The advent of the first days of a new year can be as quotidian as the arrival of any others. Or, they can be full of significance, offering an opportunity for new beginnings. I like to think of them as an opportunity. The Latin phrase “carpe diem” comes to mind: seize the day. And that’s exactly what I intend to do. I have three New Year resolutions for 2012, one provoked by an evening with my dad and two the fruit of recent reading.
My wife and I are both self-employed. If you know anything about small businesses, you know owners often work around the clock. We are no exception, although most evenings our family does sit down at the table for dinner and a game of “high/low” (each person must share at least one high- and one low-point of their day).
A week or so before Christmas, my dad dropped by my family’s house to check up on his three injured/ailing grandchildren (broken leg, post-concussion syndrome, and heart monitor – yea, it’s been a rough month in my household). After a pleasant visit for an hour or so, I admit I was ready for him to go. I had plenty of work to do and was anxious to resume.
To my initial chagrin, he instead suggested we play dominoes – a proposition that was impossible to resist once the kids got wind of it. So we sat and played dominoes. And we played dominoes. And we played dominoes. And I had a blast sitting at the table playing such a simple game with my family.
While Christmas shopping a couple days later, I came across the section of board games and recalled that leisurely and delightful evening of dominoes. I decided on my first resolution then and there: regardless of looming work, my family will spend more time eating, talking and playing games around the table. Together.
My second resolution is also related to dads. I recently began reading a collection of essays by American novelist, Michael Chabon, titled Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. In his second essay, Charbon notes how convenient it is for men to historically have such a “pitifully low” standard for good fatherhood. After recounting an experience in a grocery store where a stranger praised him for being a good dad, presumably for merely having his son with him, he ponders what might merit comparable adulation for a mom. His guess: “perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child while simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks’ worth of healthy but appealing break-time snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr.”
A mother, Charbon goes on to observe, is not good or bad in a grocery store; she’s simply a mother doing her job. Moms change diapers, wipe noses, prepare meals, do the dishes, wash the laundry, make doctor and dentist appointments, shop for clothes, et al. Yet they are rarely ever praised for being good moms. “Good mothering,” he thus argues, “is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself.”
Although this has changed a bit in recent years (e.g. more dads are cooking and helping care for babies), a long-standing double standard remains. Charbon, however, is doing his part to buck it by working harder at being a good father than anything besides being a good husband. He concludes: “The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. . . . there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their [poop and pee], sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.” I’m with Charbon this year: I resolve to join him in bucking the double standard, to work harder at being a good father than anything besides being a good husband, to have the luxury of gleaning the intimacy that comes with helping carry my wife’s invisible lucky load.
While my second resolution may lead to less sleep, my third resolution almost certainly will. I have always been a night owl. As a toddler, my parents could never get me to sleep at a decent hour. They eventually caved and let me sit up with them watching Johnny Carson. By the second grade I had already started pulling all-nighters. My buddy and I would build a fort and, with flashlights in hand, we would read the night away.
Although mornings and I have never gotten along well, two poets have challenged me to make an attempt at waking up early this year. In his book, You Must Revise Your Life, Kansas poet William Stafford describes how his experience in an Arkansas camp for conscientious objectors helped him establish a pattern of waking early. Too tired to read at night after a long day of hard work, he and a few other objectors began rising at four A.M. to study and write. He has maintained that habit ever since and his explanation is simple: “That dawn time is precious: the world is quiet; no one will interrupt; you are rested and ready.”
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning poet Mary Oliver also embraces early mornings. Here’s what she says in “Why I Wake Early”, a poem I’m currently memorizing (I’ll sneak in a fourth resolution here: due to a flabby and ever-weakening memory muscle, I plan to memorize one poem a month):
“Hello, sun in my face. // Hello, you who make the morning // and spread it over the fields // and into the faces of tulips // and the nodding morning glories, // and into the windows of, even, the // miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was, // dear star, that just happens // to be where you are in the universe // to keep us from ever-darkness, // to ease us with warm touching, // to hold us in the great hands of light – // good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day // in happiness, in kindness.”
Stafford’s description of the early morning as an opportune time for uninterrupted work and Oliver’s ode to splendorous, sun-filled mornings have convinced me to rise before dawn, or at least to make an attempt this year.
My new year, then, seeks to be filled with table games, good fathering, and early mornings. May your new year be full of delightful leisure with friends and family and of days that begin in happiness and kindness! And for all you child-rearing parents, may it be full of the intimacy that comes with sharing the lucky load of raising those messy kiddos!
eighthdayinstitute.wordpress.com 