Acknowledging the first time when a son of mine lived as many days with a living, breathing father as I did is apparently not enough for me. In Balance Day, Part 1 I wrote about the experience of the day Lucas hit that mark (10 years, 290 days) and now it’s time to write about Landon doing the same. 

The moment means little to them, since their grandfather is a figment they don’t think about if I don’t mention him. But to me it’s a rite of passage, and unless there’s a miracle child coming into our family it will be the last rite I have.

So I’d better savor it, right? I’d better learn its lesson before the lesson flies away. 

Looking back on when Lucas hit 10/290, I see that I freaked out a bit. Living with a son who had more experience with a father than I ever had made me jittery and afraid to make mistakes. I knew that part of me would want to fight with him because I never got to fight with my own father, and we certainly got into battles for the sake of battles. 

At least as I enter into this second 10/290 moment, it feels like things will be different with Landon. First of all, I already did the fighting thing with Lucas. We both got bored with it and moved on, so there’s no need to replicate that human experiment. Second of all, Landon is a different kind of cat than his brother. He observes everything and nothing gets past him. He’s an amazing monitor of human emotions, and he thinks before he speaks. 

He’s also got a bit of that typical redhead vibe like his dad (especially back in the days when I was an actual redhead): sensitive and quick to anger. And it’s the redhead in Landon that I worry about, because I essentially killed my sensitive redhead to survive and I don’t want the same thing to happen to him. 

I don’t want the same thing to happen to his older brother, either, which means I need to use this 10/290 mark to launch myself into something else I never got to experience with my father: understanding. 

With both kids, but especially with my fellow redhead, I’ve found myself mentally saying When I was his age an awful lot. When I was his age I had more responsibility. When I was his age I had a paper route. When I was his age I didn’t need so much help from my mom. When I was his age I didn’t get upset so easily. And this is true, but I keep on forgetting the unpleasant reason why. 

By the time I was Landon’s age I’d already had a disappearing father for a year and a half. We didn’t play together. We barely talked after he got back from the mental hospital. I took care of my own shit to whatever extent I could because I knew I was on my own for the long haul. I wasn’t going to cry at my father’s funeral, dammit, and I didn’t. I decided I was going to be the survivor, the one who kept it together, and to do it I had to kill something inside me: the sensitive redhead who, in reality, was just a normal ten-year-old kid who got sad easier than most and mad easier than most.

Being a ten year old kid who’s emotionally on his own, and who feels like the world is a shitty place with all its cards stacked against him, completely sucks. I don’t wish it on anybody, because it steals away the freedom of childhood. When I find myself saying When I was his age about Landon, I’m comparing a sensitive but happy and curious young kid with my ten-year-old self, who lived 100% of his time in fight-or-flight survival mode. 

What father would ever want my kind of childhood for his own children? People who want to “toughen up” their kids, I suppose, but they have problems I don’t want. On this 10/290, I don’t want to toughen my kids up, or fight with them, or make them experience continuous fight-or-flight tension that stunts their love for the world. I want to play with them, enjoy life with them, together, makes jokes and watch stupid movies with them. 

I don’t want to keep comparing my sons—who live a cushier life than I did, no doubt—to the person I was When I was their age because part of me developed much, much more slowly than it might have. I don’t mean the assertive part, though that took plenty of time too. I mean the part that’s gentle, loving, able to find quiet in everyday life. 

How can you find quiet when you’re constantly in fight-or-flight from the shithole of your own tortured emotions? It took me decades to even begin looking for this kind of quiet, this simple being-in-time and being-in-place and being-in-self, and just because it took me that long doesn’t mean the same should be true of my sons. 

So my focus as a parent shifts now to making sure I don’t kill the sensitive kid inside of my children. That starts with putting an end to the When I was his age comparison, because at their age I lived in fear and desperation. 

What father would want that for his children, even in the name of machismo and “mental toughness”? I’m going to get all Biblical on y’all, all Gospel-y, and quote Matthew 7:9-10:

Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?

Two lives depend on me NOT being that kind of father. Three, actually. Because if I give my sons fight-or-flight instead of being-in-self, it’s not just them who will pay for it. If I inflict that on them, I’m throwing myself back into the hell of my own tortured emotions and tossing away everything I’ve learned crawling out.