I find myself regularly swaying in place these days, carpal tunnel syndrome setting in as my right hand spends hours patting the Pampers-clad bum of my new roommate.
During these moments of not-particularly-quiet desperation, as I cling to the hope that I can somehow bum-pat my progeny’s mysterious frustrations away, the mind drifts.
Recently, I considered this 11-month-old, infinitely better-looking version of me cradled in my arms, screaming like a Norwegian forest cat having its fur shorn. I considered myself, a 34-year-old schlemiel whose knees are buckling under the yoke of fatherhood, wondering whether there’s some kind of class I should have taken, or perhaps a book-on-tape I ought to buy.
After perhaps a half-hour of careful self-examination–the most I could muster–I reached a disappointing conclusion: I have not become my father.
The nine months leading up to my son’s arrival seem a blur, but I distinctly remember assuming that the minute he sucked in his first breath, I would magically transform into a younger version of my dad.
I would become serious and mature. I would start listening to classical music. I would detach myself from the vacuous trappings of popular culture. I would finally understand why things in this world are the way they are. I would speak, more often than not, in a calm and authoritative tone.
This transformation has yet to occur.
For the moment, I still have no idea where lightning comes from. I am still easily amused by jokes about flatulence. At a social gathering, it would take little peer pressure to persuade me to drink several cheap beers at once through an unclean funnel and plastic tube. Classical music gives me a headache.
Burdens of fatherhood
Yet somehow I have been bestowed the responsibility of raising a living, breathing, squirming human being, leaving me concerned and wondering: Who, exactly, decided I was qualified for this endeavor?
I have to imagine I’m not the first to ask this question. I haven’t studied the matter (if my dad were in this position, I’m sure he would have), but it seems likely that many young fathers aspire to do at least as good a job of parenting as their fathers did.
For those of us who look up to our dads, this is no easy task.
My father is someone I still hold in the highest regard, a man I rely on constantly for advice and guidance.
He was never the “play catch in the back yard” or “coach the youth football league” kind of dad. Rather, he is a man of intellect, brilliant yet imperfect enough to routinely lose his wallet or go to the store wearing plaid pants and an eye-jarring striped shirt.
While I was growing up, he was an independent researcher, perfecting quirky ideas that worked but never seemed to catch the dull imagination of the corporate world that gave him funding. One example: He made black aluminum foil that absorbed heat better than regular foil, allowing a turkey to cook in less than half the time. Another, infinitely more important concept: He developed a system to clean polluted smokestack gases and ship the purified, carbon-dioxide-rich air to greenhouses, where it helped plants grow at staggering rates.
That these and a number of other inventions never took off was irrelevant. I knew they worked, and they cemented Dad as a hero in my eyes. I grew up knowing any question I had about anything could be answered–it was like being raised by the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Dad would spend hours explaining to me a scheme for a mechanical device with no wings and no propellers that he knew could take to the air. He called it his flying carpet.
Following in Dad’s footsteps
He made me the envy of the neighborhood by transforming an old gas lawnmower into an electric go-kart and rigging a rope and pulley system that let me sail, like Tarzan, between the towering oaks in our back yard.
I went on to become a chemical engineer, just like him, but found myself foundering. I never found a passion for science and recognized early on I couldn’t think the way he thinks, couldn’t conjure the zany ideas that always kept his mind engaged.
I knew it was over when I, the college-educated engineer, tried to install a dimmer switch on a light in my apartment and wound up calling Dad to bail me out with some over-the-phone electrical guidance.
Switching professional gears
So I turned to journalism and, somehow or other, it became a career. I wouldn’t know a dangling participle if it latched itself to my eyeball, yet I write for a living. I don’t read as much as I should. I watch too much television. I struggle to recount past presidents any further back than Nixon but, as part of my eternal adolescence, I can still recite all the lyrics to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”
And so with volumes of useless information eating up the limited space in my brain, I have embarked on fatherhood, and I stand, sway back and forth with a baby in my arms, and wonder how on Earth I’ll ever impress my son as much as my father impressed me.
Then I look down at the little guy and the truth sinks in. Despite an apparent lack of qualifications on my part, I am his and he is mine, and it appears that the two of us are going to have to muddle through.
His mother will nurture him, tenderly read to him, use colorful pictures to stimulate his developing mind. I will stand over him, speak gibberish and stick my tongue out, secretly hoping he’ll learn to do likewise.
I will teach him all I know about watching football: the most comfortable couch positions, how to tuck the remote between the cushion and armrest while still leaving room to balance a glass of soda.
I will demonstrate to him the tricks of acting tough while actually being terrified.
We will cruise the streets in summer with windows down and raucous rock music turned up, and I’ll explain to him that this impresses the ladies, or at least it did back in the 1980s. (Or perhaps it didn’t. Who knows?)
I’ll try to teach him to write well. I’m not sure I actually know how, but we’ll fake it.
When he asks where lightning comes from, I’ll look it up on the Internet or buy a book and figure it out.
I’ll love him with all my heart and let him know that he is, already, the greatest accomplishment of my life.
Not long ago I flew to Florida to visit my dad, and there was a night when we sat in the living room and talked and he brought up his old idea of the flying carpet, one he has been chasing around his head for years. I listened intently, because I still believe that flying carpet will fly, and I still love to just sit there and be amazed by the man that raised me.
I think that’s what I hope for more than anything, that someday my son will come see me and we’ll experience a similar moment and, for reasons that remain to be seen, he’ll look at me with love and a certain admiration.
Maybe we’ll just be sitting on the couch watching football, both carefully leaving room to balance our glass of soda. Maybe he’ll have become a writer–God help him–and I can bore him with stories of the good old days of journalism.
Or maybe we’ll be driving somewhere and the first few bars of “Stairway to Heaven” will pour out of the dashboard speakers. And maybe he’ll smile and look at his goofball of a dad, and we’ll both bask in the comfort of the lyrics we know by heart.
