I don’t think you truly become a man until your father dies. You can be seventeen or sixty, but if there’s still that someone in your world who calls you son and means it, there’s always that part of you that still exists. That boy. When you lose a father, or the man that raised you and kept you safe, you can feel it. You can be forty-five with kids of your own in college, but when you say goodbye to your father it happens—instantly.
When we’re kids, growing up like I did, and our dads take us camping, it’s never about dinners around the fire or adventures down a river. I didn’t know that then, but I do now. It’s about taking us into the dark. It’s about their presence and protection. It’s about being there for us no matter how dark it gets. When we wake up in the middle of the night and it’s so dark we can’t tell if our eyes are open or closed, terrified and convinced that every noise on the other side of that thin panel of nylon is there to kill us, it’s their presence that gets us through until morning.
After my dad died, I stopped looking for him in the dark.
When Roxy Alabama Weston was born, I became the light.
Becoming that person isn’t something someone can teach you. Not even your own father can show you how to do it. You won’t find out how in any book or course, and that light won’t be there for you to use until you’re ready to hold it. The same thing happens to women—I saw it happen to Katherine—when they become mothers. It’s instantaneous and life-changing. It’s primal. When Katherine met Roxy for the first time, she decided right then and there what kind of mom she was going to be, and she hasn’t once second-guessed herself. She’s the perfect combination of strength, courage, and just the right amount of crazy. These are the best moms.
Katherine wanted to make sure Roxy loved the rain, and I wanted to make sure she’d be able to handle spicy food. These are what you call Priorities. Katherine taught Roxy how to listen with her heart, and I made sure she knew the difference between hurt and injured. I made sure she knew how to ask for help, and Katherine made sure she helped others, and was kind and brave. I would teach her how to make the perfect soffritto for a Bolognese sauce and made damn sure she knew the difference between a nap and a sleep.
Which, by the way, are two totally different things. Katherine doesn’t nap—she full-on sleeps during the day if she’s tired. In bed. When Roxy was born, Katherine and I had been living together for less than a year, and even though we’d been together for years, there were still a few surprises and new things we learned about each other. Like napping. We will never agree on napping.
The first time Katherine caught me napping, I was snapped out of it with her standing over me asking “What…the hell…are you…doing?”
“What the hell am I what?” I asked, rubbing my eyes, straightening myself on the couch. “I’m taking a nap.”
“Why don’t you just go to bed? Go to bed if you’re tired,” she told me. It was about 2 p.m. and the spring sun was pouring in through the back window, lighting me up. Katherine refused to believe that this was in any way comfortable for me.
“I don’t want to go to bed because I don’t want to go to sleep.”
“But you are sleeping.”
“No. I’m napping,” I said.
She was not prepared for how seriously I take this shit.
“You don’t nap in a bed, you sleep in a bed,” I tried to explain. “Maybe, like maybe, you can nap in a bed, but you have to be on top of the covers. If you get under them, then that’s a sleep. I’m napping. That’s why I’m on the couch.”
“Okay. But why do you have to nap so weird?” She pointed her finger up and down my body as she stood over me, blocking the sun, in perfect and beautiful silhouette.
She wasn’t wrong. I do nap weird. I like to nap on the couch flat on my back. Always on my back. I take four throw pillows and line them down my body—one on my chest, another on my stomach and two more for my thighs and shins. I tuck my arms under the top pillow and cross my arms across my chest the same way a vampire sleeps. The same way they tell you to hold your arms when you’re going down a water slide. That’s a nap.
Katherine and I were still figuring each other out while we also wrapped our heads around parenthood. Neither was all that tough, although there’s just so much shit they don’t tell you.
Like pin worms. Pin worms are high on the list of shit they don’t tell you before you become a parent.
There’s this skill, or maybe even superpower, that most mothers have—it’s called Mom Restraint. Dads do not have this. Dads have the exact opposite. When dads want you to calm down and not panic, they usually yell something like, “Calm down! Don’t panic!” This, of course, has the exact opposite effect on everyone involved. Moms, on the other hand, can be confronted with just about anything—a broken bone, road rash from wiping out on your bike, an infected piercing, or a split forehead from a botched cartwheel on the sidewalk—and they always react the same: “Mm-hmm. Yup. Okay. Come with me,” with the inflection going up at the end of each word. Absolute Mom Restraint. This is when they gently put their hands on their child’s shoulders, slowly spin them around, and march them into the bathroom to assess the damage. The bathroom is where moms do their best work when everything goes to hell. Dads are more like a World War II field doctor, whipping off their own T-shirt on the driveway to stop the bleeding from a cut that should have been taken care of with one, maybe two Band-Aids.
Which brings us to pin worms.
There’s no situation, not a single one, that personifies Mom Restraint more than the first time your kid walks out of the bathroom with their little arm stretched out holding a tiny worm dancing on the tip of their finger to tell you, “Mom, this was in my butt.” Pin worms live in your butt, and at night, in the dark, they crawl out and go on missions to lay eggs on everything you own and crawl up the butts of everyone you love. When one person in the family has pin worms up their butt, you all have pin worms up your butt.
I’ve never done what anyone would ever call well with medication. I get every single side effect on the side of every single bottle, and for the most part avoid anything that will take me out of my own head. Even pin worm medication messes me up, but when I come home and see my portion of pin worm meds laid out on the counter, I take the damn pills. Because that’s what families do. That’s parenting.