Dear Eli, as I write this letter to you Mommy is putting you to bed. She will read to you before you go to sleep. When I came home tonight you were both finishing watching Mrs. Doubtfire on the television. Wow—bed time past 9 p.m.—how did you get that one past her?
When it’s time for bed you make the nightly request, “Daddy, will you carry me to the bathroom?” You will say, “I’m starting to roll”. You’ll roll into my arms (if I make it in time to the couch) or you will wait frozen as I walk over to catch you and carry you to the bathroom. Sometimes I tell you you’re big enough to walk yourself. Most of the time I carry you while you act like a stiff board, or I make a seat for you out of my arms. You brush your teeth, pee, I carry you from the bathroom and throw you on the bed, and Mommy or I read to you before you go to sleep. Tonight, Mommy reads.
I wonder as we read, do you listen? Sometimes I know you’re listening, other times it’s as if you’re looking off into space, thinking. Does the sound of our voice create a vehicle or sacred space for you? A way for you to travel from the reality of this world to the universe of your dreams?
Mommy comes out. “He’s very tired.” Now that’s a description of a ritual and a routine. We have many in our home. Sacred and nothing special at the same time. Reference points for how we exist and move through space together, dance sometimes, play, and get along. Within the next half-hour if you don’t go to sleep you will call out, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy” literally, either her name or mine, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy” — always three times in a kind of song—summoning us to your bedside. You will ask that we cover you, or lay down with you, or provide you with essential information regarding a question you have about anything under the sun that is occurring to you, as you navigate the transition from awake to sleep to dream. It’s as if you are getting ready to go somewhere and you want to make sure things are in place when you return in the morning.
Mommy just gave me some chicken soup. Since I came home late and didn’t have dinner, I’m eating now. Where was I? I was at The Shambhala Center. What was I doing there? I was taking the next step. What is the next step? I will tell you.
The next step is reclaiming the work I was doing before you were born and that I have continued doing after your birth, but not in the same way. I’m taking something down off the shelf that I put on the shelf so that I could create the space in my life for you, for Mommy, for rituals and routines that I felt needed to be in place, so that I could work the way I want to work. That work is to write. I can hear you asking, “You mean like on the subway?”
Yes, it’s true; sometimes Daddy will go out to ride the subway and write. The subway has all the things I need to write well. It has movement, it has no guarantee about who is going to get on or off, it has grit, some danger, noise that actually creates an inner silence within; it has stops and starts in ways that encourage me to take a breath, to pause, to connect thinking with action. There are all kinds of stories unraveling on the subway. There’s a lot of action. Beginnings, middles and endings all happening at the same time, all interdependent and isolated like subway riders can be. The subway does not care whether what I write is good or bad. It also has a kind of deadline. There’s a point when it reaches the end of the line. I have to get up, walk across the platform, and get on the train headed in the other direction. The subway is neither for me nor against me.
But the next step that Daddy took tonight about writing has been a long time in the planning. It‘s less about riding the subway and more about getting off the subway. It’s more about what Daddy said earlier about ritual and routine. It’s about reference points. It’s about writing so that other people can have and read what Daddy has written so they can turn them into their own reference points.
Eli, those reference points are for you too. Maybe only for you. Daddy may not have any reference points for what it means inside your heart to be the happy, safe, loved, and wanted little boy that you are, but Daddy has some other reference points. It’s time to give them away now. Before I say more about that, there’s something I need to tell you. For a long time, I have often said that I have no reference points for how to be your father. That’s because the kind of father I had was nothing like the kind of father you have. But that’s not true. Our time together has shown me that I have very powerful reference points for being your daddy. Some of the most powerful reference points a man can have. They are born from a heart of genuine sadness, loss, and pain.
Daddy was a wolf child. Daddy was Oblivion’s child. There are others like Daddy. We know a lot about dark places. We found our way out of them. We love to play in the light of day. We are happy to be free of our childhoods—those of us that got out—but we can’t change our childhoods. My brothers and sisters and I who come from the same kind of childhood —we howl when we feel lost. That’s how we hear and know one another, that’s the ritual and routine we use to remind ourselves where we all are. We love and care for one another. Not the same thing as “Daddy will you carry me to bed,” but that was how I went to bed at night when I was a child. Howling inside and outside. I still howl, but not for the same reason. I howl to stay in touch with my other reference points. Don’t worry, son, Daddy’s not trying to tell you he’s a werewolf.
You don’t howl at night. You are an ordinary, imperfect child. No doubt you will do some extraordinary things, but at the heart of it, you are the simple, pristine, victorious, noble, pure, nothing special, ordinary, imperfect child beyond Daddy’s wildest dreams. Daddy knows nothing about the life you are living right now on the inside of yourself. On the other hand, Daddy is working with Mommy to create the world you are living all around on the outside. Isn’t that funny? Why is it that you would never trust a pilot who has never flown an airplane to take you up in the air, but that you can trust absolutely that, while I know nothing about the world inside you, I totally know how to create and sustain that world for you?
Granted, shit happens (and don’t tell Mommie I cursed), but one thing you can count on as long as karma or God or whatever allows, I will be showing up and delivering the goods for you in terms of presence, acceptance, and tolerance, and you will have no better or more learned friend than I if the shit ever really hits the fan in your life. I have lots of reference points for that.
Last night, the lady who is teaching us about how she writes, Susan, said that while it’s true that our actions impact our environment, so too does our environment impact on our actions. You live in an environment that is being created, sustained, and maintained by Mommy and I. I’m not talking about what happens when you are outside of the world, space, container we are creating for you. That’s part of the deal we both had to make with life on life’s terms when we fell in love and realized—not too long after that—that you were coming. “Eli’s coming! Hide your hearts, girls!” are words to a song that lots of friends were singing before they even saw you.
What I want to say, Eli, is that Daddy is taking the next step, which was part of the plan, my own plan. A plan I held deeply in my heart and had to trust and believe in and wait for so that I could be sure when I took the writing off the shelf—not just the words but the ritual and routine of writing that I also need to take off the shelf now—that fundamental things would be in place. Daddy had to create all of these on his own with a lot of help from Mommy and lots of help from friends. A world. A family. A purpose. A sense of belonging. Knowing that he is loved and can love. Daddy needed to put all of that into place, along with a nice place to live, a good paycheck, and the settling of a few scores (I’m not talking about soccer and will explain more about that to you in another letter), so that he could do exactly what Susan was talking about last night.
But that’s why it’s very cool for you that I’m your daddy. I’m not bragging or anything, I’m just saying that at fifty years of age, Daddy has successfully and fully extricated himself from the oblivion of his childhood. That is a world you will never know about via your own personal experience. But it is a world that I will need to tell you about some day. It’s not like you aren’t starting to pick up on some of the clues. You notice that Daddy is comfortable in places where others might feel very nervous and frightened. You notice that Daddy is awkward and frightened in other places where there is no need for anyone to feel frightened or awkward. Daddy always inhabits a new world with every step he takes.
A couple more things to say, then this letter will end. But it’s going to be added to the collection of letters to you that I hope will be of some help to you in later years.
First thing: Mommy showed me YOUR writing the other night. She brought it to me at the perfect moment: you know, when I’m sort of tired and it’s late at night, but I don’t want to go to sleep. Wow. Are you a writer? Of course you are. So was your grandmother. So is your Daddy. What a story. I’m glad that your teacher is challenging you to write on a higher level, too. Mommy did not like the teacher’s criticism because she wants to know what third grader could possibly understand the things you are being asked to do. Since she’s a teacher and Daddy is a teacher, we are very careful to see what your teachers are saying. I agree with Mommy—maybe your teacher is a bit unrealistic. But on the other hand, something inside of me is saying, “Yeah, Eli. Kick Ass!!”
Last thing: Daddy has no special place where he writes. There never has been a special place. Daddy has always written in the gaps. Creating a special place—like the place you go before dreamland, or the safe place called our home, our family, where you are being allowed to emerge in accordance with your being, which I have the paradoxical experience of having no identification with on the one hand, and which I am totally and equally on board for realizing for you, for Mommy, and for myself on the other—creating that place for the writer and the writing that Daddy is now gong to take off the shelf is going to work only if we understand that it’s really nothing special.
Maybe nothing will change at all. You will continue to see Daddy writing in his notebooks in the park or on the computer in the morning when you leave for school. You will continue to try to talk to Daddy sometimes, and I will say yes and continue typing. You will see that Daddy will go for a long subway ride with his notebook. But it’s going to be different. It won’t be writing for the shelf. It will be writing for something else. It will be writing for you. For Mommy. It won’t be writing for writing’s sake. It will be writing for the sake of voice, for realization, for the sake of any wisdom or compassion I can squeeze out of my experience from now until when I am dead. It will be writing that will be about death that comes from living, writing about life that comes from death. I will need to be as fearless and outrageous as you are on the soccer field, when you sing and dance for us, when you jump in bed to kiss us and tell us how happy you are. It will have to emerge in accordance with its being. As you do.
