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.

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.

 

The Ring

The ring came before Christmas, intended for Christmas, but my wife couldn't wait and, seeing her own excited impatience, neither could I.

Enchantment, 16 Oct 2005 – undergrads at Appalachian State, the wind seemed to howl its disapproval as a classmate knocked on the door to my small, student-apartment. I'd just stepped out of a hasty shower, having thought that I would spend the Sunday alone, but at that point scrambling to put clothing on, to look presentable.  The rest was crashing through the assumptions and safety of others - setting a small piece of the world alight.  We decided upon what we wanted and we let nothing stop us from going to it - could we have been less devil-may-care?  Likely.  Would we, being who we are, have done any differently even in a thousand different chances?  Less likely.

Devotion, 16 Feb 2007 – as my wife's endometriosis stabbed inside her abdomen, something that wouldn't be diagnosed until much later, we sped toward downtown Charlotte from her parents' home on Pineville-Matthews Road. We'd been engaged for mere months, a formality, really.  Admonitions of family rang without consequence: warnings of regret for not having a church wedding, too soon, too fast.  My impending father-in-law drove fast and I scrambled to keep pace, nearly rear-ending him in the process.  My wife and her mother had to remove much of their jewelry for the metal detector as it pealed their threatening natures upon their entering the courthouse.  The judge was disheveled, his robe still slightly open from a visit to the restroom just prior to our arrival.  I'd change nothing.

Creativity, 25 Sept 2011 – we wouldn't learn until later how close I came to being a single father, or without any family at all.  The explosions inside the eyes of my wife as she was told not to push, not to allow anymore stress to reach our still unborn son.  Her breath exploding from her mouth in heavy, frustrated exhalations - almost shouts of air.  Our son's gray and wobbly body removed.  My wife's screams of desperate anguish as soft-spoken Doctor W reached in, up to her elbow, digging for the placenta that was torn to pieces.  The post-delivery surgery.  My son in the NICU.  The damned nightmare beauty of it all.

They sleep now next to me - my son's tiny arm curled up onto my wife's chest, his small head resting on the inside of her elbow.

The ring that could easily have been memorial.

Re-evaluating Christmas

For myself and probably many other North Carolinians, and maybe many Southerners in general, it just never felt like Christmas this time around.

The weather leading up to the 25^th was consistently balmy and wet and a permanent, barely-there haze seemed to persistently blanket the ground.

Life was also doggedly determined to be busy, full of sleep-deprivation and other various stressors that are too personal to mention.

My wife and I usually listen to James Taylor at Christmas - our very own Christmas album - one that we found on our own, not inheriting from the listening habits of our parents.  The album was released in 2006, only one year after my wife and I began dating, and so it has a special meaning for us.

This year, we realized on yesterday, we did not even listen to one track on the album.

Granted, we did bring out Aaron Neville's Christmas album, a favorite of Becky's father, but how could we have forgotten James Taylor?  His folksy, oddball takes on Christmas standards had become one of our holiday traditions. 

Though I'm an atheist, I love Christmas.  I see no reason why I can't enjoy a holiday that is, for me, just as much about family, Winter, and tradition as it is for others about the birth of Christ.  My parents were generous in handing Christmas traditions to me and my siblings - ornaments for each of us every year, a trip to Boone, NC to pick out a Christmas tree and, later, to rent a mountain cabin in which to spend the actual holiday.  The Nutcracker and A Currier & Ives Christmas were our musical standards in the James family.

We didn't even watch A Wish For Wings That Work (a deliciously neurotic and thoroughly wonderful tale) this year - though that was only due to my own reticence - maybe because I all ready felt out of the Christmas spirit before the holiday even arrived.

All of this malaise-induced Scroogery has led me to wonder if I should re-evaluate Christmas as a whole.

I'll be 27 in January, I have a son who is only 3-months-old, and he has rightly taken over the roost insofar as being the center of all holiday excitement.

I'd hate to think that I'm simply becoming too old to be excited about the holiday season, and I don't think that's necessarily true, but it becomes harder to find a culprit to blame for my lack of merriment.

Then I think that it's something in me that's holding back the so-called spirit of the season.

Distraction.  Preoccupation with trying to pigeon-hole my childhood experiences into current Christmases.  A sudden lack of interest in gift-receiving.

At what other time in an adult's life is it OK to try to relive childhood delirium aside from Christmas?

I think that I can have that delirium if I perhaps stop forcing myself to try to feel what should come, and probably will come, naturally if I simply allow it.

My birthday is in less than a month - let's see if I can avoid neuroticizing it.  I know that's not a word.

The Living Is Easy

A recent Fall day was spent in the state of "Summertime."

First it was Anne-Sophie Mutter, the unexpected strains of Porgy's Charlestonian agony - a black man in the heat of the South - lilting out of a purely German violin.  Oliver looked at me, his stone-blue eyes lolling about in his decidedly overwhelming exhaustion.  He cooed as though the music coerced him to do so, emitting his happy whispers in an almost secretive tone - to say "ooh" too loudly would give everything away and would spoil his enjoyment.  He allowed himself to smile before his eyes became cool slits among puffy pink clouds of chub.

Miles Davis?  Those buggy-eyed admonitions were too hot, too too hot for this cold day.  Oliver's clothes were just a bit too tight and Miles Davis was just a bit too excited.  His high voice is fine but for a baby it is anything but childish.

Billie Holiday.  The instrumental genesis of her version begs the sight of swaying hips in some predecessor of Technicolor.  It made Oliver smile.  He can't dance, he can't stand, he can't even crawl.  I can't dance, that is to say, dance well either - but he gave it his own.  His diaper ground against the multi-threaded padding of his crib.  He cackled, his belly shook with the promises of soon-to-come laughter.

I fashioned some of the lyrics into my own - "your daddy's unemployed/and your momma's good lookin'".  Honestly, though, I'm more employed now than I ever was as a high school teacher.

I am a homemaker, dear friends, and I am in love with my love, my son, and with music.

My Best Self

Here I am.

This is the part where I've covered quite a bit of ground and I try, in this moment of relative silence, to find my best selves.

In a way, I believe that even though there is only one physical self, each moment of my life has been lived by a unique self – a self that can never be totally replicated in all of its attributes but can be remembered and, if worth remembering, modeled.

It sounds almost metaphysical but I really believe it's simply a tidy way of examining life.

Let me go back a moment.

I don't generally examine my life. I do examine almost all else.

My interests, some of them passions, range from genealogy to video games, from science fiction to the social sciences, from poetry to basketball to Buddhism. It's a helter-skelter hodgepodge of pursuits and this tendency extends to my taste in music, films, books, etc.

It is distracting.

Yet in all of these pursuits, and all of these interests, I rarely, if ever, take the time to journal or keep a diary, even to simply try to capture a few key moments of each day. My life has gone by as a series of sparse and garbled spiral notebooks, digital camera images, and half-digested memories.

So now it falls to me to try to find an example of my best self. A self worth cataloging and, most importantly, worth emulating.