The Strength Within

The early years of Kylee's life were a test for all of us.

When she was merely a few weeks old she contracted RSV, a respiratory virus that, I am told, is fairly common and equally undefined. To this day I am still a little in awe of just how close we came to losing her during the first few days of that illness. It didn’t seem so at the time. We asked a great deal of questions, kept vigil at her bedside day and night, and watched her blood oxygen level like hawks, all the while not recognizing that in her shallow, labored, congested breaths there was a real danger she would not be able to draw the next one.

But she rebounded from that, and raising Kylee returned to normal for at least a little while. Then, at six months, she somehow came down with salmonella poisoning. We never figured out how the heck she came up with this one, and neither could the state health department. We didn’t own any reptile pets. She was the only one in the family to come down with it. We had not eaten chicken for as long as we could remember. I remember answering a confident “no” to all the other questions the person from the health department asked me on the phone, and so today it still remains a mystery.

Shortly before her second birthday Kylee was riding piggyback on her mother’s back during an afternoon of play at home and lost her grip. On the way down, she hit her arm on a bedside table and produced a hairline fracture in her forearm. The fall was so slow that Michelle didn’t think it could be a break until Kylee continued to cry and complain about it for longer than usual, and even the doctor in the emergency room didn’t think it could be a break. He handed her an ice cream cone, and when she grabbed at it and began lapping at it through a smile, he proclaimed it a sound bone without x-rays. It wasn’t until two weeks later when we noticed her favoring it at a dance that we had it examined again and had they put it in a cast.

Not long after that we began to notice that Kylee had an eye that seemed to be tracking just a little bit different than the other. Instantly, we were struck with the fear that this was yet another injury from her seemingly mild fall, and so we got her in to see an optometrist. She was diagnosed with strabismus—wondering eye, as it is known to most—and scheduled for surgery a few weeks later with one of the best eye surgeons in the Midwest that, thankfully, practiced in the same town. That was fun; try getting a two-year old through major eye surgery sometime. She was sick for two days after and I thought we were going to have to tie her hands behind her back for weeks for fear that she was going to rub them.

At about four years old Kylee’s respiratory challenges returned in a mild form of asthma. This we discovered through a bout of flu that landed her in the hospital, one of several. Kylee had a pattern we learned to predict whenever she came down with the flu. First she would wane in energy and develop fever, then she would quit eating, and then—despite all our best efforts and pleadings—she would quit drinking. Once we hit that stage, it was off to the emergency room to put her on IV fluids until she felt better enough to take in nourishment. We experienced this cycle for about the next three years.

Next came shingles. Yes, shingles. It's something I always attributed to people with stress and nerve disorders and far older than Kylee's years. Apparently it is also an offshoot of the same virus as Chickenpox and can be the result of having had the vaccination for chickenpox they offer for newborns these days. Megan came down with chickenpox the day that Kylee was born, so we thought we were being prudent and protective parents by haveing Kylee vaccinated.

Then, it stopped. We waited weeks and then months for the next health issue, exotic or otherwise, but the other shoe never dropped. Kylee went a year without any emergency room trips, impromptu doctor’s visits, or days off from school even. The nebulizer sat idle on the closet. At first we thought we were just experiencing a lucky phase, and then we gradually grew less and less concerned. At some point our only reminder of Kylee’s past difficulties came in the form of a call about her annual eye appointment. One day Michelle and I looked at each other and realized that it had been at least a couple of years since we had been to the emergency room for anything.

To see and know Kylee now, you would never have any idea of what she has been through. She is a perfectly healthy nine-year-old little girl. Every morning she awakens with the vibrant enthusiasm of someone that knows there is something new and exciting waiting for her at school or just outside the door of our home. When the weather is warm, there is hardly anything that can keep her inside. Inside, she reads aloud—loudly so—as if the contents of what she reads are alive and happening right before her eyes. She has been through a Tae Kwon Do phase, a dance phase, a soccer phase, and currently still engrossed in her gymnastics phase. She has approached each with the same vigor; she lives for the next week’s appointed time where she can be with others enjoying the activity she so looks forward to.

At parent-teacher conferences each year we get the same report from her teachers about how bright she is and how much energy she brings to the classroom. Her enthusiasm is matched by her charm, and she tends to wrap her teachers around her tiny finger. Her father, as well.

She almost never displays anxiety; I have to be vigilant for the almost imperceptible signs of something worrying her or frightening her. She’s been through a split of the family, several moves, the loss of the family home, the loss of the family pet, and yet she continues to plow through life like the Eveready Bunny.

Kylee’s approach to life at her age, when I think about the contrast of it against her early years, is a source of inspiration to me. I don’t know that she is exceptionally strong, but I know she is exceptionally strong-willed. Whatever she lacks in the physical—she is still a small girl compared with many her age—she more than makes up for in her determination, curiosity, and desire.

For a brief period her fierce will was most evident in her defiance to boundaries and disciplining. I remember a few times where her time-outs were patience-racking minutes of listening to her stomp her feet and cry at the top of her lungs. I knew then that she saw herself strong, and at several points found myself doing a balancing act with the way I tried to guide her. I didn’t want to quash the will in my efforts to teach her what I thought she needed to learn.

But those angry expressions of independence, like her health problems, fell away, and fell away with about as much notice. As I write this I am trying to remember the last time I heard her cry, or stomp her feet, or storm off to another place in the house in a pouting fit. Odd: remembering those things almost makes me miss them a little.

Like any father, I wonder what lies in the years ahead for Kylee and Megan. What will change about the way they are now when they venture out and require less of me and stand more on their own in their decisions and actions? Have I done everything that I can to prepare them, or have I made mistakes along the way that has caused some irrevocable harm and ill-prepared them for the challenges they will face? I have always thought that the best way to ward off the dangers of peer pressures and temptations was to make a child feel loved and secure at home. A strong family keeps the world away. Enough love at home prevents the need to seek acceptance and self-perception externally, a social environ and world rich in risks and dangers. But accomplishing that, creating and sustaining that blanket of security and balancing it with the lessons of independence and self-reliance, has been the monumental task of parenting, at least for me.

I hope, again—like any father, that I have made more good decisions than bad. I hope that what I see in them now is what I will continue to see in both of them in the next few years of adolescence. I hope that even later, when they enter the world of careers and mortgages and bills and raising their own children—my world now—that it will still be with them then. And I hope their children are as much an inspiration to them as they are to me.

Filling Voids

Monday morning marked the start of Spring break for the girls. It’s a time of bliss; no homework or teachers to torment their lives for a solid week. For me it began that morning with a drive to the halfway point between here and Kansas City to meet their grandmother on their mother’s side. I didn’t mind doing the drive since it meant I got to spend a little more quality time with them. It gave me a solid hour and a half more of watching Megan text and Kylee listen to her iPod.

But it also gave me a return trip of what I like to call Contemplative Windshield Time, which can be golden. It’s that time where you can mentally fix just about everything that is wrong with your world, everyone else’s world, and the whole world in general. That morning I was pretty sure, by the time I put the car back in park, that I had the global financial crisis turned around. I almost called NPR with my answers.

Walking up to the door I remembered it was going to be another one of those entire weeks without the girls. Damn! I was trying my best not to think of that, or at least avoid thinking about it for as long as I could. Eventually I knew it would creep back in there, somewhere about the time I came home to the silence or ate one too many meals by myself. I can never push it off entirely.

The first time this happened was the week of Christmas a couple of months after Michelle had moved out. We were all planned for a trip to her father’s for that Christmas, tickets in hand and everything, when things came to that point you just can’t avoid any longer. I guess I could have been a jerk about it then but didn’t see the point of robbing the girls of a trip they had looked forward to and time with their cousins in the warm climate of the southwest. “Sure,” I said, when Michelle nervously asked about them doing the trip anyway, not even really anticipating anything about what it would be like to be without them for the holidays. When it finally dawned on me that I would be spending that much time alone and could easily slide off into a holiday funk, I was determined not to let it do so. I was braver than that, stronger than that. I would rise above the dismal gray of winter and be merry and gay (easy there) and productive with my time. I would volunteer.

And volunteer I did. That first Christmas I found a family in need through the Santa letters collected at the main post office downtown. I recruited several friends and peers at work and we managed to put together a large Christmas meal, a bundle of much needed clothes, and a few toys—for fun’s sake—for the family. I delivered it Christmas morning after making arrangements with the mother. I couldn’t help but hang back in my car after leaving it on the doorstep and ringing the bell. I felt more human that morning than I had in a long time. That Christmas was a special one for me, even without the girls.

I took that feeling and ran with it for the next two years. I joined Big Brothers Big Sisters. I volunteered time for my soccer league in addition to coaching both Kylee and Megan’s teams, and collected equipment and uniforms for kids that might need it. I got involved with exchange students. I think I was also the only Den Father on record for Megan’s Girl Scout troop. All the while I felt good about what I was doing and thought I was offering a great example to the girls about giving back, about caring about others, about looking out from within your self.

Then one day a friend told me, when I was bemoaning how busy my life had become, that I might be taking too much time for others and not for myself. This same friend also thought that maybe I was filling voids with my volunteering. I dismissed it at the time, but later had to admit to myself that filling voids was how it all had started and that they were probably right. Still, I told myself that there were worse ways to fill that void, that mine was a noble pursuit, and I found it hard to give up once I came to a point where I simply had to. Our lives changed a little and charity had to begin at home. The time and expense of my volunteering had to give way to the economy and a need to focus even more on the girls. It was the right move.

But what that left me, with weeks like this week, was the return of the void. So on the drive back from delivering the girls, somewhere between fixing the world economy and preventing global warming, I made a mental list of things to fill my time this week:

1. Catch up on studying my Italian.
2. Write furiously on this blog.
3. Spring cleaning, and then a little more cleaning.
4. Catch a few March Madness games (GO TARHEELS!)
5. Detail the car.
6. Write that great American novel I have been threatening to do for years.
7. Swap out the winter and summer clothes in the closet space.

All very exciting stuff, huh? And noticeably absent of any social activity. I was discussing this with yet another friend (yes, I have more than one) when I got another piece of advice, that maybe my identity and existence was too wrapped up in the girls.

Hmmmm. I hate it when advice like that is so dead on.

I’d never thought of it that way. I knew I was, by design, not dating and not out there really doing much of anything for myself, socially or otherwise. I thought I had pretty good reasoning in doing so. The dating scene really didn’t work for me when I tried it for a while, and everything else had to fit around work or time when the girls were with me. I resolved myself to being a father and father only, because it was the simpler life that felt and fit right. Some have argued that I have limited myself, that I need to take time for myself, and that I need to adjust to the new life where the girls are not with me every day and find a way to make myself a happier camper. Their arguments are not lost on me.

But then I come back around to the one question I can’t answer: why would, or should, anyone ever resolve to accept not seeing and being with their children every day of their life (within reason until they turn the age of thirty-something)? Why would it ever be okay?

It shouldn’t. The closest I've ever gotten to an answer for that was in telling myself that making the best of a less-than-ideal situation is what we all must do. That survivors—and I pride myself on being one, given my history—rise above life’s challenges and overcome them. I get that.

I found that the better way to attack the problem, actually, was to tell myself their time away is a reality I can’t alter, and dwelling on it idly when alone is self-indulgent and wasteful and a bad example for them. I would want them to do differently, so I should. It doesn’t mean that I have to accept it, but I can choose to distract myself from it even though I dislike it. How, is less a problem for me.

And so, if you don’t mind, there’s a closet back there calling my name.

Modern Communication

I still shake my head when I remember a scene I walked in on recently at my place.

Megan had invited a friend over for the night, and when I came through the front door after work, I found all three of the girls in the living room. Kylee was exhibiting a skill, that to this day still amazes me, where someone can listen to an i-pod and watch television simultaneously. Megan was sitting at the desk, intensely focused on the desktop screen and typing away. Not more than ten feet away in a chair was her friend, my laptop perched on her outstretched legs and typing furiously.

"What's up girls?"

"We're talking."

"Oh." The quiet in the room, other than the sound of the television and the faint music I could hear from Kylee's i-pod, puzzled me. I pressed.

"Talking?"

"Yeah, we're IM'ing."

Amazing. Two people found it more interesting to reach out through keyboards and the vast distances of cyberspace in order to connect with each other in the same room and just a short few feet from each other.

Even better: I walked into Megan's room one night and found her and a friend lounged across her bed, close enough to touch, texting each other on their cell phones.

Megan's cell phone and her texting have been a difficulty for me. On one hand, I like the fact that it makes her more available (when she chooses to answer it). I know it to be a constant fixture in her hand, so I know that wherever she is, it's with her and I can be with her also. But I have also found it disappointing how much of a distraction it can be. On the way somewhere together in the car she will flip it open every few seconds to either answer or initiate some message. When she is not actually texting, I sense that she is mentally involved in some conversation that is happening with some invisible person somewhere out there, wherever "there" may be, and only physically present with us in the car.

Technology and every year of age brings a different kind of challenge in talking, teaching, or listening to my kids. I remember a vow I made to myself when I was first a father, that I would work hard at a relationship with the girls and that it would be based on solid, trusting, and open communication between us. I had grand visions; I pictured a future where the girls and I could talk about anything. I imagined evenings around the dinner table where we would all share the good or bad about our daily routines. I hoped for moments where I would be superbly intuitive and get a flood of emotional outpouring from them when I asked what might be troubling them. There would be teen years ahead where I would be as close a confidante for them as any friend they had at school or elsewhere. I saw myself explaining the "why" behind every parental direction, advice, or rule. I was certain that I could do it differently than anything I had ever seen before in my life.

But in my earnest desire I failed to recognize a couple of things, things that I had been taught or told and could have done better to remember. The first of those things was that I was going to be a product of my own environment, and would be prone to making similar mistakes just by virtue of the example I grew up with. So when the moment of frustration arrived where I, for the first time, heard myself proclaim “Because I said so!” as a response to the repeated objections Megan threw at me about why her bed had to be made or her room cleaned, I was instantly thrown into an out-of-body experience, watching myself do the same things I saw my father or mother do or say when I was a kid.

I actually took a moment to reflect on the first time that happened, and asked myself what I could have said or done differently. I had a hard time finding any answers. I retraced all the steps of the discussion and tried to understand each turn of emotion and what was said, looking for how I could have gained Megan’s commitment rather than her compliance. Within a few minutes time I decided that I was a complete failure as a father, that the free world was in jeopardy and Armageddon loomed on the immediate horizon. Then, almost as easily, I remembered that I was also human and that I would never be a perfect father, nor would Megan ever be the perfect daughter. That helped.

But the other thing I failed to remember was something I learned in college communication courses, that every communication involves a transmission and a reception. The space between the two is called interference, and with good reason. Any number of things can get in the way of the message as it traverses that space and distort the intention or the perception. I always thought I could overcome that one by trying to explain everything, by being the kind of father that took the time to also give the “why.” I didn’t anticipate the “why” coming back at me as argument.

I later dissected the same conversation and came up with what each of us might have heard at a certain point:

Me: “Megan, you need to make your bed and clean your room, please.” (Heard: I am your father and I want you to do this thing for me even though it means absolutely nothing to you.)

Megan: “Why? It’s just going to get messed up again in a few hours!” (Heard: What is important to you means absolutely nothing to me, and I don’t care if that hurts your feelings. And, oh, by the way, I AM TESTING YOUR AUTHORITY HERE!)

Later, after I had left the room and Megan in it, I came up with all sorts of good reasons for her “why.” I am pretty good at that, winning arguments by myself after the fact. I wanted her to learn and exercise responsibility and cleanliness. I wanted her to show discipline. I wanted her to take pride in her belongings and environment and take care of it. These were things I thought she needed to learn. But none of that came out or came through in the “Because I said so!” I eventually declared, and every way I tried to explain those things to her before we reached that point failed.

At some point I came around to the question I had to ask of myself: was this important for Megan to learn, or was it more important to me to have done? Was this an important battle to fight, or was it an opportunity for understanding, compromise, or a learning moment for the both of us to share. I imagined a conversation where I shared all of these questions with Megan and the two of us talked through it, laughing it off and understanding each other better.

Then I realized I was in Fantasy Father Land again and came to my senses. It wasn't going to happen. I've tried something similar before, and every time I have prefaced some conversation with Megan with "something I'd like to talk to you about" I've gotten the immediate eye roll. She listened and heard me during those conversations, but I am pretty sure she also mentally composed her next text message at the same time.

As trite as it sounds, it is still true that some things never change. And where communication is concerned, some lessons may be best learned by only one of us: the one who is supposed to be the smarter and more mature of the two.

The Unconditional Phase

People often talk about the admiration a dog has of their owner as the purest example of unconditional love. It's something I think we all aspire to as lovers, spouses, and parents, but possibly never achieve to a level or success we all hope for. The instinct to protect ourselves kicks in too easily.

I've been a dog lover much of my life. For most of my adult years I had a best friend, Bronte, a part-chow, part-retreiver that was with me for fifteen years. He made it with me through three relationships and six moves before I lost him a couple of summers ago. I used to quip that I only lived with either of my parents eight years, had my longest girlfriend relationship for 7 years, and was married 11 years, making him the longest standing relationship of my life. That is either a testament to our enduring friendship or a sad statement of fact about my relationship skills. You pick.

I learned a great deal from that dog, but most of all I recognized what he taught me about love, believe it or not. It was a fluke that we ever met; the girl I was living with at the time--make that coasting with--brought him into the house from a torrential downpour. I put up a mild objection, then folded like a cheap tent as he nuzzled my leg. He and I became attached, and I took over his primary care. Not much later, she exited, he stayed, and I learned even more about caring for someone that totally depends on you. The return you get is only in the form of the intangible: affection, someone always glad when you get home, puts up with whatever mood you might be in and seems bent on changing it to the better. At some point I learned that was enough.

Thankfully, this lesson came before either one of my daughters were born. In fact, it may be the chief reason they were born. I was, at the time, a pretty hard case, twice burned in relationships and fairly dedicated to the idea that the only person looking out for you was you. But the damn dog kind of softened me up a bit and opened the door a crack to let in a genuine, human-type relationship. Funny that a dog would do that.

Fast forward a couple of years, past a wedding ceremony and about a year of marriage, to the point where Megan was born. Like Bronte, she was somewhat unexpected ("We were trying?" I think was my response to the news), but easy to love. When she arrived I experienced a mixed bag of feelings ranging from swelling pride to incredible fear. I couldn't believe I created this life--this insanely cute little being--and I was frightened to death by the realization that her health and well-being and psyche were completely my responsibility. For years.

The parallels between my dog and my daughter were not lost on me, and I began to practice what I learned from one in my relationship and care of the other. I was not disappointed in the returns from those applied lessons. Like every parent, I came to know the joy of a toddler's greeting at the door when I arrived home from a day at work; it melted away the worst of work-related tensions carried home. Then came their gratitude for having attended their Christmas programs, coached their soccer games, or when I drove them and a gaggle of friends to the mall for a day of shopping and movies. But this has all happened in too rapid a succession.

A couple of weeks ago I recognized a change took place right under my nose, where possibly the dependency lessened and roles reversed. For me, this was a sudden realization (see previous blog) brought on by a milestone event between Megan and me, but the definition of it didn't become evident to me until I examined the differences in my relationships with Megan and Kylee.

Kylee is nine and still dependent for everything. Her social world still revolves around me for the most part. She requests little, demands even less, always demonstrates love and respect, and loves to do things with me. She thinks it is cool that her dad can still do a handstand on a skateboard, plays chess with her, lets her read to him at night, and loves whatever I make for dinner. In her eyes, I still stand on the mountain top, cape flowing behind me in the breeze, warding off all things fearful and generally making the world both fun and safe.

Megan, on the other hand, has reached a point in her life where she is trying to determine where she needs me and where not. She wants to develop her own identity and self-reliance but still wants to know that I am the safety net that is there without fail. The ways in which she finds to demonstrate her independence are remarkable. She has become incredibly adept at the eye-roll response to any advice or direction I give her she has deemed irrelevant. The music that we both used to enjoy is now labeled "ancient" and she reaches to change the station on the car stereo the moment we jump in the car. I hear less and less about her life at school our outside of it. She knows me to be a neat freak, so I am sure it was by design that the floor of her bedroom disappeared under a pile of clothes of indistinguishable laundry status. I lost the battle to keep her out of PG-13 movies before she even turned twelve.

Megan and I have entered into a reversed-role phase of the unconditional, where I will have to patiently be that safety net, demonstrate to her that no matter what she does or says I will always love her, trust her, protect her, and adore her. And I'll have to do so with the characteristically canine level of expectations of anything in return.