It has been three full months since this school year began.
I hear stories of my fellow teachers around the country pulling out their hair, claiming the students post-pandemic are “feral” in misbehavior and way behind in their studies. Some schools seem to be out of control. Teachers are fed up and quitting mid-year. Most schools can’t seem to find bus drivers or substitute teachers or cafeteria workers. The educational system struggles to recover from the COVID crisis which began in March 2020, the same as the economy overall and other industries individually.
I am lucky to be in a school mostly insulated from all this. I have been THRILLED to be back in the classroom (even with the nagging nuisance of having to wear a facemask and trying to talk through it all day long). I watch my students sweat to write essays I assign them — thinking DEEPLY, struggling to make their thoughts INTELLIGIBLE and INSIGHTFUL on some important topic — and I am profoundly pleased, in a way I never was during online “distance learning.” Students and teachers are back: we are applying ourselves in 2021, teaching and learning in earnest — at least at my school.
But the country, and the world, struggles still.
It makes me reflect on being in charge — in being a dad. Especially when things don’t go well.
Children often think their parents have it all figured out. No matter what the challenge at hand might have been, my parents had it under control. Or at least that is how it seemed to me when I was growing up.
I have since learned that parents are often faking it. They don’t always know the right steps to take in facing some dilemma or confronting a challenge. That is the hard part of parenting: too often it is not clear what to do. You struggle; you make a choice. You process it with your head, and then you make a gut decision. You do what you think is best. You are unsure exactly what that is. The complexity and confusion appears endless. The best path forward is far from clear.
But you pretend with your kids. You never let them see you sweat. You appear as if you know what you are doing, and you “fake it until you make it.”
As a father, I think that is a good policy.
If your kids see you struggling and beginning to fail, the ground begins to shift under their feet. They look to you for safety and security. You have to be strong enough to carry them, even if you can (at times) hardly carry your own weight. So keep your struggles to yourself.
My younger daughter is terrified to see me cry. Sometimes she looks up at me with a look of semi-panic in her eyes and asks, “Are you crying?” She wants the answer to be, “No.” The idea of her father crying threatens her somewhere deep down. Maybe it goes back years ago when she was barely four years old and my good friend Chris was killed. She saw me cry plenty then, and I have no apologies. If at such a time crying is inappropriate, when is it ever appropriate? I tell her as much.
But she insists. She does not want to see me cry. Period. She doesn’t like it. It makes her feel nervous, unsettled.
I get it.
She has not seen me cry for several years.
I am her rock. I am a “safe space.” I get it. If the world can be a scary place, and my daughter knows this, it is safe at home. With her parents. Nobody is crying. Well, at least her dad is not crying.
But the reality is I often don’t really know what I am doing as a father. I am faking it. I struggle as to how to deal with many aspects of raising my daughters. What to do is unclear. And there are the unknowns. Will I get sick? Cancer or whatever? Maybe I might die? Will my daughters or wife get sick? Get hit by a drunk driver on the roads? Encounter some serial killer or prolific rapist or God knows what? Such a case is unlikely, but a father worries. “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune,” Sir Francis Bacon claims. The dad is in charge. There is no end to what one might worry about.
I don’t know. Past a point you can be like a cat chasing its own tail.
Past a certain point I let it go.
As a father I can struggle. I don’t have parenting figured out, for sure. Does anyone?
But as a man I do know who I am; that does not change. I am not one thing today, something else tomorrow. I am comfortable in my skin; I am stable. I am a constant loving presence in the lives of my daughters, as much as I can. They know I will be there for them, no matter what.
And that is enough.
Or so I will hope.
Because parenting has a way of humbling a person.
As does life generally.
It can beat you down. You won’t even see it coming.
So I scan the horizon for threats.
Is there danger approaching that I don’t see? Danger for myself? Or for my wife or daughters? For all of us?
I don’t know.
We shall see.
I am wary.
I’m in charge. I’m the father. So I’m in control — supposedly.
But there is so much I don’t control — can’t control.
May God protect me and my own.
And let misfortune pass us by.
Amen.
Sir Francis Bacon
