Mary and I unrolled our yoga mats, side by side, surrounded by Lycra’d strangers, all of us hoping to stretch and perspire away our worries. We were relieved to see our favorite instructor take charge, a New Yorker named Rob who played surprisingly yoga-friendly music: the Cure, Miles Davis, the Police, and Mary’s favorite, Led Zeppelin.
Rob’s classes often felt tailored for parents of skater teens, full of advice about patience, tolerance, and self-forgiveness. “Judge not,” he’d tell us. He’d quote Jefferson: “The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.” I’d look over at Mary, who’d roll her eyes, meaning, No shit. It came as no surprise to learn that Rob had been a skater. He often seemed to have just the right message or song for our anxiety du jour. Some tunes seemed like inside jokes for skate parents: “Riders on the Storm”; Beastie Boys; Bob Marley.
Toward the end of one class he read a passage about our spiritual journeys being so full of “twists, turns, surprises and upsets, much confusion and stumbling until we reach a moment of clarity . . . but we usually learn best when we’re a bit vulnerable.”
At the word vulnerable I turned to see Mary looking my way. No shit. Rob kept reading as Mary and I held eyes: “Trust that the lesson will reveal itself to you when it’s time.”
As we sometimes did during class, Mary and I reached across and briefly touched hands.
“Other people may be there to help us, teach us, guide us along our path,” Rob said, closing his book. “But the lesson to be learned is always ours . . .
“Stay present for this one perfect moment. Be. Here. Now. And breathe. It’s amazing what can happen when you just let go and trust that the universe will catch you.”
I looked up at the sun peeking through the skylight, closed my eyes, and breathed.
With the end of the school year crashing down on us, Mary and I found ourselves increasingly drawn to bamboo-floored yoga studios—our version of the skate park, atop mats instead of boards. And it came as a relief, nearing fifty, to find yoga teachers as ideal mentors, after so many years of resisting or defying mentorship. And for good reason.
I was once an altar boy. After a field trip to the Jersey Shore I was waiting for my mom to pick me up when the tubby young priest who’d trained us altar boys guided me behind the bus, gave me a hug and a sneaky little kiss on the lips. He was later accused of molesting two of my classmates and got shipped off to Arizona.
I once had a football coach. A buzz-cut ex-marine with whiskey breath who chain-smoked Marlboro Reds, who shoved and tripped us, called us pussies and candy-ass cunts.
I once had a high school teacher. He lived for a spell in the coaches’ locker room, where he impregnated a classmate and later posted anti-abortion leaflets on our lockers.
So. With a cur-mouthed coach and two rapists as early mentors, I’d developed a tainted view of authority from a young age. I knew it, too. I sometimes oozed a subtle disdain for leadership and wasn’t always a compliant subordinate, which editors from my early newspaper days could verify.
But I’d had plenty of positive role models, too. My friend Blaise’s dad, the hardworking German mason, taught me to rise early and work hard, and Vinnie, my Italian mentor at the Gibson Girl, taught me to cook for customers as if they were family. A high school English teacher once told me, “You’re a good writer,” and in college my Irish lit professor, a boozy Jesuit priest named Quinn—who on day one asked us, “Are you lovers or are you fuckers?”—reinforced the simmering conceit that the writer’s life was for me.
And my parents? They’d coaxed me into finding jobs from an early age, encouraged my interest in music and reading and writing. But as hands-on coaches? They mainly expected me to figure out my own shit. As my mom always said: “It’s your life, NT.”
Maybe it was a New Jersey thing, or a stubborn Irish thing, but I simply learned to do life my own way, from paying most of my college tuition to living in five different cities across my first five postcollegiate years, to choosing a partner as stubbornly self-reliant as me.
But now, with boys of my own, it troubled me to realize that by not learning to be coached, I hadn’t learned to be a coach. I rarely felt capable of inspiring or enlightening my kids, so I brought home books, hoping that some fantastical story would have an impact, that J. K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, George R. R. Martin, or Stephen King would slice into their souls the way Vonnegut, Tolkien, Hemingway, John Irving, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Haruki Murakami, and Stephen King did mine.
In my journal one night I wrote: “It seems all I do is punish or talk or yell. How the hell do I inspire, motivate, teach, help? I’m always trying to change their lives. Do they need changing? Or does it make them feel bad that I think it does? Am I a bad coach? Or are they uncoachable?”
This inner/penned dialogue went on for quite a few pages in my chicken scratch . . . “What makes a good dad good, and a bad dad bad? Are they insufficient young men (at least so far), and does that make me an insufficient mentor? Or are they beautiful, vital young men, finding their way, and I’m just a dick for not admiring them as they are?”
Breathe.
Mary wasn’t someone who’d been easily coached, either. The youngest of five, she preferred riding horses, often alone, to the more typical team sports. Like me, like her sons, she usually (and still) followed her own rules. (Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . .) We’d clearly passed our don’t-tell-me-what-to-do sensibilities on to our kids. We knew this much.
Then again, Mary seemed to sense, better than I, when the boys needed some nonjudgmental parental support, or simply a no-expectations walk or drive. Mary’s version of hands off was truly hands off, while mine was like a badly wired lamp, on and off, on and off. Mary knew how to be there when her sons needed to talk. Not to lecture or nag, but just be present and patient. She also provided an optimistic counterweight to my everything’s-fucked attitude.
My spouse never envisioned the awful things I did. She didn’t check the boys’ bedrooms when she got home from work, bracing for disaster, terrified of finding them on the floor, slumped on their bed, drowned in puke. I hated that my mind was even capable of such dark imaginings, that I tormented myself with the terrible what-ifs.
But Mary? She believed in her sons. Though she sometimes wondered if all the skating had been a mistake, and whether we might have done things differently—moved around less, sent them to private school, penned them in a little tighter—she knew our kids were good people, just as she knew they were capable of good things. Eventually.
“We just need to be patient,” she’d say, sounding like our yoga instructor. “We just need to create the right environment and hope for the best.”
Or: “They don’t really want to be part of ‘the thing.’ It’s a mellow rebellion in some ways.”
Or: “I’m feeling more confident. I don’t think they’re going to be homeless or anything. It’s just going to be slow.”
Yet, when a writer friend asked Mary if she wished things had gone down differently, she snapped, “No! I wouldn’t want them to be anyone else.”
Raising two boundary-pushing boys required teamwork. And by now we’d become a better team—more in sync, more stable, more resilient.
It fascinated me that our marriage hit a groove at the two-decade mark, coinciding with the slow emergence from the teen-raising high school years. A steady dual income and a nice house sure helped. But so did our day-after-day marital routines, which kept us grounded and close, strengthened our half of the two-on-two household dynamic.
Sunday morning yoga became one such sacred rite, preceded and/or followed by an ink-fingered session with the New York Times, sipping our pot of half-caf, reading obits and op-eds to each other. (Mary’s faves: Vows and Corner Office; mine: the Book Review.) Another rite: on Friday nights, we’d get home from work and dive into our own two-person happy hour, mixing cocktails and grilling dinner while listening to the rockabilly show on KEXP, followed by a dog walk and a TV show binge session. And . . . with any luck, we’d slip upstairs . . .
We spent time with friends, of course—and with our boys, when they let us—but we had no problem hunkering down. It felt good to be at home, anchored and available if someone needed us (which they often did). Our rituals came to matter in ways that surprised me. They became part of a continuum of our marriage, our family, our life.
Other routines: a three-mile loop run, down to the waterfront and up the steep steps; long walks with Mickey, during which Mary would smell all the roses, pluck her stalks of rosemary, and scold me for hating nature; strolls through the Sunday farmers’ market, people-watching amid our increasingly hipper-younger Seattle neighbors. Though we infrequently ventured into the mountains, our urban hikes could last hours. We’d explore the same city parks the boys used as party spots, walking railroad tracks and industrial ghost blocks much like they had, but in our own weird way. We’d take a one-way, miles-long hike into some ’hood, then call the boys for a ride home, or take Uber or Car2Go.
We usually promised each other not to talk about the kids but rarely succeeded. Still, life was strangely, slowly becoming less about them, more about us. A visiting brother-in-law once teased, “Do you hold hands when you run?” We did not, and we weren’t a lovey-touchy couple. I’d refer to her as my “first wife”—a term I once used on a birthday cake—and I was her “current husband.” If I told her I loved her, she’d sarcastically offer, “thanks”—or just “ditto.”
One Friday after work we sipped our end-of-week drinks, listened to the radio, made dinner, then walked the dog to our neighborhood’s downtown strip.
“Did I get fat?” asked my wife, who at fifty was probably slimmer than when we’d met.
“Yes, a little,” I told her.
Mary found a lavender bush, snapped off a bud, rubbed it into her palms, threw the dregs at me, put her palms to her face, inhaled, and said, “I hated high school.”
“Really?” I asked, then tried her lavender routine, sniffed at my sweet-smelling hands . . . “I thought you had fun in high school?”
“Not mine. Theirs.”
We stopped at the movie theater where Leo had recently gotten a job. Seeing him at the popcorn machine, so cute in his name-tagged uniform, I was tempted to take a photo—Leo had turned me onto Instagram. But Mary saw me reaching for the phone, read my mind, shook her head. She knew Leo would be embarrassed or pissed.
Back home, after a few binged episodes of Orphan Black, Mary said: “Life would suck without you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I waited a minute, then told her, “All I need is you, y’know.”
“Me, too.”
The two of us deeply asleep as the phone trills at 2:00 A.M. Few sounds are as shrill and awful as a ringing phone after midnight.
Tonight, it was the call I’d feared for years.
“Is this Mr. Thompson?”
“Who is this? What’s wrong?!”
“Officer Elias. Seattle Police Department. Are you the father of Leo Thompson?”
Fuck. In a quavering voice, I croaked the terrible question: “What . . . is he . . . is Leo okay?”
The officer assured me that Leo was, in fact, alive. But he was drunk and mouthy and in trouble. My son had been busted at a party in an abandoned school and was being detained—the only one among thirty-plus kids they didn’t release—due to alcohol on his breath, paint-splattered hands, and “frankly, because of his disrespectful attitude.”
I drove to the address Officer Elias gave me and found my five-foot son standing on a corner encircled by eight cops. When Leo saw my car he shot both hands into the air, holding up his number one fingers, like John Cusack in Say Anything but without the boom box. Officer Elias reached out to shake my hand, and I took it, then felt guilty. The beefy cop explained that a gang of kids had been inside the school, spraying graffiti and drinking, that they’d found paint on Leo’s hands. Instead of apologizing, Leo had argued, and Elias said he had no choice but to hold him. “If I let him go? And he got killed? That’d be on me,” he said.
On the way home, Leo launched into his indignant, lawyerly filibuster mode, bitching about how the cops were all wrong, that he wasn’t spraying graffiti, that they’d harassed him because he’d dared to speak up and defend himself. This all occurred not long after Michael Brown had been shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, and I told Leo about trigger-happy cops and innocent people getting shot all the time. (Sadly more so in the years to come.)
At home, still jacked up from the night’s excitement, Leo begged to go back out with his friends. We refused, but after we fell asleep he snuck out anyway.
Next morning at yoga, the instructor led us into twisted triangle and joked, “This will help rinse out last night’s bourbon and bad decisions.”
Breathe, Neal, breathe . . .
In the fall of 2014—Leo’s junior year, Sean’s senior—both boys began taking community college classes, even as Leo insisted he’d be successful with or without college.
A program called Running Start allowed our kids to earn credits that applied toward high school and college. Sean passed the entrance test with a 91 percent and Leo soon after got an identical score. Ours weren’t the only boys in our circle empowered by DIY schooling options. Many of their friends replaced high school with Running Start, cobbling together a mix of high school and college classes—school on their terms. By the spring of 2015, Sean would be done with high school entirely, opting for a mash-up of Running Start classes, a one-on-one math tutor, and online college courses. Proud of his unique educational path, he scribbled on one of his three report cards: “I are smart.”
One night Mary and I were cooking fish when Sean asked for help with an essay he was writing for his English 101 college class. The topic: his relationship with literature.
“I think I’m going to write about how you being an author has influenced me—as a writer and a reader,” he said.
I had to walk outside so he wouldn’t see me cry. We had so rarely discussed my writing, and I was pretty sure he and Leo hadn’t read any of my books. So I felt like an asshole, again, for underestimating him/them. I later found Sean’s three-page essay, which humbled me with its analysis of my writing career and his budding interest in storytelling.
“Being the son of an author, I was always taught proper grammar and received a lot of help with my writing,” he wrote. “So I guess I was dealt a good hand when it comes to learning how to write, but also learning how to articulate and be clear with what I had to say, whether it be text or speech.”
As we neared the tail end of high school, both boys managed to work their free-will expressions—on skateboarding, freedom, justice—into their writing assignments.
Leo, in an essay on The Little Prince: “Narrow-mindedness gets you nowhere in life. All great minds have one key advantage: they think outside the box, they push the limits of what can be done. That is what makes them so great. The Little Prince represents the open-mindedness of people and the desire to explore and discover . . . it shows the importance of exploration.”
Some days I wondered whether I was teaching them anything, or if they were teaching me.
At times I started entertaining the idea that the boys were settling down and growing up—that, as a family, we all were.
There were signs. Like Leo’s handwritten “Life Priorities” list, which I found while snooping in his room for drugs:
I wanted to pencil in one more: Stop smoking pot! But we had some work to do on that front.
Thankfully, our family doctor weighed in—again, at my request—forcing Leo to discuss his pot smoking during a checkup. He told Leo that as a teenager his brain was soaking up the world, taking it all in, learning and experiencing.
“If you smoke, you shut out the world,” he said. “You deny yourself the opportunity to appreciate and swallow up all the world has to offer. There’s a haze between you and the light.”
That night Leo came to our room and sat on the bed, and I felt myself reaching for the same nagging questions about school, homework, grades, friends, and jobs, ready to offer advice, wisdom, or warning. Instead, I kept my mouth shut. And that’s when he opened up. He’d been thinking about what the doctor had said but disagreed that he was closed off to the world. He considered himself more open-minded than many of his peers. He felt mature. He had plans.
“It doesn’t matter what my grades are right now,” he insisted. “I have a drive inside me. I want to succeed. No matter what, I will be a success.”
Still . . . he was thinking about smoking less, and exercising more. He’d been taking three-mile walks with Mickey, and stretching his aching feet. He’d started lifting weights, doing pull-ups and push-ups in the basement, asking us about nutrition and eating better. He’d even started running, just a mile at a time at first.
One day he texted me: “ran 3 miles pops. lifted weights and did homework. luv ya.”
We finally got an appointment to see a well-known pediatric orthopedic surgeon to discuss Leo’s feet and the looming possibility of surgery. It had taken months to get scheduled with this specialist, who spent half an hour asking Leo about his life, about school, and then, after X-rays and a detailed exam, declared his feet to be “beautiful.”
Yes, the condition he’d been diagnosed with was causing the fusion of a few bones. But many people live their entire life with that condition, the doctor explained. Some people don’t even know they have it. He advised that stretching and running was a better plan than multiple surgeries. At least for now.
“I love your feet!” he said as Leo beamed.