The Journal of Best Practices

by David Finch

  She went on to coach me a little bit about spending time with the kids, explaining something else seemingly obvious: that I’m the adult—the dad. “So, when the kids need something, you just need to get in, work it out, and move on to the next thing. That’s the initiative piece. The empathy component may come along, but only if you’re present. And you can only be present if you’re actively engaging with us.”

  Every morning for the next several weeks, I tried mastering a new routine that would allow Kristen plenty of time to get ready. Most mornings, she had at least thirty minutes to herself without interruption and I considered that a success. A half hour may sound like no great shakes, but compared to the amount of alone time I had been giving her—zero minutes—it was a considerable improvement. The end goal was being met, but there were significant problems. Without my normal morning routine, I had no idea how to get to work on time. Kristen encouraged me to multitask—to take a short shower while the kids played in our bedroom, for instance—but as someone who took sixty-minute showers, it was clear that I had a hard enough time single-tasking.

  I just couldn’t merge the kids into my morning routine. While their needs were every bit as urgent as mine, they seemed to operate with no sense of routine whatsoever. Parker would demand a bagel, Emily orange juice, and as I’d service one of those requests, Parker would insist that he wanted to go look inside the potty; Emily would then say that she had to go potty, so I’d tell Parker not to play in the bathroom until she was done, resulting in tears. A house full of toys and you need to play with a toilet? On her way to the bathroom, Emily would suddenly change her mind and demand a waffle and—in the same breath—ask for a change of clothes. “Is my waffle ready yet, Daddy? Can I go upstairs and pick out a dress?” Waffle? Dress? What happened to orange juice?! My God, can we just do one thing at a time?

  My approach to managing this insanity was to let it run its course and to try to remain calm long enough to get the kids over to Mary’s house. All I asked was that they give me enough time to chug a glass of water and take my medicine and vitamins. The remainder of my wake-up process could wait until they were next door.

  Mary opened her doors at eight thirty, and our kids were there—messy haired and oddly dressed—on the dot. This was one of the few things I could do punctually, though it was motivated purely by self-preservation; every minute the kids were home past eight thirty was another step closer to a daddy meltdown. By eight forty, my toast would be ready. By nine, I’d be heading for the shower. Somewhere around ten or ten thirty, I’d leave for work, and the hour commute got me to my desk by eleven thirty. Just in time to log in, review my e-mails, and then go to lunch—right on schedule.

  Clint called me into his office one afternoon and, in the most exasperated tone of voice I’d ever heard from him, asked me what the hell was going on.

  “I mean, seriously, dude,” he said, “I allow flexible hours, but this eleven thirty shit has to stop. It makes me look bad to my boss when he sees you rolling in so late.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain that I had willfully and radically rearranged my priorities and, as a consequence, no longer gave a damn about work. Sure, I was willing to maintain my Business-Man persona, but only in ways that suited me as a family man. “I’ll try to work it out so I get in sooner.”

  “Don’t try, idiot. Do. Ten o’clock. That’s the latest I want you coming in.”

  “Ten o’clock . . .” I shook my head and let out a long, contemplative sigh. I did the math, working backward from ten o’clock: Leave the house by nine. Kids over to Mary’s at eight thirty, which gives me only thirty minutes to eat, shower, and get dressed. That won’t work. The alternative is waking up earlier, like around six. No fucking way. “I don’t know if that’s going to work.”

  He laughed. “Ten o’clock. Make it happen.”

  I knew I couldn’t give him a plausible explanation for my eleven thirty start time. No one in the chain of command above me at work would care about my Best Practices. So, in the end, I lied. “Ten o’clock it is.”

  Chapter 11

  Be present in moments with the kids.

  My failure to establish an efficient morning routine with the kids was frustrating, but it seemed rather insignificant once I realized the reason behind it: I was failing as a father. I was by no means an abject failure—Emily and Parker were healthy, they never lacked for any material thing, they loved me, and they loved spending time with me—but I certainly wasn’t the father I wanted to be.

  I didn’t realize the extent of my shortcomings until after I assumed the responsibility of getting the kids ready in the mornings, and I could see, moment by moment, what a challenge it presented for me. I don’t presume that managing two spirited toddlers at breakfast is easy for anyone, but for me, it went much deeper: I wasn’t connecting with them at all. Some days, breakfast was the only time I got to see Emily and Parker, and—according to my brain—they weren’t my kids for that hour, they were my chores.

  In servicing Emily’s and Parker’s morning needs, I found it easiest to detach from them. I discouraged talking, and playing was out of the question. As I saw it, the task at hand was to feed them and get them out the door as quickly and painlessly as possible. By limiting my participation, morning moments became all about extinguishing fires: make the breakfast, change the diaper, interrupt the food fight. While the approach got me through an average morning without mishap, none of us were enjoying it very much. The most I could hope to extract from our mornings together, depressingly enough, was a sense of accomplishment in completing the daily exercise. That’s not being a dad. That’s being a babysitter. A bad one, at that.

  At 8:29, my patience fried, I’d bark at them: “Come here so I can put on your shoes. Emily, put that doll down. No, you can’t color a picture right now, we have to hurry. Emily, put the doll down and put on your shoes. Parker, put your pants back on. Emily, go stand by the door. Parker, sit down so I can put your shoes on. You guys aren’t listening, and I swear to God I’m going to start throwing toys away if that’s what it will take.”

  At 8:31, I’d kiss them both good-bye in Mary’s entryway, telling them that I loved them. (I hadn’t exactly shown the love all morning but hoped that a few words would let them know.) Parker would usually kiss me and run off to find a toy after telling me, “My muvvoo koo, Gaggy,” which meant, “I love you, too, Daddy.” Despite all of the barking and scolding and freaking out I’d subjected them to over the past hour in desperate attempts to keep them 100 percent under control, Emily would want me to pick her up and hold her. “Just a few more minutes, Daddy,” she’d whisper. I’d pick her up, squeezing her close. She’d wrap her arms and legs around me as far as she could stretch them, and suddenly, almost cruelly, I would become present. With her hair tickling my cheek, her body light in my arms, and her feet clinging to my sides, I would realize that I had wasted a perfectly good hour of bonding. Then in a whisper she’d tell me, “I don’t want you to go.”

  I wish I could be a better dad for you. “I don’t want to go either, sweetie,” I’d say over a lump in my throat. “But Daddy has to go to work now.”

  We’d stand in the entryway, swaying back and forth, each of us wishing that things could be different.

  After a couple of minutes, Mary would usually dream up some miraculous distraction—something she knew Emily loved to do, like painting a picture or helping her make fresh bread. Emily would slide down my stomach and legs to the floor. Taking Mary’s hand, she’d walk slowly, hesitantly, away.

  On the short walk back to our house, my emotions would spin out of control while my mind processed a single thought: I am not good enough for my children. Overwhelming guilt would become crushing sadness somewhere in Mary’s driveway. I am not good enough for my children. Sadness would turn into self-hatred somewhere in our driveway, which would soften to regret moments later. I am not good enough for my children. I would carry that regret around until I got home at
the end of the day; that’s when the kids would bombard me, tripping over themselves to give me hugs and ask me to play with them—a moment perfect for erasing guilt, perfect for redemption—only to hear me say that I just needed a few minutes alone to settle in first. “We’ll play later, okay?”

  Kristen and I had been married almost two years when she became pregnant with Emily. What should have been the most joyful and exciting time of our life became, for me, something new to worry about. Hooray, we’re having a baby! Wait, wait. What about our house? We can’t raise our baby in a town house—the walls are too thin. We’re going to need to build a new house for our baby. Our baby! Oh, shit, I don’t know how to be a dad! Dads are supposed to keep their cars clean! Dads are supposed to read the newspaper and know what’s going on in the world! Dads are supposed to know how to interact with children!

  Yet my car was a mess, like a teenager’s. I had never once read a newspaper, although it wasn’t for lack of trying—in my handful of attempts, I’d gotten distracted by the texture of the paper. The last thought—Dads are supposed to know how to interact with children!—troubled me the most. At that point in our lives, my experiences with young children hadn’t been the greatest. Once when I was a teenager I fell asleep—stone-cold asleep—while babysitting an eighteen-month-old for some friends of my parents. I woke up when they returned home; the air in the family room was thick with the singular scent of fully loaded diaper. Contrary to my parents’ assessment, being exceptionally good at math does not a babysitter make. Lesson learned. I also had a few younger cousins—very sweet kids—who would have been fun to play with had I any idea what to do with them. Technically I was the closest to them in age, which qualified me as someone who should have known how to play with them. I didn’t. Maybe they’d like to roughhouse, I’d think, lowering myself to the floor and encouraging them to stomp on my face until supper was ready.

  My record as an adult wasn’t so good, either. I had been told that my first niece, who had just begun to walk, “love-love-loved” being surprised. “Stand behind the wall by the stairs,” my brother told me. “When she comes around the corner, jump out and surprise her. It’s the cutest thing.” It seemed everyone else had a comparatively tame interpretation of the phrase “jump out and surprise her.” Thirty seconds later, Kristen, my brother, and my sister-in-law watched in horror as my niece rounded the corner and I pounced, screaming at the top of my lungs and fluttering my hands in her face. She didn’t seem to love-love-love it.

  Despite the fact that I couldn’t handle spending time around anyone else’s youngsters, I always wanted kids of my own. I didn’t understand what that really meant, of course. I doubt if anyone does. Like almost anything real life has to offer, I assumed parenthood amounted to the stuff I saw happening in sitcoms and movies—two young parents swoon over their cooing infant; years later they’re skipping through a zoo holding hands as a family; invaluable life lessons are imparted moments before the limo arrives on prom night; flash forward to the eldest child returning home from college abroad, a little surprise visit to the graying parents who still have time and energy for a quick game of horse in the driveway, just like old times.

  Before we became parents, I had myself pegged as a regular Cosby Show–certified family man—wise, good-humored, nothing if not perfectly qualified to raise children. Discipline would come naturally, and I’d know how to tie knots. Family moments would be something to treasure, rich, no doubt, with a spirit of joy and affection. Nothing would be more fulfilling than . . . oh hell, I didn’t know . . . doing whatever it was people did with kids.

  Three years into fatherhood, my time with Emily and Parker had begun to feel empty. I loved them, but I wasn’t loving time spent with them. I understood that I was supposed to react to key defining moments in their development—lying with Parker for the first time in his new bigkid bed, Emily’s first preschool recital. I understood the significance of those moments, and I recorded them in my memory. But I didn’t feel as much as I thought I should.

  I hadn’t always felt so disconnected. I knew how to spend time with Emily and Parker when they were babies; with babies, it’s impossible not to feel precisely whatever the moment creates. I felt satisfied holding them or plopping down with them on a blanket in the soft grass, their sweetly scented heads protected from the sun by oversized bonnets. I loved tickling their irresistible, round tummies and watching them figure out how to lift their heads up, how to roll themselves over, how to crawl, and finally, how to stand up and walk.

  But standing on their own, Emily and Parker became individuals. They started forming opinions. They learned how to engage with us, how to ask for things they couldn’t have and how to refuse things they needed. They started inventing their own games with confusing, insane rules (“Daddy, you hold this crown. Parker, you go inside the refrigerator and hand me food. When I say ‘stop,’ we all clap, and the first one who hops the longest wins the biggest fork ever”). They even started creating their own versions of familiar games, oblivious to the traditional rules. We would play hide-and-seek, for instance, and as soon as I’d count to ten and begin my search, Emily would leap out from behind a wall and tag me, declaring me “it,” while Parker would call from the other room, “I’m in the playhouse!” When I’d try explaining the rules for the umpteenth time, they would become antsy and suggest a new game to play, at which point I’d get annoyed and find some reason to excuse myself. “I’d better go fold that laundry now. You kids play.”

  Kristen sometimes watched from the sidelines, confounded by my inability to participate. She told me that I seemed checked-out, that I was missing too much. During our performance review, she told me that as the kids got older, the opportunities to spend time with them would change and diminish. “We’ll never have this period of their lives back, Dave. For your own sake, I wish you could engage with them and get something out of it.”

  While I knew what parenthood was supposed to look like, I didn’t know what I was supposed to extract from the time spent with our kids. Should I be seeking a sense of pride in educating them, or a sense of decency in raising them to value discipline and courtesy, or what? I discussed this one day with Kristen, and she responded, “They’re only this age once. Yes, we need to teach them things, and yes, we need to keep them disciplined. But if you’re wondering what it is you should be extracting from your moments with them, it’s joy. Period.”

  I began looking for the joy and was disappointed—a little troubled, actually—when I couldn’t find it. What I did find was that Kristen’s assessment had been perfectly accurate: I may have occupied the same space as Emily and Parker, but I wasn’t present. My mind was often somewhere else when I was with them, so I started following where it went. Sometimes, I was preoccupied with whatever we were playing, wondering how I could make it better or more efficient. I wasn’t thinking about making the experience better, just analyzing the circumstances: This tower of blocks would be more sturdy if we used a wider base and cantilevered those upper terraces. We’ll have to reconstruct it, and maybe when we do, I can use the colors to teach them about groups and patterns. I should videotape this. But first I need to get a blanket to sit on, this floor is so hard.

  Most often I was thinking about other things I could have been doing, such as mowing the lawn or relaxing in front of the television. Kristen would sometimes have to remind me that I was supposed to be playing.

  “Parker has been asking you over and over to help him rebuild his tower. Don’t you hear him?”

  I would admit that, no, I hadn’t heard him, that I had drifted away to my own little world, and then I’d log it in my journal: When building towers, figuring out the best and worst things to say to pregnant women can wait. Pay attention!

  Understanding where my focus went was helpful, but I didn’t know what to do next, so I asked Kristen to help me flesh out a strategy for more meaningful involvement. She didn’t feel that was necessary. “There’s no trick to enjoying your time with t
he kids, Dave. It’s not a process. Just be present. I don’t know how else to say it.”

  I wrote her advice down on a Post-it note—Be present in moments with the kids—and stuck it to our kitchen counter. I had written those words maybe a dozen times since our performance review and still they hadn’t sunk in. All I could think was, How? I couldn’t ask Kristen to explain it. How would a neurotypical go about explaining something as elemental as engaging with the outside world? It would be like me telling her, “Go solve some differential equations.” Her brain just doesn’t work that way.

  I spent weeks trying to force myself to be present with nothing to show for it. Then one day in the spring, I was outside on our patio watching Emily and Parker hunt for worms in our flower beds in their old Halloween costumes. Emily was a cow and Parker a lobster—surf ’n’ turf. They would find a fat night crawler and take turns holding it and squealing with delight before running to the swing set to give the worm a ride. After about a minute, on Emily’s command, Parker would turn the worm loose and they’d run back to the flower beds to find another one.

  It was a beautiful, quiet day. The daffodils that lined the curved seating wall of our patio were in bloom, and the flowering dogwoods we had planted the previous year were starting to fill out, their leaves lending a soft voice to the breeze. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and it finally hit me: If you want to be present, just be present. You can’t force it. You can’t overthink it. Insisting on being present, in and of itself, detaches a person from a moment. By making a conscious effort to engage and connect, you end up thinking rather than feeling, and you miss the moment completely. Nothing numbs feelings like thoughts.