Balance, Baby

Some Parenting Thoughts

Tonight, Tito stepped off the back porch into thin air, his hand reaching out for mine as he went. He didn’t check to see if I’d noticed, didn’t slow down to make sure I’d actually help him, the kid just went. Such a tiny huge thing, safety, faith. The certainty that a bigger hand will be there to make sure you come in for a gentle landing on the far side of that gigantic, somehow unintimidating drop.

I thought, in that moment, about what a wild and impossible thing it is, to parent. To carry the joy and responsibility of that trust, knowing that certainly, one day, you won’t be there when they reach out, and praying that the fall won’t be too far when that day arrives, that you’ll have prepared them enough, that the world will spin gently for just that moment. Every day is a prayer, met by a fear, met by a flash of faith, a glint of despair. Every hour, really.

People always say — it goes so fast. The constant refrain. The truth is, when it’s over, it went fast. Everything is a blur in the rearview mirror.  But when you’re in it, the single span from sunrise to sunset, wake up to collapse, feels like at least a half-dozen years.  

I’ve lived an amazing life. I biked from Boston to New York! Almost got runover by street cars delivering messages in San Francisco! Documented migrant abuses at the Tijuana border crossing! Brought more people back to life than I can count on both hands! Other shit I can’t even remember right now! And I wrote twenty books!

But nothing I’ve done even comes close to the badassness of being a parent. It is the most challenging, thrilling, intense, ridiculous, wild ride I’ve ever been on and it’s only just begun. (And to be clear, by parenting here I mean raising a child, not donating sperm to the creation of one.) Now that I’m in it, it’s wild to look at the very obviously false notion that family life is somehow boring. Yes, we aim for some sense of routine, but that’s not out of desperate suburban fever dream of conforming — that’s just to offset the absolute chaos inherent to a growing child.

Routines, when done right, are about balance, not uniformity.

When I was a medic, the protocols used to grate on me — the notion that something as unwieldy and unpredictable as a gunshot or a heart attack could be squeezed into a two page set of guidelines that you can memorize and apply — it felt wrong. And in some ways, it is wrong, but those protocols work best when used as jumping off points, a structure to build from, not the end all be all of treatment (much like an outline, writers!). The simplicity of protocols balances the total batshittery of acute disease and trauma. And, used right, with flexibility and intelligence, they work.

But of course, notions like these — what society deems exciting, adventurous, brave, and what it chides as routine, boring, dull — don’t fall from the sky. Patriarchy loves to shove a whole world of work into small tidy boxes labeled “women’s” and walk away. It helps control and confine, having such simple binaries. Domestic life, these cheap, lazy narratives tell us again and again, is settling, is boring, is giving up, is conforming. I guess a much more exciting, masculine, adventurous path would be joining the army, where no one tells you what to do and you can dress however you want? Or being in some kind of corporate jet setting scenario — where you get to make all the rules and go wild? Make it make sense.

No matter what, growing up involves balance, routine, chaos, adventure. We are constantly negotiating them, and even more so when we do it in community, in connectivity, with one another. That is the essence of family life, be it found or fertilized (ha!).

Tonight, I reached back, caught Tito’s little hand in mine, and helped him to a gentle landing in the backyard. Another tiny gigantic crisis averted, another day another prayer another flash of faith and fear as we strive endlessly, hopelessly, joyfully, toward balance.