Month: March 2019

It was a warm night in June, or perhaps July.  I was very conscious of the time, because you were late.  We had asked you to come home by a certain time, but your curfew-hour had passed, and you were still out.  I left the house and walked around aimlessly, for fifteen to twenty minutes, up and down the local streets.   I knew that the chances of meeting you were low; negligible; greater than zero, but not by much.  What else could I do?  Sitting at home waiting for you was a torment.  By walking, at least I could slowly impose upon myself a diminution of my anger.   I would almost certainly not find you, but I would be kinder to you when you eventually came home from wherever you had been hiding.

You had a phone; a very nice phone; a BlackBerry to be precise.  In those days, when Nokia and Erikson had fallen behind, and before Apple and Samsung were ubiquitous, BlackBerry was the phone of choice for teenage girls in Hackney.  Forget the efficiency with which they delivered email, which made them beloved of employees of the financial services industry, for you it was only about the free-to-use messaging service:  BlackBerry Messenger allowed you and your friends to communicate endlessly and pointlessly – securely too, although you cared less about that – without incurring any cost.

Tonight, my smart daughter had her smart phone turned-off.  Or you were just ignoring my messages, pretending that, despite being a member of the most “connected” generation in history, somehow you were unavailable to take my call, enquiring why you were not home at the agreed time.  You were on the grid but pretending not to be.

You were late, very late, and I was furious.  This was not the first time: it felt as if it was every time.  You asked if you could go out and we agreed a time by which you must be home.  You invariably came home an hour or more later than we had agreed and then played hurt and aggrieved when we chided you for tardiness.  You were at fault, but your body language quickly made us feel ourselves to be the problem: frowning mouth, eyes rolling upwards, tension in your shoulders and fists.

One of my worst experiences of fatherhood was catching myself while offering you some form of admonition or cautionary advice, realising half way through that I was starting to sound exactly like my parents addressing me when I was your age.  And I remembered – immediately and urgently – how little regard I had for what they said to me when I was in your shoes.  I didn’t want to repeat that mistake but, mid-sentence it was hard to re-phrase my nugget of parental guidance in a way that might be of some beneficial use to you.

The repetition of fool’s wisdom, from one generation to the next – and the next and the next, onwards unto perpetuity – was not my idea of responsible parenting.  Just stop talking, I told myself, before you say something even more stupid.

When I was a teenager, I thought school uniform was an authoritarian imposition, and wholly pointless; I thought it not unreasonable that I should go out with my friends without being obliged to return home at some arbitrarily agreed hour; and I thought that the formal rituals of family life – eating together, taking an interest in the day-to-day worries of kith and kin, showing respect to each other’s values and property – were insubstantial and should be subordinated to the genuine demands of peer friendship.   Mostly, I still think these things.

How I struggled to make the case for the other side of those arguments, when you told me, with exasperation, exactly what I had tried to explain to my parents a generation previously.  I could have said, “yes, of course, you are right”, but I doubted that it would be helpful for you, as you matured into adulthood, and was certain that it would not be helpful for me, as I clung on, reluctantly, to my paternal role as enforcer of household law.

Looking back, I realise that there is a modicum of truth in the wisdom of parents.  There is virtue in shared daily routines, of demonstrating solidarity with the joys and tears of other family members, in learning to be diplomatic, in respecting agreements and trying to meet expectations that have been collective agreed.  An important part of growing up is learning how to modulate the desire for sincerity – for authenticity, as we existentialists like to say – with the social value of compromise and peace.  Some things, albeit true, do not need to be said; some hypocrisies do not need to be called out; some family traditions, rules, mores, do not need to be transgressed, just for the sake of demonstrating the ego’s autonomy.

That said, an equally important part of growing up is knowing when civility is demeaning, when home-truths demand to be told, when double-standards exposed, when tradition should be abandoned and when innovation embraced.  I am even now learning how best to judge the appropriateness of these actions; back then I found myself trying to teach you what I had yet to master.  Parenting is error-strewn; learning by doing badly; being unable to find the right balance; laying paving in the wrong direction but with good intentions.

What did you need from me during those difficult teenage years – from fourteen to seventeen – when you felt the need to rebel against me and my values, to challenge my authority, to overturn the order of the home, just as I had felt that need when I was your age?  But – I wanted to say to you – but don’t you see that the order I have imposed is reasonable?  I have not established my authority upon unjustified and unaccountable power.  I am not an unthinking dictator.  Each request I make, each limit I set, each boundary I draw for you is based on a thoughtful and sincere assessment of your right to independence, blended with our right for the integrity of our family life to be respected.

Of course, you needed to rebel.  When you are a teenager, the specific character of authority is not the point.  It is not the details but the essence of authority that needs to be challenged.  Thereby, you forced me to realise that my own rebellion, a generation earlier, was less to do with the righteousness of my case than my need to have a case – any case – to sustain my emergent sense of independence.  The James Dean film is right: being a rebel is what matters, the precise nature of the cause a minor detail.

If the essence of adolescence is rebellion, then the burden of parenthood is the erosion of fraudulent authority.  I longed for my part in this drama to be over quickly, but that making it too easy – for me as well as you – would have been a great disservice to us both.  You needed to learn that you have to fight to be free; which meant that I, your father, had to resist, to try to keep you imprisoned in your childhood cocoon, despite my not wanting to.

And then – mirabile dictu –some evenings you would come home from school and talk about a lesson you had found interesting, a piece of work that you had enjoyed doing, a problem with a friend to which you had discovered a solution, a challenging incident in the playground or the street that you had responded to with maturity, an item on the news that had awoken your curiosity, an inappropriate remark or insult to one of your classmates that you had challenged.   From time to time, hope springs.

I’m guessing that a frictionless path from childhood to maturity makes for a weak person in later life.  The battles of my teenage years have surely held me in good stead during adulthood.  I hope that I made your adolescence hard enough for you to nurture your strength.  But I am so very happy that time is now in our shared past. Truly: the sign of failed parenting is not that your children break the house rules; it’s when they don’t.

 

My father taught me the finer points of people watching when I was in my late pre-teen years, those strange years from age 10 to 12 where young boys are truly not yet men but nevertheless we start showing signs of what we will eventually become.  For me, I was preternaturally aware, too conscious to be really a boy but still naive and blissfully unaware of the dominant, painful superabundance of sexuality.  I could understand myself and could see the moral nature of others but too much was still hidden, and in many ways I’m still that young man.  Despite being aware of the physical cravings of being human, I’m still caught in that unformed body but superaware mind that made me such a perfect student for my father as we travelled around Maine and the east coast.

The first time I really remember him teaching me the bright colorful arts of people watching, we were on our way back from a business meeting that he brought me on for some reason down east, I think in Rockland or Rockport – two separate towns, but Rockland has the ferry terminal and the fish processing plant and thus is a bit working class, or was thirty five years ago; Rockport just had lovely scenery and old farmhouses and thus was probably a bit more stuck up and definitely more Protestant; my guess is Rockport veered Trump, while Rockland was solidly Hilary.  Draw your own conclusions, but I don’t remember lingering in either place.  My father had his meeting, I read a book – probably a few books – in a poorly furnished waiting room, and then we headed back towards Portland and home.  On the way, though, we stopped at Moody’s, a popular diner about an hour and a half from Portland, and had a late supper.  I don’t remember what we had for the meal proper but over the pie, my dad noticed a table a few booths down which consisted of two local police officers and a Maine state trooper, the trooper being obvious from his large wide straight brimmed trooper hat, his three-inch fascist black patent leather belt, and the diagonal leather stripe over his shoulder.

“I wonder what they’re talking about,” he said.  And Dad quickly began spinning a tale about what they were likely talking about – something about pulling over drunk drivers and speeding moms, something benign and silly and pointless.  I started giggling and adding my own thoughts over the pie – I know I had blueberry, I always had blueberry pie at Moody’s – and after a few minutes the trooper came over, said hello to each of us, and let me wear his hat.  It was far too large for me but it didn’t matter; I was in heaven.  Maine state troopers were the closest things to the archangels that I would encounter in my youth, and wearing one’s hat was akin to Gabriel letting you blow his horn.

On subsequent trips – including one very fun trip to Washington DC for a convention – my father would take me to old dark wooded restaurants, and truck stops, and airport lounges, and hotel lobbies, and everywhere he’d point at some person, or couple, or group of people, and say “what do you think they are talking about” or “why do you think they are here” or something similar.  As I got used to the drill, I got better at thinking about what people might be actually there for – not predictively, of course, but creatively, coming up with better and more interesting reasons for why, say, an older man and a younger woman were bickering at a table across the aisle, or why a man looked so angry while he was writing in a journal, or why a family was so studiously disinterested in one another.  My father always had better stories – he still does – but it wasn’t about coming up with something better than him: it was about practicing the art of inhabiting another person’s body and situation, in a place of transit, in a place that all of us would soon, and happily, abandon.

Tonight I was killing time at a restaurant across the street from Sea-Tac Airport, having spent a lovely weekend with my son and having worked all day on phone and laptop for the job in Texas.  I’ll increasingly just work on phone and laptop: the Texas people have acknowledged that I have no desire to live in south Texas, at all, and have granted me permission – more than that – to work from Maine, so phone and laptop will increasingly be my office.  The restaurant is a bit of a throwback to the early 70s, with high-backed leather swivel chairs around the counter and deep mahogany booths in an otherwise nondescript ten story office block housing mostly the small local offices of foreign flag carriers and somewhat dodgy import-export specialty firms.  I had a salad and the Hangtown Fry, a West Coast classic consisting of oysters, bacon, onions, and eggs, whipped into a scramble, with toast.  I nursed a drink and next to me sat a couple in their late 20s, she was maybe a bit younger.

He was dressed, I guess in his best, in a clean and recently severely folded black T-shirt advertising some sort of music festival.  He was pale, with reddish hair, the type of guy who doesn’t have freckles but can only burn, not tan, and he was overweight in the pudgy way of videogame afficiandos, pudgy not from overeating but from eating normally and not moving enough.  He ordered a Sprite.  He found it difficult to smile or show emotion.  I kept thinking “gamer” but waited.

She was a bit overweight but nonetheless very attractive, with dark hair tightly braided and then wrapped up into a kind of bunnish do, wearing a lacy black blouse that was a kind of ideal mix of transparent and opaque, in that it wasn’t see-through at all, but the laciness of it made you imagine it maybe was, and that added to the allure of her stark white but almond-shaped eyes.  She ordered tap water.  Then the guy said they’d have a calamari starter and she looked at him oddly, and he said she’d like it.  Then he ordered bacon and eggs, eggs medium, and she ordered the buttermilk chicken salad.  The waiter looked at them for a second, first him, then her, and thanked them and went to put in the order.

I looked more closely at the guy as the two of them settled into awkwardly looking at their place settings, not talking at all.  He had a lousy beard – what the hell has happened to this country that beards now seem de rigueur – and I now noticed the tattoos on his arms, Gothic lettering that I couldn’t decipher wrapped around some kind of Celtic cross or sword-like thing, lacing up his arm until disappearing under his sleeve.  Then I looked at her, noticed how she didn’t really want to be there but she kept flashing a smile, kept flashing interest in him to him, kept reassuring him with her glance and her demeanor and her body that she wanted to be there, was enjoying being with him, even though it was clearly an act.  Only someone who wanted to be deceived, who needed to believe in the act, would fall for it, and it wasn’t entirely clear he wanted to be deceived but then he wasn’t checking his phone, he was nervous and fumbling, he was trying to figure out what to do before the food came.

The waiter came with a refill of water for her and the guy ordered another Sprite, and the waiter, sensing the awkwardness, told both of them that the calamari would be out in less than a minute.  He caught my eye and asked if I needed anything and I made something up – “could I get some more cocktail sauce” – and I think the waiter knew I was just making time.  All of us were uneasy.

I shouldn’t say that.

The woman was uneasy; as a black woman with a pale white, possible ex-convict white guy, clearly either (charitably) on a first Tinder date or more likely on not so much a date as the first part of transactional evening, she wasn’t sure what was to come and she was trying to find her way.  The man was uneasy; he had probably “ordered” a woman on the website or via the back page of a free newspaper and he wasn’t suave about it, this was either new to him or he was aware of the feebleness of being in this situation, and he was struggling.  The waiter, clearly not unaccustomed to dealing with these situations in the only decent restaurant on the cheap hotel strip across the street from a large airport, didn’t want to dwell on the situation and wanted it over quickly.  I wasn’t sure what my role was in this little drama and while, as a student of my father’s, was interested in the human drama, was also slightly too involved for comfort.

But the core relationship – the pale pudgy man and the buxom young woman – was comfortable with itself.  Whatever it was – first date, transactional, future slasher film fodder, or just heartbreakingly awkward time kill – was appropriate in and of itself.  It was unfolding on its own terms, and somehow – despite crossed racial boundaries and the amazing inability of either person to maintain more than four sentences of conversation at a stretch over the course of an hour – it was all it needed to be.

I came up with a dozen different potential narrative, potential answers to Dad’s old questions.  But much stranger, much more challenging, was to watch the non-conversation that emerged.  They had their calamari – she had never had calamari before but seemed to enjoy it, and both were stymied when they asked the waiter what the white sauce was and he said “it’s aoili”, which required explanation and even after that, the idea of a garlicky mayonnaise didn’t quite register.  Then the meals came quickly and they ate in silence, but a couple of times looked at one another and smiled and made those eye gestures indicating “this is pretty good” or “gee, this is better than I expected”.  He ordered more Sprite, she stuck to ice water.

I ate my Hangtown fry and read the news on my phone until, about ten minutes after I finished the eggs, I realized one of the oysters was, er, not good.  I removed myself to the gents in short order and when I emerged again, ten minutes later, quite a bit paler, they were gone.

I don’t imagine they registered me, but I wonder what they would have said about the guy sitting next to them, reading, checking his phone, eating an omlette and then hurrying off.  Single diners don’t make for stories that are quite as interesting, I’ve found, but then again, who could come up with the tale that got me there, across the street from the airport, on a rainy and dark Monday night?  Why do you think I was there?

 

Emotions are pesty things.  As undercurrents within our souls, they sway our mood and shape our attitude to our daily lives.  Feelings affect how we perceive what is happening and how we react. They can tell us what feel right, and hence, what we ought to do.  In that sense, emotions are a key input to live the good, moral life.  Yet, like undercurrents, emotions can be so strong as to submerge us.  Many people resist strong emotions and try to repress them – especially if they dare to contradict our finely ordered lives.  But a burst of emotion – like in a panic attack – can still drown us.

Apparently, emotions live in the limbic system of our brains, somewhere more primitive than our acclaimed cerebral cortex.  Jonathan Haidt, in his book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’, describes how our lymbic system is like an elephant that our cortex, its rider, is trying to ride. Sometimes, rider and elephant appear in communion.  But does it mean that the rider has control of the elephant?  Or simply that the elephant just wants to go in the same direction as the rider?  I like the ambivalence in the analogy.  Can we actually control our emotions?  Or are they just what they are?  And what should we do when emotions threaten our current reality?

I recently faced these questions vicariously, as my family was rocked by some strong emotional winds.  A death, a terminal illness, suicidal thoughts – “Heavy S***, if you ask me!”  I don’t think that my family is extraordinary in attempting ‘denial’ as their preferred approach to emotional unrest.  It is certainly a favorite first impulse!  What is particularly hard is that I cannot stomach the hypocrisy of it – so I often end up being ‘the canary in the coal mine’, the one who calls “Bullshit!”.   In the most respectful way, I express what others and I feel – but my ability to read the elephant’s mind is really tiring.

 

January ended with my uncle dying without even allowing us to say goodbye.  He did so because he didn’t want to face unresolved conflicts with a brother and sister.  I suspect that he simply  – selfishly – avoided his own shame for past mistakes.  “Fine!” I empathized, “it’s hard enough to have to face death.”  As the cancer overtook his breathing capacity, I felt compassion.  But then he died and forbade a celebration of his life, my heart switched to anger.  I vented: “His life might be his ownuntil his last breath!  But he cannot deny, beyond the grave, that his life affected us all!”  It’s harder to grieve when you fundamentally disagree with the deceased last wishes.

February started with my niece completely paralyzed by her emotions.  She had repressed so many traumas that she threatened her life. Again, I had spoken up.  Over Christmas, I shook her.  “All the tension you shove inside – trying to look like you are ok – it will explode one day if you do not deal with it!”  As her mental health progressed from bad to worst, I felt guilty.  Of course, once her emotions started to resurface, she didn’t know how to deal with them.  She couldn’t work, couldn’t think – it’s been a bumpy ride even if I’m convinced that I gave her a soft(er) landing instead of a full-frontal crash to the bottom.

And my step-dad’s illness progressed. He was already on the clock but now, it’s ticking louder.  He doesn’t fear his death – he is actually facing it with saintly stoicism.  But he doesn’t want us to be sad of his eventual passing, which is of course ludicrous.  So my mom has to hide to shed a tear and everyone must maintain the ‘life-as-usual’ facade.

 

But life is not as usual!  When I exclaimed: “Wake up!  It’s time to be honest!”, my mom dared to defend him: “You know that it’s not everyone who likes to express emotions.”

– Maybe so, I said, but we all HAVE emotions, so let’s stop pretending like we don’t!

There, I spoke out loud the ultimate taboo: we have these pesty things call feelings, that don’t agree to stand by idly while life unfolds.  Out of the blue, the elephant refuses to be tamed.  Emotions, previously manageable, can no longer be controlled.  A gloomy wave takes over our limbic system.  Even the most contained of rational mind can slip and fall into the abyss.  Maybe – in fact – the most rational of us are actually more vulnerable to systemic shifts in emotions – having denied them in their infancy.

Why do we fight so hard to keep emotions at bay?  In some ways, emotions are the signposts of our lives, telling us what feels right and what doesn’t.  We should welcome them, accept them with open heart, and act on their insights.  But sometimes, feelings contradict what we rationally wish. Then what is more real?  Our decisions or our feelings?

It was a warm night in June, late in the evening but I had lost sense of time.  A bundle in a blanket was handed to me, lighter than I had anticipated, but heavy with expectation.   “You’ll need to put the baby-grow on her now”, I was told.  I was about to say, “How can I?  It’s in my bag.  How can I open my bag to find it if I’m holding the baby?”  Instead, I said to myself: “You have two hands.  Use them”.    It’s not an especially difficult task.  Quickly parents learn to open bags, doors and tins of baby milk-powder with one hand, while the other gently cradles and supports the new-born.  But the first time is experimental.  There is no preparation, no rehearsal, no training course that can capture the feeling: that moment when everything changes forever.  They say that the Rubicon was a small stream, but it carried a vast flow of meaning for those who waded across it.  One moment fatherhood is merely an idea, a theoretical proposition, the next it is a real, physical, urgent demand.  The baby is in my hands, wrapped in a hospital blanket and needing to be dressed for the night: I am on the cusp of becoming responsible.

I wrap my right hand around your small fingers and ease your arm into the sleeve.  Balancing your body on my leg, I use my free hand to open out the cuff, allowing me to draw your baby hand safely through.  I repeat three times for each of your other limbs.  I button up the baby-grow, which is now far too big but within weeks will be far too small.  For the next year you will change every day, but I know this moment will stay with me forever.  The first time that I dressed you, that I kept you warm, that I prepared you for sleep; the first time that I took responsibility for you because – for now – you cannot be responsible for yourself.

We have names and identities of our own, but our relationship to each other endows each of us with another name, another identity.  I am Mark and you are Ysabel, but I am your father and you are my daughter.  We are bound together, for better or worse.  Let’s hope for the better.  We will both need to work at that.  For now, there is a profound asymmetry in our relationship, which places an obligation on me that I want to understand in full, and discharge as best I can.  I know that you are a part of me, but also separate from me.  I want to protect you but not to suffocate you.  Sometimes at night when you cry, I take you downstairs and I sleep on the sofa, I lay you on top of me, with a blanket covering us both.  I worry that if I move in my sleep you will fall.  Instead I lay you by my side, but now I worry that if I roll-over I might crush you.  There is no good solution.  I lie awake and listen to you breathe.  I make sure you are warm.  I will be tired tomorrow at work.  Never mind.

Part of my responsibility is to be away from you: most days I go to work, to earn money, to pay the bills, to provide for you, to ensure stability and security as best I can.  Sometimes this is a relief: reading the FT on the bus, staring at my Reuters and Bloomberg screens, adult company and wine at lunch, hours spent puzzling over my Excel worksheets, looking for something that others have missed, trying to understood what these numbers and the shape of these graph-lines mean, more clearly, more fully than what is implied by the asset-weighted-market-average.  Sometimes a very early morning taxi takes me to the airport to catch an early morning flight to somewhere: where there are prospective clients with money to invest, or existing clients to whom reports must be made, or conferences at which to listen or to speak.  There are sights to be seen, people to meet, food and drink to enjoy.   Wherever I go, for however long I am away, there is always the moment of return: I will open our front door and you will be there.  Will you smile when you see me again?  Or will you scowl and turn the other way?  How little you know your power to break my heart.

I put you in the car seat and drive down to Whitechapel, to the large supermarket.  It’s not the nearest, but it is a trip out, just the two of us.  I have a long shopping list, but we have plenty of time and we have more than enough money to pay for the food.  Unlike the indoor adventure playground, to which I sometimes take you on a Saturday morning, at the car park we don’t have to pay an entry fee.  I put you in the shopping trolley with a child seat.  I check you are secure, holding the hand rail with me.  Then, I brace my arms, press down on my heels and I spin, around and around and around, with you shouting, “faster, faster, faster!”  You shriek with joy.  Dizzy Yzzie.  I stop the trolley and then we spin the other way.  You might be sick now, but it’s a risk worth taking, just to hear your laughter: no inhibition, no self-censorship, no socialized constraint, no decorum, no embarrassment, you just laugh, laugh and laugh, loud and free.  I love this sound, this intimacy, this shared moment.

You are very unimpressed when I take the stabilizer-wheels off your bike.  Now you can’t ride ever again, unless you learn to balance on two wheels.   We go to the park and practice.  It’s hard and you don’t manage it.  You complain.  You frown.  I am lost for words.  It’s hard to explain what to do.  Just keep trying.  It will come.  Maybe next weekend.  The following Saturday, another park, another glum face.  I persevere, but I prepare myself for failure rather than for success.  We try and you fall.  We try again and we make more progress.   I run along behind you holding the seat to help you balance.  This week is so much better than last week.  In your face there is a glimmer of hope.   We try one more time.  I stop running and you don’t notice that I am no longer holding you.  You are riding solo.  You have done it.  I stop and watch you pedal away from me.  Happy day!    Wait a moment, where are you going? Why don’t you stop?  Why don’t you turn around? Where are you going?

I feel sick.  I feel lost.  I feel helpless and foolish.  I was responsible for you and I have lost you, lost sight of you. You have learned to ride a bike and for your first expedition you have cycled off into the far distance and I have no idea where you are.  I have failed you.   I let go before we had agreed a plan on what to do, when you were able to ride on your own.   I start to run after you but what’s the point?  You can already ride faster than I can run, and you have a head-start.  I don’t know which way you will turn.  I don’t know whether you will be able to start again once you stop.  I don’t know whether you will find someone who can help you, or whether you will find someone who might harm you.  You are lost, and I am lost.

Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus to return.  I waited barely twenty minutes but was equally joyful when you rode back into sight.  You were a little breathless but otherwise nonchalant, apparently unaware of the emotional trauma your little adventure across the park had inflicted upon me.  All smiles.  “Dad, I can ride” you tell me as if I hadn’t worked that out.  But you are back, you are safe, and my irresponsibility has gone unpunished.  I smile at your delight and my relief.  Lucky man.

Looking back, there were plenty of times when things might have turned out worse than they did.  All those random events that might have but didn’t happen – accidents or illnesses – the “left tail” as the statisticians would say, the heart-breaking moments that some parents suffer – unlikely but always possible – which we managed to avoid.  Happily, we found ourselves located within the better part of the normal distribution.  Sometimes behaving responsibly just wouldn’t be, just couldn’t be enough: but in my case, it was.  And I felt that burden, like a heavy winter coat draped upon my shoulders.  As you grew, day by day, from baby to toddler to child towards teenager, I felt the weight slowly lift.  My relief was genuine, but also tinged with concern: not that I desired to cling to my paternal role, to maintain you in a state of dependency, but a growing worry about my ability to help you gradually to assume responsibility for yourself.  There is no preparation for becoming a father, whether caring for a new-born baby girl, or preparing your daughter as she stumbles into the age or autonomy.  We had come a long way from that first June evening, but we still had plenty far to go.