffering of innocents. It appears to be logically inconsistent. Of course, there are ways out of this train of thinking, but I won’t muddy the water with those now — only the synchronicity of events is what is relevant and interesting to me at this point in time.

Also, this whole subject brings up rather personal issues regarding my own childhood and my molestation by my uncle. I’ve often been a strong believer (as it is backed up by scientific evidence) of the concept that child abuse and molestation doesn’t appear in a vacuum, and for every act of reported child abuse or molestation there is an echoing crime committed against the perpetrator as a child. Intellectually, I agree with the idea that a person violated in such a way as a child can suffer damage that compels them to act in like manner to other children. Emotionally, I feel like a fifteen-year-old young man should know better than to abuse a five-year-old boy, no matter what the origin of the compulsion. I haven’t fully forgiven my uncle of the damage he’s done not only in my own life, but in the lives of my cousins as well, who he lived next to in a townhouse complex for several years. I’m certain while his crime against me was a one-time occasion, those boys got the worst of it on a regular basis, and I just can’t bring myself to look at him or to be in his presence, especially since no formal crimes have been reported, and no official justice has been brought to bear against him. While I can possibly bring myself to forgive a man who has been brought before justice to serve his sentence of punishment in retribution for his crime, can I extend that same compassion and forgiveness to a man who is walking the streets free, never required to face the realities of his actions? In a karmic way, he’s suffered a great deal already, as it has shattered his life in many ways. But is karmic retribution enough to make me feel compassion for the man? At this point, that is a resounding no. Perhaps one day, but for now I still refuse to associate with him, and have placed him in the past tense of my life, along with so many others of my family. Perhaps I’m missing an opportunity of redemption. Maybe this event I have blocked out of my life because holding it up for inspection is too painful for me even on the best of my days. On those days in which I create a space to meditate and reflect, I allow myself compassion for my uncle and I wonder what happened to him, who hurt him as a little boy, and can I help him to understand his culpability, in the same way that the mother in the play helps the murderer to understand his own. Sometimes you just want your pain acknowledged by the one who caused you pain. Sometimes you just want the person to go away forever. The truth is, although the violence is the fault of the person doing the violence, and they are the source of pain for the victim, the pain that you carry as a victim into your future has everything to do with you, and nothing to do with the perpetrator of that violence. It’s your choice to carry that pain, even if it’s not your fault that you received it in the first place. Most of the time you’re unable to understand that choice, or do anything about it, but sometimes you have moments of clarity and you realize it’s within your power to forgive and let go. Your abuser has no power over you that you don’t allow them to have. Once the violence is in the past, it belongs to you.

We have two major traditions in our lives as humans relating to our children — the path of kindness, and the path of cruelty, and each perpetuates themselves with fantastic ease and power. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to overcome the latter and give ourselves over to the former. My link in the chain of violence thankfully is shattered with me, and my focus is in propagating kindness. I have two lovely boys that I cherish and protect and shower in affection, and I hope they do the same for their own kids in due time.

Today we threw a party for Eli’s fifth birthday, and invited about 20 kids from his school and the local community to join us at Round Table Pizza for a few hours of mayhem, mischief, pizza, plastic balls and sugar overload (by the way, my apologies to those I didn’t invite and that are our usual suspects — it was fast and loose this year, and with as crazy as we’ve been over here, we’re lucky it came off at all.) While I fully expected there to be presents purchased and brought to the party for my wily little dude, I think it never quite sunk in that he’d be getting on average a gift FOR EVERY CHILD invited, plus grandparents, etc. So, at the end of the party we’re left with a pile of gifts that would rival Christmas/Hannukah/Bridal Shower and after the fifth load to the car, I entered an altered state of consciousness.

OH MY GOD, It’s all coming home with us!

Okay, now don’t get me wrong — I really love to buy gifts for my kids, and to see them play with and enjoy gifts that they’ve received. My parents were struggling when I was a kid, and therefore I only got a few gifts a year, and I loved and cherished the crap out of each and every one. When I got something, it was usually something I wanted a whole lot, and when I got it, I played with it until it wore out. Okay, well that’s extreme — I’m sure I also got stuff I threw in the corner and never played with, but all in all, it was pretty much quality over quantity. But I’m looking over this pile of gifts, and I’m seeing stuff that I never knew even existed — that I know Eli never knew even existed, and wouldn’t have known to ask for it at all before it arrived on the pile o’ pleasure. Eli took I think maybe 3 gifts out of their packages today, and there are like 17-20 left to go. This cannot be healthy to have so much toys all at once, and it’s not like this kid is starved for toys. If you’ve seen his room, you know what I mean. What I really worry about is the debasement of material acquisitions and the devaluing of the gifting act. And it’s not like this stuff is cheap, either. $10 here, $20 there, some stuff I know was $40… if Eli had gotten cash value for these gifts, he’d be rolling in over $400 easily. Frankly, I’m not even sure where all of this stuff is going to fit. His room is at capacity, and the common space is pretty close to that as well. We JUST did a big toy purge for Christmas/Hannukah, and I’m thinking we may need to do yet another one.

So how do you guard against the massive toy influx? I certainly don’t want to discourage toy purchase altogether, but how do you moderate for your kid in a world that requires guests at a party to bring gifts out of courtesy? I’m all for driving the economy and all, but I just don’t want my kid to look at possessions as essentially disposable and meaningless (at least not in a non-buddhist way.) I have my ideas, actually. Eli has a 529 open, and I’m about ready to open one for Isaac, as soon as the paperwork goes through. I think I’m going to just start including the account number on all invites and say ‘if you’d like to make a contribution to Eli’s future, instead of his consumeristic present, please give $20 toward his college education’, or something of the sort. Plus, I think you can give up to $11k in gifts to any individual tax-free, so it’s good for everyone. The other thing I think is pretty good, that Julie mentioned tonight, was something she’s seen done with older kids: having guests participate to a charity of Eli’s choosing, instead of purchasing gifts. That seems like a great way to further foster the giving spirit we’re trying to instill in Eli right now.

And just to catch myself in my own hypocrisy, tonight Eli brought with him to his grandparents one of his gifts — a double gift, actually, of two mega-blocks dragons (dude, these things ROCK!)(Irascor and Ferrerius). Eli allowed his favorite older cousin, Jonah, to open and play with one of the dragons, and he spontaneously offered to let Jonah have and keep one of the dragons. This had to be one of the most selfless acts I’ve seen from a five-year-old, and I was totally blown away and… torn… about this. On one hand, wow, my son is totally generous and non-attached to his toys enough to give his cousin one of his BRAND NEW DRAGONS. On the other hand, is he just garnering favor with his elder cousin, and did he REALLY want to give this gift way. Also, did he really grok that it was going to be GONE FOREVER? Besides, *HE* had been given this gift, not Jonah, so shouldn’t ELI keep it? What if the friend came over to play and said, ‘hey, let’s play with those dragons!’, and Eli responded ‘I gave one away to my cousin’ — what does that say about his respect for the gift-giving process to that friend? Also… these are damned cool dragons. I fully expect to plunk them down in the middle of a gaming mat sometime in the future to my unsuspecting players (sorry guys ). So… I suggested that perhaps the dragon could be Jonah’s whenever he came over to play, but that Eli keep it. As it turned out, Jonah lost interest pretty quickly because after Jonah proclaimed his was better and as they smashed the dragons together, the dragon Jonah got was breaking apart quicker than Eli’s dragon, and therefore was inferior and not as strong. This Jonah lower on the dragon pecking order, so he proclaimed them ’stupid and boring’. Ah, the politics of boys.

But, after this encounter, I felt myself feeling a little hollow. Perhaps I should have allowed Eli to go ahead and give his cousin the gift full-out. He’s got LIKE TWENTY OTHER TOYS TO PLAY WITH at home. Truth be told, he could give away half the stack, and still be sitting pretty. I feel like I did Eli a disservice by not allowing him to give the dragon away, like he intended. Was my reticence an artifact of my own greed? Did *I* want the dragons? Man, you can never get this shit right as a parent. Deep inside, there is a child that is crying because his parents tell him there isn’t enough money to buy that toy he wants. Now that there’s enough money, that child feels the guilt of possession.

So yeah, there’s a pile of toys in my living room that will soon get unpackaged and integrated into the gestalt. Over half of them will get forgotten, and the other half will be broken, lost, or otherwise damaged and devalued in the act of intense play. The little guy inside of me who envies the feeding frenzy is just gonna have to learn to get over it, and the wary parent needs to be able to make sure the message gets through all the chum in the water. One thing’s for certain, I feel totally uncomfortable right now looking at all these toys, and I’m gonna have to get over that for myself. Then, I’m going to figure out a way to allow my values to be reflected in the process.

He’s walking. 10 months old, and he’s taking steps. he’s gotten up to 7 in a row I think (or maybe 8), and he generally doesn’t fall. He senses his balance is going, and he sits or goes to hands and feet. I’m utterly amazed.

Sigh.
I’ll skip the apologies for not posting — I’ve been trying to participate in NaNoWriMo, but my word count is way low and I’m not certain I’ll finish in time, however I’m going to keep trying and pushing through, because hey, I like this book I’m writing, and someday I’ll actually finish it. Didn’t I say I was gonna skip the apology? Anyhow…
So, Eli was away for the weekend visiting his cousin Jonah (and his cousin Zinnie, and Aunt Keri and Uncle Dave, but really, it’s all about the Jonah), and today we picked him up after spending the day with all said participants in Old-town Sacramento. It was kitchy, and fun, went to the train museum, etc. All-in-all, a decent day. Then, we drive home in crazy sunday-after-a-three-day-weekend traffic, and finally get home around 6:30 or so. We make dinner, and Julie and I both agree, I don’t want to fight, let’s just give the kid Mac & Cheese, but let’s get him to try our food first. So, we sit Eli down and he tries A BITE of our dinner, after much protesting and so he earned his prize of his favorite meal, macaroni and cheese… except, now he picks at it, moves it around, complains that it’s the wrong kind, and then finally takes a bite only to spit it right back out into his bowl. This gets my blood boiling, and I ask him what is the matter. He says his m & c has ’specks’ in it. Now, those of you who have been following the episodes of FOOD WARS may recognize this term from previous battles, where Eli has imagined miniscule particles of nous that cannot be seen or detected save by his superior eyes and tongue. He told me that he wanted a different kind of m & c, to which I flatly refused. I also told him that if he did not eat his m & c, I would not be making him any m & c into the foreseeable future. He, of course, refused, and so I had to send him, in tears, to bed without supper and with the knowledge that he’d lost his m & c privileges (from me, at least — I left a loophole for Julie or others to give him m & c). I talked with him about the whole thing, how I loved him, but I was disappointed and upset by his behavior, etc. etc. He felt bad, I felt bad, and off to bed he went.
It still digs at me to know I sent my boy off to bed without food, but if he were truly hungry, he would have eaten. We provide plenty of opportunities for the boy to eat, and there’s no reason to feel any guilt, and yet — he’s my little boy, and I really hate to not give him what he wants. But, as a parent, I have an obligation to get him to eat more than starch, and beyond that, I need to balance this war of wills, because that’s what it’s become.
It’s a hard line, but I’ve decided that from here on in, Eli’s old enough to eat what the family eats for dinner, period. It’s gonna be hard, he’s gonna have tantrums for days, but eventually… finally… he’ll get over it, and he’ll start to just eat what’s for dinner. He needs to incorporate vegetables into his meal, and non-processed meats. Furthermore, he needs to understand that we are having meals as a family, and that we’re not catering to his special needs and desires. I’ll do my best to make meals that are agreeable to him, and to provide less-seasoned portions of anything that might be too spicy or exotic for him, but I’m done with the separate menu, and with giving him 5 or 6 choices. It’s just like getting Isaac to sleep through the night, the boundaries have to be set, and we have to send a clear and consistent message.
I’m not looking forward to the coming week. Ugh.

I just had a realization this evening that made me really excited, and of course I’m probably setting myself up for a major fall, but… I get to do Boy Scouts with my two boys, and I can run them through D&D adventures. Some day, if I’m still cool enough, my boys and I are gonna do cool guy things together. Stuff that I enjoy, stuff that I know kids their age enjoy because… I did them, and I still do them. One day, if I’m lucky, I’ll have my kids look to me, smile and tell me that I’m ’so cool!’. I live for that day. Already Eli and I have our own private stuff, our ‘burp games’, our own adventures. Adding Isaac to the mix is going to just drive the energy through the roof. Of course, I’m going to have to wait until the kids get to a certain age until they’re both in ‘the zone’ — probably when they get to be 5 and 9, through 8 and 12. At that point, I figure I’m pretty close to losing Eli to his teen friends, and I will be delegated to the category of uncool. I consider myself fortunate if I make it even that far. But for a few golden years in there, I’m going to be the king of cool. The Master of fun. And I’m going to milk every single moment of it.
On a side note — look! A whole month of blog entries! I know, I cheated a few days there, but there is an entry for every single day, even if I was 8 hours late a few times. check it out! Now only 11 more months to go, and I’ve made it the whole year. I have to say, this has been an excellent exercise for me. Yay me!

Tonight I was out late filling up my tank on my car and I saw a family out with their young boy, maybe about 3 or 4 years old — same approximate age as Eli. It was 11 at night, and way later than I would keep Eli up or out if I had a choice, but at the same time, I really feel jealous. It made me think of the Talking Heads song, “Up All Night”. I really do love Eli so much that it hurts, and there are times that I allow my mind to wander into the place that all parents know, but none of us like to talk about. It’s that place of utter vulnerability, when you think of the fact that your child could get hurt, at any time, and you are completely and utterly helpless to prevent the possibility. They could get hit by a car, or kidnapped, or burnt, or one of many various possible painful things, and the image of that just paralyzes you and makes you want to hold your child and protect them from the entire world. Of course, you can’t protect them from the world — the world happens all around them, all the time and will for the rest of their lives. Nonetheless, you just get so scared, and you have to shove the thought out of your head. In about 5 weeks to the day, I’m going to double the chances of one of my kids being hurt. I’m going to be 100% more vulnerable, and 50% less capable of stopping something catastrophic from happening. I know that I’m going to love my boy, Isaac, and he’s going to light my life up in ways familiar and entirely new. I can’t wait to meet him and get to know him in the ways I’m getting to know Eli. I can’t wait to see how similar he is to his big brother, and yet how completely different. I am scared about his birth, and his first weeks and months. I am frightened about all the things that might go wrong, and the things I can’t prevent. And yet, I am courageously entering into that space of parenthood and accepting the challenge to live in a place of uncertainty and vulnerability; to wear my heart on the outside of my chest. I know the experience is part of maturing and becoming wiser, but I do it not for the possibility of personal growth. I do it because I don’t even know Isaac yet, but I already love him, and love is a force that you cannot compromise. I am compelled into the space of danger and uncertainty and I dive headlong into that realm with a smile on my face.