Daddy Blog (8/29/11)

Making the Most of This Day

By: Danny Thomas

Making the most of this day.

The to-do list…

At the top is always my children

But it seems like every thing on the list,

That gets put off,

Pushed back or set behind

Is ultimately for them, too

Or for the family.

Laundry, housework, tidying…

Cleaning the bathrooms.

Hanging the curtains,

or the pictures that have been sitting long enough

in the hallway that I don’t even see them there

anymore.

Mowing the lawn

The list goes on…

and on…

Here’s the thing:

I want to delight in the joy of their childhood,

I want them to delight in it, to shine…

I don’t want to spend the days we have together

Finding ways to distract them or

keep them occupied

So I can “get things done”

I want to build things with Legos.

Make Art.

Race slot cars.

Go on bike rides.

Dance.

I want to bake cookies

Keep a balanced diet and a balanced budget.

Exercise.

And have a clean and stylish house

A decent lawn.

And a healthy family.

I also want time for my creative life; playing music, working in theatre, reading and writing.

And I want my children to do all those things

With me and on their own.

And I haven’t figured out yet

I guess,

How to balance both…

I find I feel like I’m always putting one aside for the other.

I tell myself this is the path to balance,

I wonder how I can be sure I’m making the most of each day.

Daddy Blog (8/17/11)

The More Things Change

By: Danny Thomas

Transience

Probably my favorite subject…

Bittersweet impermanence…

Love.

Loss.

Learning.

Changes.

I think there is something of a march to it, time.

But it meanders too, like a stream, or a cumulonimbus…

or a thought.

At times, maybe most of the time, it seems to go in all directions at once.

I returned home to a house we’ve lived in for less than a month,

After a two-week trip to the Pacific Northwest

And felt a strange mixture of emotions when I realized I was glad to be home…

and what that meant

now that home is here, in Moorhead, Minnesota

and not

The Pacific Northwest.

But it was a solid glad, an it-feels-good-to-be-breathing-this-air kind of glad to be home, an I-really-enjoy-the-look-and-feel-of-this-topography-and-I-recognize-it-and-feel-a-place-here kind of glad.

And that didn’t feel altogether good,

Because, up until that moment, there was really only one place that I felt that kind of glad to be home.

Man it’s hard.

Bear in mind that I was at the tail end of, like, a ten-hour travel day that included driving, flying, crossing at least one time zone, and more than a handful of meltdowns… also a very tall mojito…

So my mental state was one prone to a little philosophical, existential pondering.

(The trip was amazing and exhausting and heartbreaking and exhilarating)

Being with friends and family brought joy beyond description, meeting new people, new amazing families brought the thrill of adventure and the delight of new experiences…

I was sad about not getting to see some of my friends in Seattle and Eugene.

I was sad about saying good bye to the people I did see.

I was sad because, from now on, and for several years past,
Whenever I go back, to visit places I’ve lived…

Everything is or will be different.

Enough is the same that I am lulled into a sense of relief, comforted…

But then

I start to realize, I am not reassured

Entirely.

This sense that the footing is unsure, that what was is gone…

Well it’s just there.

It’s in among all the familiar comforts.

I had a thought today as my girl played for the first time in the neighbors’ pool supervised only by a pair of teenage girls among a family dynamic that is, in countless ways, foreign from our own.

The thought was this: losing one’s innocence, while it may be perpetual, is trifling when compared with the sting of seeing your children lose theirs.

Daddy Blog (8/3/11)

A Family Vacation

By: Danny Thomas

I am writing this blog on the 6^th day of a 14-day family vacation.

I spent most of July packing and moving our family across town… and finished that project just in time to pack and load our family into a car for a 4-hour drive to Minneapolis. Then loaded them all onto a plane for a 3-hour flight and another 5-hour drive from Seattle to Eugene, Oregon. Tomorrow we drive back to Seattle.

I feel like every part of this vacation, literally moment by moment, has been a profusion of mixed blessings…

We have experienced so much fortune, so much joy in our togetherness, and so much kindness and generosity from the friends and loved ones we’ve been able to visit…

We have also driven each other batty and tested the limits of each other’s patience and flexibility, and we are not even half way!

The visit to Eugene has been bittersweet; we lived here for seven years, had two kids here, bought a house, built some incredible relationships and friendships, and laid down a lot of roots – revisiting that is hard for a number of reasons, we can’t recapture it, none of us wants to leave, and yet we feel solidly that we have moved on… that we have made a home in our new place – we feel comfortable and happy in Fargo-Moorhead.

There is no way to do all the things we want to do, or see all the people we want to see in the time we have here. I know many many people who, when returning to a past home, have experienced this very same thing.

I am trying to figure out what to learn from this, what to take away…

One of the themes, for me, of parenting, of life, has been the idea of adjusted expectations, I’ve written about it before – heck, in some ways I’m writing about it all the time.

Vacation with a family is, in many ways, hyper-family time, and for those of us stay at home parents it is not a break, per se. So it becomes an incredible exercise in adjusted expectations.

If you think of vacation as time with your feet up, or lying poolside sipping margaritas, or even hiking through the woods restoring your mind and soul, communing with nature and exploring… well all of those things can happen on a family vacation, but family vacation is different from that.

And once again I find myself thinking of my parents and my experiences growing up and, once again my respect and admiration for them grows exponentially, along with my gratitude for the experiences they provided for my brother and me.