The blessing of a sturdy table

The center of a family is not its family room, the heart of a family lies in its dining room, at the table it gathers around.

Photo Credit: Unsplash @ddealmeida

I remember the table my parents had growing up. It was styled like the early nineties, a light looking piney wood with a glossy finish. Kind of like the wooden equivalent of acid washed jeans. Its legs were curved and ribbed, the type of texture that little hands love to run their fingers and nails over. I remember feeling such glee when my father would put in the table leaf, because it meant we were having a special amount of company over.

The wooden chairs we had were a similar, light, hue. They were the sort of kit chairs a young, modest, immigrant family could buy from Kmart or Service Merchandise to assemble and stain themselves to save a little money.

The table always scared me a bit, because it was built as if to be a little wobbly. I remember my father tightening the bolts, every so often, to ensure it wouldn’t shake too much. I never played under it, because I was always a little scared, in the way a four year old might be, that the time it would finally topple might be the precise moment I was underneath it. But beyond that, I never had a little sibling or a puppy to chase around, so I never really had any reason to scurry under that first wobbly table we had.

That table was were we had dinner, where as a young lad I would, invariably, beg for Kraft macaroni and cheese instead of bhindi and dal. It was where my parents would review the bills and make ends meet. It was the only place in America I ever ate and talked with my with my visiting grandparents. That table and those chairs are one of the only fixtures in my family home that we’ve had with us from Williamsville, New York to three different cities in Michigan: Grand Blanc, Rochester Hills, and Rochester.

Eventually, my parents were on the come up. And one of the first purchases they made was a new, sturdier, dinner table. It was darker wood, stained to a cherry-esque finish, and they bought a china cabinet, server, and eight upholstered chairs to match. More than anything else they ever bought, I think, this was the symbol that we had made it in America.

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The first table Robyn and I had was a small one, an IKEA outfit, but one of the nicer ones that I had from the roommate era of my life. It was solid and flat, its surface resemblant of a butcher block, but thinner. Robyn and I first ate together around it before we started dating, when in the same building in Midtown Detroit, the one with the coat of arms in the lobby. Robyn came up when she was sick on her birthday, I made soup and played John Mayer’s Where the Light Is album.

Little did we know, it would be that table that we would first sit down for dinner at, in our first apartment together, after our marriage. It would be the table that we would dream about our family, and make bucket lists of all the fun things we wanted to do together in the upcoming season. It would be the table - the one by the window, nestled between the wall and the slightly-too-big-for the-room couch - that our 10 month old, nervous, rescue dog would vertically leap onto after sprinting around the room.

When Robyn and I bought our home in Detroit, we packed up that little IKEA table, along with the rest of our boxes and ends, and moved uptown to a friendly, tree-lined street on the north side of the City. After we unloaded the truck, Robyn stayed back while I I led the movers in a caravan up to my parents house in Rochester.

After my father passed, that sturdy cherry table they bought, along with the matching chairs, cabinet, and sever had been mostly idle. My mother was gifting the whole set to Robyn and I, as we started life in our new home and I went up to retrieve the whole set.

And so, on that overcast January afternoon, the movers packed everything up in blankets, with care, and brought it all to Detroit, into our cozy little dining room, with the french doors where Robyn would later hang up photos of our children in the glass panes, every year on their birthdays.

That sturdy table, I’ve realized, is where all my dreams are represented.

Robyn and I have our candle-lit mini-dates there. When our sons were born, we’d pull up a high chair right to the corner and give them mushed up bananas, peas, and sweet potatoes. It’s where we gather our family and friends around, with easy access to the pot in the kitchen filled with a meal that can feed us all. It’s where our sons and pup can confidently hide and chase each other, without fear of the walls crumbling around them.

It’s where we blow out the candles on birthday cakes or share what we learned or were grateful for after a school day, while eating leftover tacos. It’s where Robyn and I talk for a few minutes, after the kids have already moved onto to their next adventure, after breakfast on Saturday mornings, and we smile, and then whisper to each other, “This is the dream.”

That table, that sturdy table, is where the blessings we count in prayer first came to be.

And now, as I see my sons around that table, I understand why my parents were so particular about picking exactly the right one, after weeks of research, budgeting, serious discussion, and several trips to the Thomasville store. The chance to upgrade to a sturdy table, wasn’t only a symbol of securing their seat solidly in the middle class.

I know now, that my parents were thinking of the future when they bought that table. They wanted to pass that table - that sturdy table, onto me and Robyn, even though they would not know her until decades later.

That table reminds me of the blessing and the sacrifices of both our parents. My parents had no choice but to start off in this country with a wobbly table and chairs they glued together themselves. They wanted to help us start our lives together with something sturdier.

They dreamed for us, what we now dream for our own children: that we have a lifetime of love and memories around our table - a childhood our kids want to remember. And we dream of helping our children start their lives beyond us with a table of their own. Maybe not one that’s opulent or expensive, but one that is sturdy - sturdy enough to build their dreams and their own families around.

I don’t always know who reads these posts, or where in the world they are from. But if you’re reading this, I hope you are blessed with the gifts of a sturdy table, and a community that gathers around it, just as we are.

Memories Are Only Shards

At around 2:30pm, when he emerges from the chamber of his midday nap, Myles is at “peak snuggle”. And this day he chose me. I was outlayed on a sofa, tucked into a corner at it’s “L”.

And then, in one single motion, he scooped on top of me, jigsawing in between my knees and sternum. This was a complete surprise, because this never happens. It’s mommy that invariable gets his peak snuggle, not me.

And I was excited-nervous like some get right before an opening kickoff and maybe even before a first date. I wanted to soak this one in, because in addition to this never happening, I’ve come to accept the difficult truth that our kids won’t be little forever.

We will only get 18 Christmases, Diwalis, and birthdays with each of them at home. We will only get 18 summers with them at home. Eventually, Myles’s sternum and knees will outgrow my own. It’s not just a thought of “oh my gawd, this never happens, I’ve gotta soak this in”, it’s a realization that there will be a time where they’re too big for this to ever happen again. Eventually, Myles, and all our children will outgrow the very idea of peak snuggle.

I know this is all fleeting, and so I was trying to just be there, so still, so as not to perturb Myles into realizing he could move on with his day. I tried to notice everything: the softness of his newly chestnut colored hair, which has lightened as the summer unfolded. I noticed the fuzzy nylon texture of his Michigan football jersey. I tried to cement the feel of his fingers as he tried to read my face like a map, as he reached up above his head, past my chin, and to my cheeks. I embraced the particular top-heavy way his two-and-a-half year old frame carried its weight at this specific moment of his life.

But hard as I tried, my efforts to remember were an exercise in grasping at straws. Memories have the shortest of all half lives.

Even 5 minutes later, as I desperately tried to encode my neurons with this moment, I couldn’t quite remember it as it actually happened. Even after just five minutes, I had only the fragments and feelings of something that now was fuzzy and choppy and bits and pieces. What remained was more like a dream than a memory.

All my memories, are this way. I’ve even experimented to test my mind’s resilience to remember, and everything still fades. Even for the most exhilarating moments of my life - like our marriage vows, the birth of our children, or my first time walking into Michigan Stadium - only the fragments remain. It’s excruciating but true that the only time the we ever experience reality is in the very moment we are in, and only if we’re fully there. After just seconds, the memory decays irreparably. All we are left with is a shard of what really happened.

This unfairly short half life of memory has softened my judgement about social media. After stripping away all the vanity, status signalining, and humble bragging, I think there is at least a sliver of desperation and humanity that’s left. At the end of the day, we just all want to remember. And because our minds are too feeble to remember unassisted, we take a photo and share it as a story.

In the past few weeks, as I’ve realized that I don’t truly have any clear, vivid, life-like memories. I’ve almost panicked about what to do. This is why we have to tell stories. Stories, just like photographs are a way to save a little shard of something beautiful. This is why I have to get sleep. The sleep keeps my eyes wide open and puts a leash on my mind so it doesn’t recklessly wander away from reality as it’s happening. And, most importantly, this is why I have to be with them.

We treasure our relationships and are so protective of them for a reason. If we find friends, family, or colleagues that we actually want to remember, we know intuitively that we ought to see them as much as we can. We know intuitively that if we see those treasured people often, maybe it’ll slow down the decay of our memories a little. Life is too short to throw away chances to be with the people we want, so desperately, to remember. This is why I have to be with them.

And just like that, Myles moved on with his day. He scooped off the sofa, just as quickly as he arrived. Peak snuggle was over. And my memory started to decay immediately, as I expected. But at least I do have this fragment of a feeling. And, thank God that even if I won’t be able to ever have full, real memories of this beautiful moment, I will at least have the shards of it.

Parenting is Truly Bittersweet

I rarely take naps on the weekend. But I happened to today because I’ve been getting over a cold, though I somehow managed to avoid catching Covid-19 from my sons.

This is the exact view I woke up to when I opened my eyes from this rare occasion of a nap:

It has four examples of the complex experience of “bittersweet”:

First, the item in the foreground is exactly what it appears to be: a monkey sitting on a Paw Patrol slipper. That’s so hilarious and creative, but it’s so frustrating to be jolted from a nap by a monkey bean bag riding in a slipper. That’s must be the light thud I half-asleep-remember feeling on my stomach.

Second, you an see a facial tissue on the coffee table: It’s disgusting that Bo left a tissue on the table, but it is a relief that he uses tissues instead of his sleeve like I did for most of my life.

Third, next to the facial tissue, is a construction Bo described as, “it’s something you make that has super powers. It’s called a power-punch.” It is kind of cool that he’s making his own sort of art with household objects. Kind of looks like a caterpillar. But damn kid, why you makin’ me do even more dishes?

Finally, you’ll notice a lightsaber all the way to the right. That’s right…Bo brought his lightsaber over and was cuddled up next to me as I fell asleep, which rarely happens anymore. I was so happy to have him right beside me, but now he’s somewhere else in the house. Bittersweet.

I hadn’t thought about how complex the experience of “bittersweet” was until I started reading Atlas of the Heart. In it, Brené Brown describes the science and theory behind several dozen of the most impactful human emotions and experiences. 

Her premise for writing the book is that we can’t emote or process our life properly if we don’t have emotional granularity. Not everything is happy, sad, angry, or tired and we need to have a grasp of the right words and concepts to describe what’re we’re feeling.

Apparently “bittersweet” is a cognitively complex phenomenon that develops gradually. Children don’t report simultaneously feeling happiness and sadness until they reach age seven or eight.

And damn, so many moments of parenting are bittersweet. Now that I better understand what bittersweet means, I feel it and see it everywhere. So many things happen where I’m so proud or so in awe of how my sons have grown, acted with courage or shown maturation. But in those moments, I also feel this remorse. Because with every demonstration of growth, they are closer to being grown.

So when I say something like, “wow, they just grow up so fast” I realized that what I’m actually feeling is bittersweet.

As I’ve thought about it more, there’s so much complexity to the statement, “they just grow up so fast” beneath the surface. I want so badly for my kids to be mine and belong to me, but I’ve come to accept that they don’t and they never have.

Yes, on the one hand I can pretend that my kids are mine and they belong to Robyn and me. We love them so dearly. We pour so much time into them. We have sacrificed so much for them. We are their parents. They are our responsibility. They are our children. They have to belong to us.

What makes this so bittersweet is even though we think it so, they do not actually belong to us. These sons of ours are growing and they’re going to keep growing. And as they grow, they’re going to affect the world around them. There are friends they’re going to help out of tough times. There are strangers they might touch the lives of without even knowing it. There are neighborhoods they’ll live in, companies they’ll work for, and causes bigger themselves they will progress forward. There are other children out there, somewhere in this world that they will marry and god-willing start families with someday. 

And if I’m being really honest with myself, if all goes to plan, our sons will outlive us and spend a significant amount of time on this earth while we’re not here. They’ll end up belonging to who they chose to spend their lives with and who they choose to devote their lives to. Not us.

So even though we raise our kids and it’s true that we’re their parents, they’re not ours. Our role is to help them grow so they can give themselves to others. Our role is to give them the gift of being good parents, and all the nourishment that good parents bring to a child. We’re merely stewards of this part of their journey on the earth. They don’t belong to us and they never really did.

What I pray for though, is that if we do right by them, and give them the gift of a good, strong, character-based upbringing they’ll want us to stick around. I pray that we do this right so that after they’re grown, they’ll choose to have us be part of their lives, even though don’t have to. They might choose us among the people they belong to. That would be a gift to Robyn and I.

Part of the unresolved grief of losing my father is rooted in this gift. When he died, I was fully grown, but just barely. I was getting to the point in life where I could choose, freely, to spend time with my parents. I realize now, that’s a gift children can give to their parents, not an obligation. I become sad when I realize that it’s a gift I always wanted to give back to my father, but I’ll never get a chance to.

There is, however, a silver lining that I try to remember. As I shared earlier, every moment where I think or say “wow, they just grow up so fast” it’s because there’s an example in front of me that our sons are growing. But even though I feel such joy to see them grow, I feel sadness that because I remember time is passing.

Those moments where they’re “growing up so fast” are also moments that show how much Robyn and I have grown.

Because along the way, our sons are helping us grow. By being parents to them, we are becoming more patient, more caring, and more selfless. By letting us parent them, they are pushing our hearts to open wider and to be more grateful for the lessons that come from suffering. They, too, are strengthening Robyn and I’s marriage by giving us a common purpose to work together on.

I feel an almost divine gratitude for the gifts our sons are giving us and the lessons they are teaching us. Even though every moment I notice their growth I feel a deflating sadness for the fleeting sands of time, I also feel so grateful that they are teaching my soul to be purer and more virtuous. It’s truly bittersweet.