Trey Ellis
I’ve rock climbed and kayaked and surfed and hang glided. I’ve hitchhiked across the continent of Africa and gotten lost overnight on the side of a Guatemalan volcano. I’ve been motherless since I was sixteen and fatherless since I was twenty-two so I pride myself on my stoic resilience.
Yet now that I’m taking care of two small children I cry more easily than a seven-year-old little girl.
When I was married and they were babies I was the muscle, the typical male who carried the car seat, assembled the pack-n-play, carried them back to the car when they said they were too big for a stroller but still too little to long distance self propel. When my daughter was three and a half and my son just a half my then wife moved out. She still saw them most every afternoon and still does, however suddenly I was the one more often giving them a bath , shampooing, conditioning and braiding my daughter’s enchanted forest of hair and putting them to bed. I was the one in the mornings making them Cream of Wheat (I add raisins that when cooked get deliciously mushy) and then driving my daughter to preschool. When I look back at these past four years I have no idea how I got through it but it’s vastly easier now that she’s older and my son’s in preschool. I’ve gained so much, grown stronger than I ever thought I could — but also much, much more soft. It hit me the other day when I was reading to my daughter and one of her best friends before school started. My daughter picked out a book called The Wednesday Surprise by Eve Bunting and I started reading. In the book, a seven-year-old and her grandmother are excited about the surprise they have planned for her father. Meanwhile they read and read and read, an hour each day. I thought an hour straight is a long time, we read before school starts for just fifteen minutes. I turned the pages but still no sign of the dad’s surprise. Finally the dad’s birthday arrives. He’s a long-haul trucker and he’s dead tired but happy. Hmm. A working-class dad in a kids’ book, I think to myself. Very cool. The grandma and the little girl tell the dad to sit down and get ready for his surprise. He does and the grandma picks out one of the children’s books and starts reading it. The mother and the father gasp and suddenly I can’t breathe either. I’m about to sob — great, loud, heaving weeps and gasps — in front of all the kids and all the other parents reading to their kids this morning because it was the little girl who was teaching her poor illiterate grandma to read. My daughter and her friend were absolutely unphased. I held my eyes open wide to try to catch the tears then gave up and rubbed the water into my cheeks like lotion. I realized right then that before I had kids I just didn’t care about other people as deeply as I care about them now. Now, thanks to my kids, I’m as tender as a three-inch, dry-aged filet. And I used to be kinda cool. I’d go to clubs. I’d dress in black. That’s all gone now. I swear to you that years from now, if my kids ever give me the chance, I’m going to be that insanely embarrassing old grandpa you see in the supermarket parking lot wearing a sweatshirt silkscreened with the faces of all his grandkids.
You think the Moonies are the world experts at brainwashing? They’ve got nothing over fatherhood.