The Story of a Father’s Love: Reflections on Fatherhood and Family

The driveway, it is finished.

They set forms Monday, then poured the driveway Tuesday. The contractor originally planned to pour the upper half Tuesday and the lower half on Wednesday. They finished the upper half faster than they expected though, and he was able to get a second truck that afternoon, so they went for it.

I stood on the parking pad Tuesday evening, just soaking the whole thing in, and I finally realized how big that area is. I knew it was big, because we’ve got room to park about a dozen cars there. But seeing all that concrete really brought it into focus.

Grandson loves it. He had one of his remote-control cars out Monday, just zooming it all over the place. He likes riding his bike out there too. We just need to watch him at the top so he doesn’t go flying down the driveway into the road.

The contractor has a pile of asphalt debris to pick up, and we’ve got a bunch of dirt to spread around the edges, but this project is basically done.

I think the next thing will be working on the landscaping in front of the house. I’ve got to be careful in the planning stage though because I can easily see executive dysfunction bringing me to a grinding halt.  

Food, Glorious Food

We’re about a week into Youngest Daughter’s elimination diet. I’m super proud of the way she’s handling it. Cutting out chocolate, even for just three weeks or so, is a huge thing for her, but she’s doing really well with it.

For several years, we’ve made our menu up in advance. It makes meal planning and grocery shopping a lot easier and saves money too. We’ve worked up to shopping a month at a time these days, but it means we’d already bought stuff for meals that Youngest Daughter can’t have now, like tomato sauce and pasta. So back to Walmart we went. Wednesday night we were having French toast, so I made it with egg whites and milk (and cinnamon and nutmeg). Thursday night for our pasta meal, we ended up with yolkless noodles and Primal Kitchen’s No-Dairy Garlic Alfredo Sauce. That was pretty tasty, with an almost sweet tang to it.

It took a little bit of effort to find eggless sauces. Quite a few seemed to have “enzyme modified egg yolks,” which looks like it’s just a modification to make them less prone to separation. I was prepared to make my own alfredo sauce, but since we found the Primal Kitchen product, we went with that. I’m lazy. It’s pretty pricey though, at $6.99 for a 15-ounce jar at Wally World. That’s better than double the cost for something like Prego’s Alfredo sauce, but the Prego has the modified egg yolks. I’ll probably start making my own.

And very soon I’ll be playing around with my new grill. The church is planning on having a picnic for Easter and needed a grill. I’d mentioned to Diana that I wanted to start grilling more, so we picked up an Oklahoma Joe (by CharBroil) Longhorn smoker/grill a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got a couple of grilled meals on the menu this month though they’re nothing too fancy. I’m hoping to get some smoking done in May. Suggestions are welcome for good tutorials on smoking foods.

What’s In A Word?

I came across a headline Tuesday that grabbed my attention, and not in a good way.

Former Wausau priest sentenced to three years for child porn

“Child pornography” is an absolute misnomer. It’s like “child prostitute.” There’s no such thing. Children below a certain age can’t consent to sex, so they can hardly be expected to consent to having the acts filmed. Calling erotic imagery “pornography” conveys a certain legitimacy despite the controversy involving the basic idea behind pornography. But there’s nothing at all legitimate about images of children being sexually assaulted. “Child sexual abuse imagery/material” is a better choice, I think, because it reminds people that every picture they’re seeing involves a child being abused.

And I get that it’s a soapbox kind of thing here. I’m the same way about “shooter” though. I’d like to see journalists start saying “attacker” in place of it. It shifts the emphasis from the thing used to the action. We don’t say “stabber” or “knifer” or “beater,” so why do we focus on the tool when it’s a gun?  

Fathering

Oldest Son got his copy of the Storyworth book on Wednesday—a week early—and immediately started reading it, and immediately got emotional. Right as I was finishing up my stories, I heard Harry Chapin’s The Cat’s In The Cradle. That song has always resonated with me. I remember saying when I first heard the song that I’d never be that dad, that I’d always make time for my kids so that what happened to the dad in the last verse wouldn’t happen to me. So I riffed on that for a few hundred words, and that’s the piece I put at the beginning of the stories. He texted me right after he started reading saying he wasn’t ready for that.

This project has made me reflect on the kind of father I’ve been compared to the father I had and the father I should have been.

I loved my dad. Really. He was pretty good at what he did, too. But he didn’t have a father for a good part of his childhood. He had uncles and cousins and brothers, sure. His dad died when he was 7. He didn’t have someone who was always there for him, so I think there were a lot of times with me and Uncle Hal when he didn’t know what to do and didn’t really have someone he could ask for help from.

So Dad seemed distant a lot of the time. I’m coming to think that apparent distance was mostly based on his having almost no example of what to do, of how to be a dad.

Dad left in the morning to teach, then came home and had a couple of drinks. Then we had supper and he headed off to his study to do…whatever it was that he did there. I didn’t know much of what he did because his study was his sanctum sanctorum. I rarely went in there when I was young because I wasn’t supposed to disturb him. He was doing Big Important Stuff then. The reality was that he was working on genealogy research, or writing music, or getting ready for his lectures the next day, but I didn’t understand that as a little kid.

That was the only example I had, though.

I think, despite that and despite my own weaknesses, my kids turned out pretty okay.

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