The End Game

Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Yesterday my three-year-old grandson stared at a large-framed photograph of a smiling little boy with big brown eyes and long eyelashes which has been hanging on my bedroom wall for many years. “I know who that is,” he announced with satisfaction.

“Really?” I said. “Who?”

“Me.”

True. Sort of. It’s a photo of my husband taken more than seventy years ago. The similarities are striking. Especially when I add a photo of Son #6 into the mix. Three generations of heart-breakingly beautiful brown eyes, all of whom love complex problems (my husband—machine technology; my son–software design; my grandson–dinosaur jigsaw puzzles, currently), and who are uniformly as stubborn as camels in a trek across the Sahara. (It’s an apt description Daughter #1 assures me after her semester in the Middle East made her of serious fan of the wily beasts.)

When Son #6 was a teen-ager, he and his father were engaged in a titanic struggle of wills that left me exhausted and amused at the same time. My husband always walked away certain that he was the winner, while my son rolled his eyes and quietly did exactly what he wanted to. Now his son uses the same technique, which at the moment involves screaming and tears. I am usually seriously sympathetic, but occasionally can’t resist allowing an unspoken “what goes around comes around” to cross my mind.

Regardless of whether we like it or not, we all find ourselves shadowing our dads now and then. For most of us, that’s good news. Because my dad turned off the highway at every “see the Two-Headed Snake or Billy the Kid Hideout” sign, I grew to love quirky byways and hole-in-the-wall mom and pop diners. And because my dad could recite from memory long rambling poetry like “The Cremation of Sam Magee”, I learned to love words, eventually making a living teaching them.

When I was young and having children, the dads I knew were focused on building a career and creating a solid financial foundation for their families—a noble and generous goal. But also a demanding and time consuming one. With eight kids, my husband spent our early married years first in school and then working two jobs just to keep up with the price of 10 gallons of milk every week. Most of the dads in our neighborhood were paddling along in the same boat.

That’s why I was so startled three or four years ago when four or five of my adult sons and a couple of their buddies decided to head south for an adventure. Over the years they had built a tradition that when one of group turned 40, they’d take off into wilds somewhere to bike and hike and eat without the constraints of comfort and cleanliness their wives demanded. On this particular trip they loaded up their mountain bikes, hiking shoes, and swimming suits. What was unusual? They also loaded up their children, leaving only the nursing babies. Not just sons, but daughters, too. I think the age gamut was somewhere in the range of two-year-olds to teenagers. There were at least a couple of kids with every dad.

And they had a glorious time. When my grandkids came home, they couldn’t stop talking about scorpion hunting with ultra-violet lights in the desert dark, tramping under waterwalls, biking red rock trails, swimming for hours, and staying up way later than their mothers would ever have allowed. But mostly what they talked about was how “cool” they thought their dads and uncles were.

It’s an act of courage to become a dad, to have a child, and then stick with raising him or her. There is never a day that’s easy. When my kids have been in the throes of child-rearing, I’ve always told them that 20 years of sacrifice reaps the rewards of a lifetime. Looks like they figured that out way earlier than I expected.