I am 36 on Saturday. And in my head, what I am writing now is the beginning to this great movie that I am making. It’s this documentaryesque film that hazily hovers over the boundary between fiction and fact. It’s quiet, moody, insightful. It has frames of me driving to voiceovers like this one, my voice meandering its way through some familiar but obscure song – a deep cut you can’t recall hearing from an artist you thought you knew – and for whatever reason I am turning the steering wheel a lot, as if where ever I am going requires lots of hand over hand technique. It’s a voice over however, because though I am not talking to you, you need to be able to hear my thoughts. That’s the cool thing about those shots; they seem so intimate like there is a mic inside my head and I don’t know it. But I do know it, because I want you to know these things. I just don’t want to look at the camera and say them to you, the thousands, the millions of viewers I imagine watching me drive – my rhetorical bashfulness. And I know it’s quiet in the theater, or where ever you are watching, because it is in the car, and you want to hear what I am saying.
It’s the kind of film that will make you wonder if any of what I am saying is true, while at the same time thinking to yourself “that sounds just like him, just like his life,” even if you don’t know me.
I am 36 on Saturday, and this is the movie I want to start making, the movie I am pretending I am writing right now. This is the movie I think I have been thinking about for the last 36 years. Except for the fact that I don’t know what this movie is about. Not really.
I’ve got plenty to say. Plenty.
It could be about marriage. I have written about that a lot lately. I have had some transformative experiences in the last 10 years of marriage, and I am sure that I could put them together in a way that someone would find helpful. Not Steve Harvey helpful. Nor Dr. Phil. Not Deepak Chopra, either. More helpful in that Away We Go type way, the movie with Minnie Ripperton’s daughter. That film where the pregnant couple wanders around, metaphorically looking for their spiritual home, a center in and from which to raise their coming child, just as they realize the home they sought was actually the one in which one of them was raised. That “cock your head and blink your eyes and look again to see the world looking differently from this angle” help. I like that. Or maybe I would want to be helpful like a Zora Neale Hurston quote, eloquent and accessible - both effortless so. Subtle and yet bold like a Baldwin insight that slaps you in the face for having ignored it for so long. I would want to write those kinds of helpful things about marriage. I think I could do that. My wife would help me.
It could be about identity – especially the delicate process of knitting together national or communal identity. I can talk about that all day: The unforeseen consequences of the successfully assimilated 2nd generations; the invisible class warfare within ascending communities. It could be about making plain the phenomenon of the social construction of race, or the unfortunate fact that black and all the racial colors were and are in many ways still a reaction to the invention of whiteness, or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s definitely both. It could be about how becoming American means joining in the time honored rite of passage of killing your parents, figuratively of course – more of a cultural murder. My wife would not help me with this stuff. On this, I’d be on my own.
It could be about getting older. 1/3 life crisis stuff. Thirty-Something for the Forty-Somethings because people mature 10 years slower than they did in the 80s. It could be about the impossibility of adult authenticity. I could talk about how I don’t feel grown but how I am. How I am stuck between being Holden Caulfield or Old Spencer. Right? I am beyond scrubbing away all the FU’s in the world, but I still believe that the mark of a mature man is, actually, resignation, and I can’t just give up, sell out, and grow up like that. But, I don’t play video games so that protest seems a bit disingenuous for me. And I’m mad that somebody took hip-hop from me, but I’m over it, really. I have Van Hunt, K-os, and the 54. I mean, Brown Sugar, High Fidelity, and Garden State have already been made. If I made them again, they would just be Afro-hippy versions, which I must admit would be cooler. But that’s not the point.
There is so much I could talk about – so many things that are pertinent in my life right now: gentrification, being broke because of my choices and not my lack of opportunity -- as if I thought the lifestyle I was choosing was some monk like discipline (that sure was hyperbole). I could talk about Diaspora – map out through Facebook all the brown people I know, from all the places where there are brown people, and line their stories up to show how similar they are, or how impossibly different they are, to prove and disprove at the same time the universality of human suffering.
But I think what I really want to talk about is the fact that I am 36 on Saturday, and I don’t yet feel like I have done what it is I was meant to do. I feel like I have been moving that way, am on the right path, but here is my 36th year and I don’t know where “there” is yet. Once I thought I did. The world seemed so graciously theoretical at 22, so well designed. But at 36 there are components missing, whole bridges yet unconstructed that would make it possible to get there from here.
And so, I am writing this movie. This will be my door. Like Harold and the Purple crayon, I am drawing a jamb in your mind, in our collective minds, and I am walking through it. And I’m gonna say whatever needs saying.
Showing posts with label adulthood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adulthood. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Shamed.
(In advance, I apologize for the rather hetero-normative focus of this blog, for it is heavily inspired by my own life and my own research to manage it. I don’t suggest that these broad strokes below are the only assessment of my gender, but they are relevant to me at this point in my life.)
I am reading this book about men and women and relationships and about how no amount of communication is likely to really improve a relationship if closeness is the desired outcome. Forgive me if I am offending any relationship values you might have, but let me at least outline one of the book’s central arguments before you scream blasphemy or “quackery.” It suggests that no matter how skilled or intentional we are, more often than not we communicate and comprehend, especially when “unrefereed,” in ways that support our primary emotional motivations: fear and shame. It does a rather convincing job of explaining how women (I am aware of how broad these strokes may seem, but the book does a better job than I will do here of accounting for variety and diversity of perspective in its gendered samples) are largely motivated by fear and men, largely by shame. It talks about baby boys and girls and their different relationship to eye contact – specifically for infant boys it is overwhelming where for girls it is comforting – and draws a rather compelling connection from that research to the primal emotional instincts we have as adults. Since I have only started reading this book, and I don’t intend to write a book review, I won’t outline any more of its claims, but if you are interested, follow this link: http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=267095
What I will say is that I found what I have read so far on men and shame painfully pitch perfect at times. It argues that more than bodily harm or even death, men fear failure, loss of status, being unworthy of love, powerlessness, and inadequacy. And its most radical claim is this: Since men seem hardwired to be less emotionally astute/equipped than women (in comparison they generally have less facility to read non-verbal cues, to assess and express their own emotional experience, to negotiate realities that are not best understood by solely “logical” analysis), it is in relationships that men feel most inadequate and most ashamed of themselves and of their inability to positively maintain the relationship. And while it’s not the focus of this blog, the book then avers that talking about the relationship, something men do poorly already in comparison to women, is not likely to be the best or even a particularly effective way of bringing a man and a woman closer together, for the obvious reasons: most men lack the facility to fully and quickly engage in such emotional conversations and that so much of this emotional motivation, shame, lurks beyond the conscious mind (the book also offers solutions I don’t discuss here).
Those of you who know me may know me to be a talker. Even more, I think that I talk about my emotions relatively openly. So, that part of the analysis does not resonate with me so much. However, it is hard for me to communicate to you how much of every minute of my day is connected to avoiding shame.
For most of my life I have always been a “good boy.” I have been a child about which adults could always say, “That Okorie, he is doing things well.” I came in when the street lights came on, I went to a prep school and did decently in school, practiced my cello when told (mostly), never drank, never smoked (except for three months when I was twenty-five and I fancied smoking cherry Cavendish in a pipe because I thought it made me feel and look distinguished), never drugged, never sold drugs. Hell, I was a virgin until I was nineteen. I went to college, got married, had children after marriage. I got a respectable profession.
Even now as an adult, I concentrate hard on looking women in the eye, sometimes to the point of not hearing what they say, simply so that my eyes won’t wander. I smile and nod constantly at things that people mention that I don’t understand so that as soon as they are gone I can look them up on my Iphone and educate myself. I heard someone recently use a phrase from American Beach, a book about the Martha’s Vineyard of the South, that described the Black community there as “radically respectable.” I heard him say it and I instantly understood how desperately members of that community must have felt. For, I have been seeking respectability and, in some instances, glory all my life, primarily to keep as much distance between me and that third rail of shame as possible. And in the moments when I have felt that I have brought shame upon myself, I have been quietly and, in some cases, terminally depressed.
But the truth of the matter is that largely, I have been successful at staving off shame in my public life. More often than not, I am celebrated and embraced by the people around me. But in my marriage, I cannot fool my wife. Although there are plenty of areas in which I excel at home, there are things I don't do so well. There’s my daughters’ laundry. And, my socks. My wet towels on the bed. And, my inability to be as disciplined and animated as I am for work at home. There are the bills that I don’t manage and the calendar I don’t coordinate. There is birth control, which until just recently was also not managed by me. There is money and my self indulgent “noble” low paying profession (I could be a lawyer, right now earning much more than I do, but instead I chose fulfillment). And then there’s intimacy – that’s a-whole-nother blog. (The previous paragraph has echoes of “An Average Man at Home,” another blog I wrote last year.)
Some of these short comings have been brought to my attention by my wife. Others of them are my own private frustrations. And I don’t have the magic wand to erase or ameliorate them. These things get better with concerted effort, and they go away when habits are changed or new ones formed. I am neither perfect nor perfectible, so it’s likely some of them will never go away, or that once gone they will be replaced with others.
So, living with the shame of my own imperfection in my family has been hard, painful even. But I also understand that it is life. I am not alone. And based on the reading I have done lately, I am actually quite typical - which may actually be my greatest shame of all.
When I was in college and in my twenties, I felt so certain and in control. I was a budding artist, hippie, feminist, and idealist. A privileged, relatively accomplished young African-American who thought he was too good to uncritically embrace the privilege that had been provided him for the last quarter century, too “enlightened” to intentionally choose a career simply to make money. Most important, however, was that I knew that I would not be typical. Of course, I knew that I would not have a typical job. But I also knew that I would live life differently. My relationships would look different, my performance of masculinity would be different, and my family structure would be different. Most of all, I would avoid the sins and weaknesses of the many men that went before me because I did not inherit their “unexamined” life script. I was writing it line by line, self inspired, informed, and bold. I knew that whatever I would be in 15 years would not be typical.
Yet, here I am now, reading a book by two people who have never met me, and they are theorizing about my life as if I were their ethnography subject – as if they sat in my living room and watched me. Reading a book that suggests that not only am I not atypical, I am as common as they come. This is the fourth book of this type in three years that has had this kind of insight into my life.
Worse than that, when I visit my other married friends, I hear echoes of the same dramas unfolding in their houses. People whom I think are categorically different from me and my wife say things in our presence about “I took me a while to realize that doing the dishes is foreplay.” Or “Sex? What’s that again?” Or, “I’ll have to check with my wife before I schedule that. Can’t make that mistake again.” Or, “I just wish he would handle the bills/calendar/laundry/groceries/cleaning/insert any managerial household task!” It’s like all of us are caught in our own ethnically flavored version of the 80’s TV show Thirty Something.
Stranger still for me is my new need to be around men. I was essentially raised by my mother and grandmother. All my life, most of my closest friends have been women. I hung out with my boys in high school and college, but I felt very comfortable around women, maybe even more comfortable around them because such a comfort confirmed my notion that I could perform a non-traditional masculinity – one that didn’t seek the company of men because it was uncomfortable around women.
Now, I find this uncomfortably powerful joy in getting together with the fellas, especially married fellas, because I somehow identify with them in ways I never imagined I would. I invited three of my good buddies out to a bar one night recently, and I don’t think I have felt that comfortable socially since I was in college. It was great. We talked about politics, work, sports, but we also talked about being married, choices, and challenges. We laughed at each other, full of an empathy that was effortlessly expressed. We raised our glasses in fellowship and rushed back home to get the sleep we would need to be fathers, husbands, and professionals the next day.
It seems I have become a man – in so many senses of the word that I would not have expected, that I couldn’t have imagined. And while I understand how, I don’t really know why.
What is it about the force of marriage and kids that completely reorganizes one’s own sense of identity and notion of autonomy? If ever I thought I was in control of my life and who I was, the above two forces changed that. All it took was for my wife to start showing, and all of a sudden I started playing out roles of provider that I didn’t expect to embrace so uncritically. Even more, my wife became someone she didn’t immediately recognize. And I guess in some ways it’s for the better, for we are a solid, committed unit for our family. But there’s all the other stuff that changes, too. What is it with the sympathetic/man/father weight? Many friends I surely suspected of being anorexic when they were in college now have a heft to them that befits their portrayal of a middle aged gangster. Where did my fixation with grilling come from? What is it with men and socks? I used to think that was something only written into movies out of a sense of tradition. Why are none of my married buddies having as much sex as they would like? Why did no one tell us? What is it with us and doctor’s appointments? It all seems too anecdotal and stereotypical to be true. And yet, I went to the dentist last week for the first time in two years.
The hardest thing for me to admit to myself about all of this is that I am ashamed - not of being a man. But of not being an exceptional man, or rather of not being a man of my own making, not being an “inertialess” man; of not being a man who because he was raised by women had no problem whatsoever managing the daily work of making a life with one; of not being the kind of man that was above all of this petty gender stuff; of not being the kind of man that was able to name and define adult manhood on his own terms. Come to find out, I am fairly common and fairly powerless to be bigger than the drama that has played out between men and women since the beginning of the species, and significantly less powerful than my circumstances of being a married father.
I see that my younger assumptions were amazingly uniformed and brazenly arrogant. But, they were who I was.
And now, I am someone different. I am a someone reading a book about men in relationships with women. I am learning about shame. And I am so ashamed that I have something to learn. I thought things would be different. I was certain I would be.
****
If you’d like to respond, here are a couple of prompts to consider:
Is your emotional life shaped by fear or shame?
How have marriage and children changed what you know about yourself?
Are you the adult you expected to be? Why or Why not?
I am reading this book about men and women and relationships and about how no amount of communication is likely to really improve a relationship if closeness is the desired outcome. Forgive me if I am offending any relationship values you might have, but let me at least outline one of the book’s central arguments before you scream blasphemy or “quackery.” It suggests that no matter how skilled or intentional we are, more often than not we communicate and comprehend, especially when “unrefereed,” in ways that support our primary emotional motivations: fear and shame. It does a rather convincing job of explaining how women (I am aware of how broad these strokes may seem, but the book does a better job than I will do here of accounting for variety and diversity of perspective in its gendered samples) are largely motivated by fear and men, largely by shame. It talks about baby boys and girls and their different relationship to eye contact – specifically for infant boys it is overwhelming where for girls it is comforting – and draws a rather compelling connection from that research to the primal emotional instincts we have as adults. Since I have only started reading this book, and I don’t intend to write a book review, I won’t outline any more of its claims, but if you are interested, follow this link: http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=267095
What I will say is that I found what I have read so far on men and shame painfully pitch perfect at times. It argues that more than bodily harm or even death, men fear failure, loss of status, being unworthy of love, powerlessness, and inadequacy. And its most radical claim is this: Since men seem hardwired to be less emotionally astute/equipped than women (in comparison they generally have less facility to read non-verbal cues, to assess and express their own emotional experience, to negotiate realities that are not best understood by solely “logical” analysis), it is in relationships that men feel most inadequate and most ashamed of themselves and of their inability to positively maintain the relationship. And while it’s not the focus of this blog, the book then avers that talking about the relationship, something men do poorly already in comparison to women, is not likely to be the best or even a particularly effective way of bringing a man and a woman closer together, for the obvious reasons: most men lack the facility to fully and quickly engage in such emotional conversations and that so much of this emotional motivation, shame, lurks beyond the conscious mind (the book also offers solutions I don’t discuss here).
Those of you who know me may know me to be a talker. Even more, I think that I talk about my emotions relatively openly. So, that part of the analysis does not resonate with me so much. However, it is hard for me to communicate to you how much of every minute of my day is connected to avoiding shame.
For most of my life I have always been a “good boy.” I have been a child about which adults could always say, “That Okorie, he is doing things well.” I came in when the street lights came on, I went to a prep school and did decently in school, practiced my cello when told (mostly), never drank, never smoked (except for three months when I was twenty-five and I fancied smoking cherry Cavendish in a pipe because I thought it made me feel and look distinguished), never drugged, never sold drugs. Hell, I was a virgin until I was nineteen. I went to college, got married, had children after marriage. I got a respectable profession.
Even now as an adult, I concentrate hard on looking women in the eye, sometimes to the point of not hearing what they say, simply so that my eyes won’t wander. I smile and nod constantly at things that people mention that I don’t understand so that as soon as they are gone I can look them up on my Iphone and educate myself. I heard someone recently use a phrase from American Beach, a book about the Martha’s Vineyard of the South, that described the Black community there as “radically respectable.” I heard him say it and I instantly understood how desperately members of that community must have felt. For, I have been seeking respectability and, in some instances, glory all my life, primarily to keep as much distance between me and that third rail of shame as possible. And in the moments when I have felt that I have brought shame upon myself, I have been quietly and, in some cases, terminally depressed.
But the truth of the matter is that largely, I have been successful at staving off shame in my public life. More often than not, I am celebrated and embraced by the people around me. But in my marriage, I cannot fool my wife. Although there are plenty of areas in which I excel at home, there are things I don't do so well. There’s my daughters’ laundry. And, my socks. My wet towels on the bed. And, my inability to be as disciplined and animated as I am for work at home. There are the bills that I don’t manage and the calendar I don’t coordinate. There is birth control, which until just recently was also not managed by me. There is money and my self indulgent “noble” low paying profession (I could be a lawyer, right now earning much more than I do, but instead I chose fulfillment). And then there’s intimacy – that’s a-whole-nother blog. (The previous paragraph has echoes of “An Average Man at Home,” another blog I wrote last year.)
Some of these short comings have been brought to my attention by my wife. Others of them are my own private frustrations. And I don’t have the magic wand to erase or ameliorate them. These things get better with concerted effort, and they go away when habits are changed or new ones formed. I am neither perfect nor perfectible, so it’s likely some of them will never go away, or that once gone they will be replaced with others.
So, living with the shame of my own imperfection in my family has been hard, painful even. But I also understand that it is life. I am not alone. And based on the reading I have done lately, I am actually quite typical - which may actually be my greatest shame of all.
When I was in college and in my twenties, I felt so certain and in control. I was a budding artist, hippie, feminist, and idealist. A privileged, relatively accomplished young African-American who thought he was too good to uncritically embrace the privilege that had been provided him for the last quarter century, too “enlightened” to intentionally choose a career simply to make money. Most important, however, was that I knew that I would not be typical. Of course, I knew that I would not have a typical job. But I also knew that I would live life differently. My relationships would look different, my performance of masculinity would be different, and my family structure would be different. Most of all, I would avoid the sins and weaknesses of the many men that went before me because I did not inherit their “unexamined” life script. I was writing it line by line, self inspired, informed, and bold. I knew that whatever I would be in 15 years would not be typical.
Yet, here I am now, reading a book by two people who have never met me, and they are theorizing about my life as if I were their ethnography subject – as if they sat in my living room and watched me. Reading a book that suggests that not only am I not atypical, I am as common as they come. This is the fourth book of this type in three years that has had this kind of insight into my life.
Worse than that, when I visit my other married friends, I hear echoes of the same dramas unfolding in their houses. People whom I think are categorically different from me and my wife say things in our presence about “I took me a while to realize that doing the dishes is foreplay.” Or “Sex? What’s that again?” Or, “I’ll have to check with my wife before I schedule that. Can’t make that mistake again.” Or, “I just wish he would handle the bills/calendar/laundry/groceries/cleaning/insert any managerial household task!” It’s like all of us are caught in our own ethnically flavored version of the 80’s TV show Thirty Something.
Stranger still for me is my new need to be around men. I was essentially raised by my mother and grandmother. All my life, most of my closest friends have been women. I hung out with my boys in high school and college, but I felt very comfortable around women, maybe even more comfortable around them because such a comfort confirmed my notion that I could perform a non-traditional masculinity – one that didn’t seek the company of men because it was uncomfortable around women.
Now, I find this uncomfortably powerful joy in getting together with the fellas, especially married fellas, because I somehow identify with them in ways I never imagined I would. I invited three of my good buddies out to a bar one night recently, and I don’t think I have felt that comfortable socially since I was in college. It was great. We talked about politics, work, sports, but we also talked about being married, choices, and challenges. We laughed at each other, full of an empathy that was effortlessly expressed. We raised our glasses in fellowship and rushed back home to get the sleep we would need to be fathers, husbands, and professionals the next day.
It seems I have become a man – in so many senses of the word that I would not have expected, that I couldn’t have imagined. And while I understand how, I don’t really know why.
What is it about the force of marriage and kids that completely reorganizes one’s own sense of identity and notion of autonomy? If ever I thought I was in control of my life and who I was, the above two forces changed that. All it took was for my wife to start showing, and all of a sudden I started playing out roles of provider that I didn’t expect to embrace so uncritically. Even more, my wife became someone she didn’t immediately recognize. And I guess in some ways it’s for the better, for we are a solid, committed unit for our family. But there’s all the other stuff that changes, too. What is it with the sympathetic/man/father weight? Many friends I surely suspected of being anorexic when they were in college now have a heft to them that befits their portrayal of a middle aged gangster. Where did my fixation with grilling come from? What is it with men and socks? I used to think that was something only written into movies out of a sense of tradition. Why are none of my married buddies having as much sex as they would like? Why did no one tell us? What is it with us and doctor’s appointments? It all seems too anecdotal and stereotypical to be true. And yet, I went to the dentist last week for the first time in two years.
The hardest thing for me to admit to myself about all of this is that I am ashamed - not of being a man. But of not being an exceptional man, or rather of not being a man of my own making, not being an “inertialess” man; of not being a man who because he was raised by women had no problem whatsoever managing the daily work of making a life with one; of not being the kind of man that was above all of this petty gender stuff; of not being the kind of man that was able to name and define adult manhood on his own terms. Come to find out, I am fairly common and fairly powerless to be bigger than the drama that has played out between men and women since the beginning of the species, and significantly less powerful than my circumstances of being a married father.
I see that my younger assumptions were amazingly uniformed and brazenly arrogant. But, they were who I was.
And now, I am someone different. I am a someone reading a book about men in relationships with women. I am learning about shame. And I am so ashamed that I have something to learn. I thought things would be different. I was certain I would be.
****
If you’d like to respond, here are a couple of prompts to consider:
Is your emotional life shaped by fear or shame?
How have marriage and children changed what you know about yourself?
Are you the adult you expected to be? Why or Why not?
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
When I First Realized I Had Become a Grown-Up
It wasn’t the wedding or the hard fulfilling work of a marriage that ensued. Nor was it the purchase of our house and its mortgage. Not the escalating pressures of a demanding career, the births of either of our daughters, nor the moving of our life and belongings 600 miles south to another city. In fact, none of the usual rites of passage evoked from me anything more than a mere consciousness that the world saw me as an adult and I in turn “acted” in compliance – a boy successfully impersonating a man.
But in the last few days of 2008, while I struggled rather ineffectively to keep from drowning in a sea of exams to grade, I had my first epiphany that I could no longer “act.” It was the scariest and most expensive realization of my life, which formed in a hazy 2:00 AM confession to my wife on a Saturday and crystallized in the emergency room of Atlanta Medical Center an hour later and would continue to blind me over the next six months. For it was in that unfurling half-year that I realized that growing up for me was not the acquiring of responsibilities and trappings of adulthood. It was in the knowing that it all could be taken away from me, that I could lose, or more accurately, that I might inadvertently and carelessly discard the entire experience, joys and sorrows alike, all while “pretending” to be the adult at the center rather than being him, posing for rather than propelling the swirling world around me.
The confession that started it all is not a provocative one. It is instead that I had not been telling my wife about chest pains I was feeling for almost a week, since Christmas day. I was convinced that they were gas pains, brought on by the irregular eating schedule and diet of the holidays. But here I was, five days, and the pain seemed consistent and maybe even significant. I told her at two in the morning because I had been out until then grading exams. I am an English teacher at an academically rigorous prep school, and in my end-of-the-semester zealousness, I assigned too much work to grade over the winter break; in fact, I had 700 or so pages of writing to grade in that final week of vacation. I had been making decisions like that all semester - good for my classroom and bad for my family - and in that last week of 2008 and a few fresh days of 2009, I spent most of my waking hours grading and abandoning my family, eating poorly, not sleeping, and quietly stressing, creating the perfect loam for this persistent little seed of chest pain to take root and blossom into a flowering anxiety over possible heart attack.
I drove myself to the emergency room (another very bad decision), but when I got there, I suffered the beginning stages of something more severe than possible cardiac arrest, more life altering: a dawning panic that I might be leaving behind all that mattered most to me that night. This new consciousness descended upon me in two parts. The first part was fear: I wasn’t ready to go, I had just turned 34, and had things to do: a wife to love and partner with, children to love and nurture, a curse of paternal absenteeism to break, a creative dharma to live up to, and now all of this seemed to hang in the balance. No, I was not ready for it to be over. But the second part was overwhelming guilt; I had known for many years now that I had high cholesterol, and I never did anything to address it. And to be honest, it was this guilt that overwhelmed me in the moment, because if I left my life now, and extended the curse of a fatherless generation to my children, if I made a single mother of my wife, if I died a person of great potential who had accomplished little in his life to match that promise, then I would have done so because of my own carelessness and at the expense of the great sacrifices that were made for my very good life. My daughters, then 5 and 2, would one day realize that maybe their daddy didn’t have to die; instead he had irresponsibly defaulted on his loan to his body creditors who came to take back their temple. I couldn’t live with that, or rather I couldn't die with that. Luckily, a perfect EKG kept me from having to.
Two hours later, I left the emergency room with two things: a firm medical opinion that it was really just gas, discomfort brought on by undue stress and an understanding that I had to do things differently, that pretending to be the adult at the center of my life had not gotten the job done, a job I could too easily be fired from if I didn’t do it better. And now I would. Do it better. More important, I had realized that I had things in my life to lose, important things that while I had never really taken them for granted, I also never imagined that I could lose them, not anytime soon. And I was now determined not to lose them, not to carelessly discard them, not to deal with the threat of their loss in the talented slacker way I had dealt with most other perils.
It would be misleading to suggest that shortly after that moment I started acting like an adult. In fact, it would take me the next six months to begin figuring out what being an adult meant for me. I certainly focused on healthy living; I found a book that made sense to me and three months later I was about 20 pounds lighter and eating better than I ever had in my life; my cholesterol improved. But my wife and I were just beginning to address how my work life balance had been affecting the family and especially our relationship. I would need another three months to really hear what she was saying to me about my contribution to the custodial and managerial responsibilities of our life, to see the world in more adult terms than “at work I work, and at home I rest.” I am still working on that, but after reading select chapters from a book about the inequitable division of labor in marriages, I moved in a positive direction that has lightened the home load on my working wife and made me more of a partner in managing our home life. Not perfect, but improving. I am still figuring out how to make decisions that honor both my students and family in my classroom, but now I am ready to apply the lessons of early 2009 to 2010. I’ll know that I have learned something if in the next winter break I find myself in a different place than then.
However, it’s really not about my progress, is it? For the next 40 years or so I will get better at some things and worse at others. I’ll have blind spots and spotlights in my life until I die. But I am not merely reciting the lines anymore, no longer looking from an inner eye through an outer waiting for applause. I understand that the consequences of my decisions were never virtual. I am awake, now, and have been so for almost a year. But it took the threat of losing my life, for me to actively live for it.
That’s adulthood to me – intentionally living for the things you love, cognizant of the fact that it’s all too easy to lose them, cognizant of the fact that the things you want require your committing your life to them, cognizant of the fact that now you want to do the work even if there is no one there to make you do it. I think I’m grown now.
But in the last few days of 2008, while I struggled rather ineffectively to keep from drowning in a sea of exams to grade, I had my first epiphany that I could no longer “act.” It was the scariest and most expensive realization of my life, which formed in a hazy 2:00 AM confession to my wife on a Saturday and crystallized in the emergency room of Atlanta Medical Center an hour later and would continue to blind me over the next six months. For it was in that unfurling half-year that I realized that growing up for me was not the acquiring of responsibilities and trappings of adulthood. It was in the knowing that it all could be taken away from me, that I could lose, or more accurately, that I might inadvertently and carelessly discard the entire experience, joys and sorrows alike, all while “pretending” to be the adult at the center rather than being him, posing for rather than propelling the swirling world around me.
The confession that started it all is not a provocative one. It is instead that I had not been telling my wife about chest pains I was feeling for almost a week, since Christmas day. I was convinced that they were gas pains, brought on by the irregular eating schedule and diet of the holidays. But here I was, five days, and the pain seemed consistent and maybe even significant. I told her at two in the morning because I had been out until then grading exams. I am an English teacher at an academically rigorous prep school, and in my end-of-the-semester zealousness, I assigned too much work to grade over the winter break; in fact, I had 700 or so pages of writing to grade in that final week of vacation. I had been making decisions like that all semester - good for my classroom and bad for my family - and in that last week of 2008 and a few fresh days of 2009, I spent most of my waking hours grading and abandoning my family, eating poorly, not sleeping, and quietly stressing, creating the perfect loam for this persistent little seed of chest pain to take root and blossom into a flowering anxiety over possible heart attack.
I drove myself to the emergency room (another very bad decision), but when I got there, I suffered the beginning stages of something more severe than possible cardiac arrest, more life altering: a dawning panic that I might be leaving behind all that mattered most to me that night. This new consciousness descended upon me in two parts. The first part was fear: I wasn’t ready to go, I had just turned 34, and had things to do: a wife to love and partner with, children to love and nurture, a curse of paternal absenteeism to break, a creative dharma to live up to, and now all of this seemed to hang in the balance. No, I was not ready for it to be over. But the second part was overwhelming guilt; I had known for many years now that I had high cholesterol, and I never did anything to address it. And to be honest, it was this guilt that overwhelmed me in the moment, because if I left my life now, and extended the curse of a fatherless generation to my children, if I made a single mother of my wife, if I died a person of great potential who had accomplished little in his life to match that promise, then I would have done so because of my own carelessness and at the expense of the great sacrifices that were made for my very good life. My daughters, then 5 and 2, would one day realize that maybe their daddy didn’t have to die; instead he had irresponsibly defaulted on his loan to his body creditors who came to take back their temple. I couldn’t live with that, or rather I couldn't die with that. Luckily, a perfect EKG kept me from having to.
Two hours later, I left the emergency room with two things: a firm medical opinion that it was really just gas, discomfort brought on by undue stress and an understanding that I had to do things differently, that pretending to be the adult at the center of my life had not gotten the job done, a job I could too easily be fired from if I didn’t do it better. And now I would. Do it better. More important, I had realized that I had things in my life to lose, important things that while I had never really taken them for granted, I also never imagined that I could lose them, not anytime soon. And I was now determined not to lose them, not to carelessly discard them, not to deal with the threat of their loss in the talented slacker way I had dealt with most other perils.
It would be misleading to suggest that shortly after that moment I started acting like an adult. In fact, it would take me the next six months to begin figuring out what being an adult meant for me. I certainly focused on healthy living; I found a book that made sense to me and three months later I was about 20 pounds lighter and eating better than I ever had in my life; my cholesterol improved. But my wife and I were just beginning to address how my work life balance had been affecting the family and especially our relationship. I would need another three months to really hear what she was saying to me about my contribution to the custodial and managerial responsibilities of our life, to see the world in more adult terms than “at work I work, and at home I rest.” I am still working on that, but after reading select chapters from a book about the inequitable division of labor in marriages, I moved in a positive direction that has lightened the home load on my working wife and made me more of a partner in managing our home life. Not perfect, but improving. I am still figuring out how to make decisions that honor both my students and family in my classroom, but now I am ready to apply the lessons of early 2009 to 2010. I’ll know that I have learned something if in the next winter break I find myself in a different place than then.
However, it’s really not about my progress, is it? For the next 40 years or so I will get better at some things and worse at others. I’ll have blind spots and spotlights in my life until I die. But I am not merely reciting the lines anymore, no longer looking from an inner eye through an outer waiting for applause. I understand that the consequences of my decisions were never virtual. I am awake, now, and have been so for almost a year. But it took the threat of losing my life, for me to actively live for it.
That’s adulthood to me – intentionally living for the things you love, cognizant of the fact that it’s all too easy to lose them, cognizant of the fact that the things you want require your committing your life to them, cognizant of the fact that now you want to do the work even if there is no one there to make you do it. I think I’m grown now.
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