Yesterday I took my son out to the nearby pitch and putt course for his first time on a real golf course. He’s six years old, and he’s been taking golf lessons in an afterschool program once a week, plus his mom or I take him to the driving range whenever the weather is good. He likes going to the driving range, and there’s a mini-golf course there too. I used to work there, so it’s a familiar place for me, and it’s become a familiar, happy place for him too.
Last evening was picture perfect – sunny but not hot, a breeze coming off the lake keeping the gnats that come out as the sun creeps down to a minimum except in the nooks and crannies of the course that stayed sheltered from the wind. My son has a junior set of clubs, a driver, an iron, and a putter, with a giant whale head cover on top of his driver which always falls off as he walks with the bag. At six years old, a little over three feet tall and thin as a rail, his walking is floppy and jerky and draggy all at once. His arms flail and his body twists and moves with a kind of silly grace, while his legs sometimes barely lift from the ground as he drags his feet across the grass. He grabbed his driver, put his bright orange ball on the tee, and aimed about 45 degrees to the left of the hole and swung, the ball shooting along the ground about 90 degrees to the left of the hole and jamming against the chain link fence that surrounds the course. I got the ball, teed it up again, and said “try aiming more to the right this time,” at which instruction he lined up even more to the left. I stopped him, corrected his stance, and he swung away, this time the ball bounding into the air but still going pretty far left. Good shot, I said, then I teed up, hit my ball, and we walked towards our shots.
We played eight holes – we skipped one as a couple of hipsters were getting frustrated with our pace at one point – and throughout the round, the concept of “aim” was just not getting through to my son. I explained how to line up his feet with a club – the shaft pointing straight towards the hole – and inevitably he’d then line up aiming left, and when I’d tell him to aim right, he’d aim even more left. I explained to him how to “aim right” in a variety of different ways, but it wasn’t getting through. I got a bit frustrated and started interrupting his swing, he started getting confused, and all in all, it was a bit of a mess. Towards the last few holes, though, I found some inner peace, asked him to calm down and take a deep breath before each swing, and I’d line up his shots for him, picking him up and turning him towards the right direction, and then telling him to breathe deep, keep his eye on the ball, and swing. He did really well. He putted well too. We ended up having a pretty good time for those last few holes.
But let’s face it, I’m a lousy teacher of such things as golf. Really I’m a lousy teacher of anything involving the body – my ex-wife can attest to my utter failure to teach her how to drive a stick shift, for example, and I think what it came down to was the creeping frustration I felt at my own inability to describe how to depress the clutch, change gears, and then lift the clutch while pushing on the gas pedal in that subtle combination that leads to a clean shift. It’s the timing of left foot, right hand, then left and right foot together but in opposite directions – a purely physical connection to the car – that you can’t quite explain, that you have to feel, and I can’t describe feel. And then I’ll get frustrated, at myself for failing to describe it and at the driver for not getting it right, and things fall apart.
After story time last night, as my son was curling up in his bed with his stuffed bear and his new stuffed hedgehog, I told him how proud I was of him, how great it was that he went on his first real golf outing, and how well he did on the course. I also said I was sorry for getting frustrated with him, and told him that I was still learning how to be a good dad, and that I really appreciated how patient he was with me as I learned. He asked me “how can I learn how to be a good dad?” and I told him to remember the things I didn’t do well and think about how he would do them better when he becomes a father. And I told him to talk to my father, his grandfather, when he comes to Maine in August. I told him his grandfather was a much better Dad than I was, and he’d have lots of good tips on how to be a good dad. My son told me he thought I was the best dad in the world, and I told him thank you, but I still have a lot to learn. He gave me a hug, then turned over and went straight to sleep. I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, teary eyed, then turned over and fell asleep myself.
This morning, a beautiful bright summer day, the air cool coming through the window, I finished a book in the faint morning sunlight coming through the blinds and listened to him slowly roust himself from sleep. He talks to himself a bit, and once he realized I was awake he let me know some random facts about trains – he usually dreams about trains – and then suddenly popped up and went to use the toilet. Coming back, he told his stuffed animals that they needed to sit in the chair, and he folded up his sheets and put his pillow away and then pushed his mattress underneath my bed. My apartment in Seattle is tiny, maybe 200 square feet (20 square meters) at most, but it’s close to my son’s house with his mom and since I only use it about eight to ten nights a month, it has everything I need but absolutely nothing extra. Eight months after moving in, eight months of a growing little boy and a lot of turmoil in my life, the place still works. What’s amazing to me is that my son has absorbed my own rhythms in the place – moving the chair and the footstool at night to make room for his bed, sweeping and keeping dust and dirt off the shelves and the floor – and he’s now doing his part to keep things clean and neat. The place is too small to let any disorder creep in; it would become unliveable quickly, it requires the kind of constant attention that a sailboat demands. But we’ve made it work, and he’s making it work too. He even adds his own touches – not just artwork on the walls and stuffed toys and crafts, but when he stays with me, he likes getting flowers for the apartment when we go grocery shopping. His mom, after all, is a florist.
I got dressed, he got dressed, and I convinced him to join me on a walk. I was hoping to head down to the lake to get a dose of water views, but that was a bit too long for him, so I changed the destination to the donut shop and that convinced him. The sun was already getting warm, and he dragged his feet and complained about the heat – I wish he was more of an outdoor kid, but hey, he likes golf, I’ll take what I can get. We got our donuts and picked up a cruller for his mom, whose home was on the way back, and I texted her saying we’d stop by with a surprise. We walked up the tree-lined streets and my son made up a little song about “two silly boys, two silly donut delivering boys” as we trudged along. His mom was pruning the plum trees in front of her house and he held out the bag with the cruller, saying “Mommy Mommy Mommy it’s an apple cruller!” as he ran down to give her a hug. We exchanged pleasantries, she said she was just heading out, and we went our way.
We got back to the apartment. We played some board games – he likes to play them in four-player versions, with two stuffed animals joining us, him playing for one of them and me playing for the other. He hasn’t quite gotten used to the idea that the stuffed animal he plays for should be played as a separate player – that is, not as a self-sacrificing ally that enables him to win, but as a player who should want to win in their own right. The nature of the games at this age, fortunately, mean that even though he does sometimes make his stuffed animal make a bad move to his own advantage, there’s usually still a good distribution of outcomes. I also enjoy the fact that once a player wins, my son keeps playing the game with the remaining players to determine the full ranking of first, second, third, and last – usually because he just wants to avoid being last, but also because he genuinely sees the whole game as a complete arc, and if we just stopped with one playing “winning”, we wouldn’t know the whole story. He came in last in both games we played this morning, but he’s growing up: he accepted the outcomes and hugged his stuffed animals, congratulating them on their victories.
We listened to the baseball game on the radio last night; it was a pitcher’s duel, a 1-0 shutout for the Mariners, so there wasn’t the home runs or close plays at the plate that make it obvious to him that something exciting is going on. Every inning I’d tell him that the Mariners had kept the other team scoreless, and when they finally scored a run, told him that we were winning. He cheered and went back to playing with his Lego trains while I read and collected my thoughts. They finally won just as the sun set, and we read for the rest of the night.
I was a weird kid. At my son’s age I was already reading long books, sneaking up to the adult section of the library to get histories and textbooks and atlases. It’s what I think is normal but I know it’s not, I knew it wasn’t normal even when I was a kid, but it’s all I know in my heart, and it makes me a lousy father. Actually it makes me a lousy adult: I keep thinking other people had childhoods just like mine, which is obviously ridiculous. Even if I had been “normal” no one else has the same childhood – which as I sit on my bed, watching my son play a game where you build rail networks across Europe with two stuffed bears and a stuffed carrot, is a concept which really resonates with me right now. My son has lived long enough now that he’s known his parents apart for more of his life than they were together, and if I’m blunt with myself, even when his parents were together, he had an absentee father. So maybe a better way of putting it is that he’s old enough to know that he has a loving father for almost as long as the time where he had a ghost for a father, a ghost that paid the bills but otherwise wasn’t seen.
As we got close to the apartment this morning, we walked by a house with an older guy watering his rose bushes. My son skipped along in front of me and then said “I’m running!” and rushed towards our building. I smiled, and the guy stopped watering for a second and said “Hey, happy Father’s Day, Dad.”
I don’t deserve it yet, but today is a pretty good day. Happy Father’s Day to all fathers out there, and thanks to you all for helping me learn how to be one. I’m doing this differently, maybe unrecognizably to what you know, but I’m still listening to your lessons and making them my own. And I think I’m helping a future father that will be better than any of us, but he’s really doing it all on his own.