Back? to Normal

I haven't published since June 15 which is unsurprising considering that the apartment building caught fire on June 27.

That's right my devoted reader(s), the apartment building in which I lived caught fire.  Dashing through choking, blinding smoke while bear-hugging my infant son was not something I could have foreseen.  Still, that was almost a month ago and, after living out of a hotel for a week and then moving all of our undamaged goods, well, I think life is settling out again; though we had a flash flood in the parking lot at our new apartment and our cars were both water damaged for awhile.

So really, there is no normal simply because there is no way to average out the collected experience of each human life.  There is no normal, not because Angus said so (though he was right there, too) but because even though we hold so much in common we still experience life so differently, even from our neighbors and those closest to us.

In a little more than a month I begin graduate school at East Carolina.  I'll be working on this. 

Is that normal?  It probably is for me. 

I'm not saying anything new here and, to be sure, I don't think I've ever used this blog to break open new philosophical possibilities. Most of us can parrot (not to diminish our belief, though) that everyone is different.  It's a sort of existential libertarianism that's incredibly common in our American life and, I would hope, to life worldwide.

For me the apartment fire was red letter.  For State Farm it's just another claim to be dealt with quickly.  For people living nearby it was rubberneck worthy.  For my extended family is was likely even more frightening than it was for me and, for billions of others, it was a non-event.

What's universal (though not necessarily normal) is that everything and nothing can be both small and large.  People can hold things in common and apart.  Our lives intersect with other lives and with everything and yet we live apart.  Most of this normalcy requires no work and exists simply by virtue of our being.

But that's normal, I suppose, and I'll slip back into that until something else dislodges me.

Twenty Seven

We spent the day wandering the city.

Oliver fell asleep on my chest as Becky tried on clothes at The Limited.

Men discretely (so they thought) ogled my wife as we walked through the mall.

We ate at Panera.  Becky feasted on her usual.  Her currently red hair blew across her face in the parking lot.  Oliver's hair stood on end in the stiff breeze.

Our hands touched and our shoulders touched, my eyes consistently sought hers or those of our son.  Familiarity outside - even though we were surrounded by everything else.

She was born twenty seven years ago.  Her parents were frightened teenagers or even smaller, even more afraid, being where they were and so far away from home.

Oliver made eyes at people, watched people, all from the safety of our arms.

He won't say "mama" when Becky is around but only when he thinks that she's left the room or the apartment.  Becky has been lucky enough to catch him a few times when his back has been turned.

The young woman at Sephora apologized over and over for the fact that the story did not have birthday gifts in stock; her words were self-devouring shoelaces.

Even though we've been together for some time now I am still capable of gazing at her when she suspects nothing - her green eyes hiding out behind the rounded vogue of her eyeglasses.

Everything that's close is beautiful.

I wrote in each of the books I bought for her.  Gift notes of my hopes.  They are various promises - all of them waiting for her acknowledgement and her eyes.

Happy birthday, Becky.

High School and Huxley

I read constantly as a young boy and all the way through adolescence - encyclopedias, fiction, even a bit of poetry - I was an avid writer as well.  I spent a good deal of time in the middle school library, checking out books of ghost stories, historical fiction, etc.

Yet, teenagehood being what it often is, I lost interest in reading and mired in video games (not that video games are bad, I love them still) and depression - though I still continued to write.  I could not, at the time nor later in life, understand the idea that being a teenager was meant to be the best period in one's life.  The notion still riles me and engenders in me nothing but disdain for its falseness.

A combination of neurological and situational maladies contributed to my deep melancholia and I still have that melancholy disposition to this day, though it is more now a permanent piece of my personality than an impediment to general happiness.

This Is Family

The stillness of morning in Fayetteville.  Our waking, or at least mine, is  due to the increasingly excited grunting of a seven-month-old.  His eyes startle me for a moment with their blueness, something he inherited neither from myself nor my wife.

At 1:00am he had awoken and I'd brought him to our bed to nurse.  We fell asleep before he finished and so he ended up spending the night with us - something I'd figured was going to happen.  I was too tired to take him back to his room, anyway.

So upon my waking at 7:30am there he is: sitting upright with his mother's help, gazing around, smiling, and making small consonant sounds to the morning.

My wife is overtired from weeks of long hours at work and I no longer have moments when I do not smell baby poop - the scent is glued to the sensory receptors in my brain so that, whenever my wife asks me if I smell something in particular I can only reply, "Poop?  I only smell poop."

And I love it.

Becky's Quirks & Quazy Qualities

There are quirks that are endearing and quirks that are forced and not at all endearing.  Becky's are sincerely endearing.  There is a uniqueness to her person that is not created by an effort of will but a soft, gentle honesty.  This posting will be in list-form and will be about a person who exists in my personal life where, outside of that life, she exists as a professor, friend, and family member.  She's always first in my life.

• she craves asparagus.
• she loves Def Leppard and Journey in the way that a preteen loves Justin Bieber.  It is not nostalgia but pure ecstatic joy.
• she adores fairies - figurines, paintings, and murmurs of the little creatures exist all over our home.
• she has seen a fairy.
• she has filled over 100 personal journals since she was 16.
• as a child she spent her nights swooning to a cassette tape of Michael Crawford as the Phantom of the Opera.  At other times, she spent her nights swooning to "Mr. Roboto".
• she wrote and directed plays as a child, most of which starred her friends and were videotaped by her father.
• she was an award-winning Irish step dancer.
• when a preteen she spent a summer day reading "The Phantom of the Opera" and, without noticing the passing of time, earned a massively miserable sunburn.
• her veins flow with the steady bubbling of Dr. Pepper.
• she has the constitution of a character in a Jane Austen novel.
• her belief does not fail - and in this life that is a quirk.
• she remembers meeting Dennis DeYoung and also remembers the fact that he was eating a candy bar when they met.
• she was born in Tennessee but has the accent (or lack thereof) of a newscaster.
• her celebrity crushes are usually men who are far too old for her (i.e. Kevin Kline, Kevin Spacey, etc.)
• she cannot pronounce the word giraffe.
• she loves me.

Ten Years Gone

Becky has begun reading the novel What Alice Forgot, the story of a woman who suffers a concussion while exercising at her gym and, upon waking, has forgotten the past 10 years of her life.  She awakens in the mindset of who she was 10 years prior - newlywed, pregnant for the first time, and hopeful about the future.  As she begins to explore the world around her she finds herself in the middle of a divorce and bearing a C-Section scar.

This has led both of us to wonder what we would think if, upon waking here in the apartment, we'd forgotten the past 10 years of life.  

Southern Ruin: A Photo Post

In the weeks preceding the birth of my son I began traveling with my wife each day to the college at which she teaches so that, in case she went into labor, I would be with her to take her to the hospital.  I was no longer employed as a high school teacher and was able to be as flexible and as available as she needed me to be.

Though I spent some of my time on the campus milking the open wireless network and researching genealogy I felt a need to go explore some of the surrounding countryside of Bladen County, where the college is located.

I am a North Carolina native.  Six of my direct ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War along with at least six great-grand uncles.  My mother's family hails from Aiken County, South Carolina and my father's from Stokes and Surry Counties in North Carolina.  Add to my heritage the fact that I am also a far left-leaning liberal, an agnostic-atheist, etc, and you have with me, like with much of the South, a quiet mess of contradictions.

Still, I make no secret of the fact that I have a particular and irrational love for the South, similar perhaps to the way someone might love a stray mutt - a mutt who may howl, scratch itself obscenely, and be rather a nuisance but a mutt who is also comfort and a symbol of home, even a symbol of one's own true self, if thoughts are allowed to wander so far.

In any case, and before I wander too far into the absurd intricacies and fallacies of at once hesitant and strong regional devotion, here are photographs I took as I traveled around Bladen County, North Carolina.  These are the scenes which struck me most:

Naming

For our son, the middle name of Eliot had long been chosen.  My wife and I may have even plucked this name from as early a time as our last year of college.  We'd had no definite plans of children then and, in fact, we'd only just been married during the spring semester of our senior year - but we both agreed that, should the opportunity arise, this name was wholly agreeable, great even.  I chose the spelling.

For quite some time we had liked the first name Byron, mostly as a literary nod though neither of us, while not opposed to Lord Byron, were not tremendous fans.  For quite some time Byron Eliot seemed like a foregone conclusion.

To be honest I've never truly liked my own first name - Joshua.  During the 1980s and up through this year the name Joshua has remained fairly popular.  I was born in 1985, however, when it would seem the name reached a peak.  I can still remember elementary school and how the teacher would call out the name and several boys would all answer.  Add to that the fact that the namesake was of one of the worst of butchers to be found in the Bible and my lack of enthusiasm should be, if not understandable, at least justifiable.

The Magic in My Life

“Better than a thousand hollow words

Is one word that brings peace.”

~ Dhammapada, The Sayings of the Buddha

- Oliver affirms life – not because he looks like me but because he's my son and because, through the fact of his existence, he's an affirmation that I can create and create on a heart's scale and more, as opposed to the simplicity of destruction with which I often felt more at ease.
- José Saramago's novels exist.

- Becky “took away all of my reasons not to care” in ways both practical and invisible.

- There are roughly seven billion people on this planet.

- As I write this, I am sitting on a bed on the second floor of a building. That building sits upon a tiny round rock that is currently hurtling around a medium-size plasma orb at 67,000mph. That orb of plasma is currently traveling through an interstellar cloud it entered roughly 44,000 to 150,000 years ago. I could go on about our location within the Orion Spiral Arm in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars – but let's stop there, for now.

- The music I loved as a teenager still moves me but the lyrics take on new meaning.

- The boy who thought he'd not live to see 18 is now 27.

- Faerie figurines are perched all around me.

- My wife had a short story accepted for publication – on her first attempt at submitting work since 2010 or earlier.

- Inside this apartment building there are people all around me, just on the other side of the walls or floors, living out their lives just as oblivious to me as I often am to them.

- There are three furry felines in the living room – just sitting in there, like it's the most natural thing in the world for them to be there.

- Joy Division

- My son is currently sleeping and sighing while he does so.

- I am the improbable sum of all of my ancestors.

- iLiKETRAiNS

- Hamlet (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2009)

- Whether we will it or not, we are all bound to one another.

The Point of Writing and Eternity

For likely 20 years now I have told myself that I want to be, and that I am, a writer.

This started with my first attempts at fiction when I was seven years old.  I would take my father's printer paper, remove the little hole-punched strips that adorned the sides, and create illustrated books.  I don't remember the content of those books, not really, but I remember being immensely proud and, what's more, thoroughly satisfied and happy during and after their creation.

Creation, though I didn't examine it so closely at the time, in the extension of the physical self into another physical self - the duplication of our own physiology (nerves, neurons, neuroses, etc.) to something physically resembling but not quite like us.  This is, in essence, what we do when we have children with the glaring exception being that we have more control over our creative expression in the inanimate than we do in the animate.

Two Depressives Walk Into A Marriage

My wife and I are both exhausted.  It's cold, rainy, cloudy outside, and the trees are skeletons.  The road makes that "wooshing" wet sound whenever cars go by and it sprays cold whatever everywhere.  There's no Christmas coming soon, no New Year, we're just in the doldrums of winter.  The hallways at her college probably sound hollow and are a bit darker, even with lights - like an empty hospital in an X-Files episode.

I began taking anti-depressants when I was fourteen.  At the time my mother's brother was in the midst of an unnaturally colored descent into something like a quiet madness which would, by the time I was seventeen, lead him to take his own life.  My father's mother suffered from unspecified mental illness which has only recently been revealed as schizophrenia.  My parents understandably sought relief for me rather than watch their son, a sensitive, smart, and oft-bullied young man, push himself further toward desperation.

The Spirituality of the Non-Believer

I defaulted in the most cliche manner when trying to obtain the meaning of the word "spirituality" - I looked to the dictionary.  Like an obnoxious speechwriter, I appear to be beginning this post with a dictionary definition.

"The vital principle or animating force within living things."

Vague.  Not at all religious, not really, though of course there are other, more specifically religious, definitions.

There are those who say, when asked about their religious orientation, "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual."

One says this as if it will automatically, and in the most contradictory manner, explain ones deepest nature while at the same time cloaking one within the most bright mysteriousness.

In my view it is a meaningless statement.  It is an attempt, it seems, to keep the spectre of dogmatism at bay.

To be a follower of Christ, or Buddha, or Mohammad, no matter how ethereally so, is to be dogmatic even if only at the very smallest.  Tenets, precepts, codes, rites, rituals - these are all the very lifeblood of any religious order, whether thousands of years old or relatively new.  It may be possible to be spiritual, which I would assume means "concerned with the vital principle", but once a formal deity is brought into the equation, even only in the least obtrusive manner, there is the element of the religious.

Of course, when people ask me about my religious orientation the question is generally more straightforward, with less room for theological wiggle:

"Are you a Christian?"

Stay-at-home

My New Minority Status

"You go into your classrooms, you shut the door, and you shut yourself off from your colleagues."

When I was a high school teacher the principal would often gently admonish the faculty in this way.  In truth, he was right to do so.

In teaching, being isolated was easy to accomplish.  For many of us, it was preferred.  In a job where your students feel more like your colleagues than your fellow teachers it was easy to barrel through a day without even communicating with your fellows (except to commiserate, of course).  Much of the time we didn't even want our fellow teachers' input or attention - our lesson plans were our own, our methods were our own.

I now find myself in a profession even more isolated in nature - that of the stay-at-home parent.

I could say "stay-at-home dad" but really the job is difficult for either side of the gender line.

Still, though, I'm rare.  Here's a little statistic from the federal government:

158,000 - estimated number of stay-at-home dads in 2009. These married fathers with children younger than 15 have remained out of the labor force for at least one year primarily so they can care for the family while their wives work outside the home. These fathers cared for 290,000 children. Among these stay-at-home dads, 59 percent had two or more children, and 57 percent had an annual family income of $50,000 or more.

This seems to have remained constant according to more recent numbers released in the Current Population Survey in March 2011.

 

How Did I Get Here?

I'll pretend as though some of the people who read this blog do not know me personally and, therefore, do not know how I came to be a stay-at-home dad.  Indulge me, it helps keep the narrative going.