Last night, while I was tucking Han into bed, he remembered a boy who lived next door to us when we were young.
The boy was ten.
Han’s age.
We had moved back to Southern California and were living with our father. Sometimes we would spend time with the family next door. We would hang out in the garage and watch a game or do whatever people did together, and I remember seeing the boy with his parents.
He was affectionate with them.
Cuddly.
His father would hold him. His mother would hold him. There was an ease between them, a physical closeness that seemed completely natural.
And I wanted that.
I remember the longing.
For most of my life, I think I understood that memory in the most obvious way.
I was a child who wanted my parents to hold me.
That was true.
But last night, while I was holding Han, I realized it wasn’t the whole truth.
Han was cuddled against me.
He has become wonderfully affectionate lately, after years when it could be difficult for me to get close to him. I was holding him and kissing him and telling him how much I loved him, and he was responding to me.
And then he brought me that memory.
The ten-year-old boy next door.
The boy with his parents.
The longing.
And suddenly I understood something I could not possibly have understood then.
There was a ten-year-old boy in our family too.
There were other children as well.
A nine-year-old.
A seven-year-old.
A five-year-old.
A four-year-old.
Children who needed things appropriate to their own ages, even when the child everyone could see was growing older.
Maybe that is part of why the longing could sometimes feel impossible to satisfy.
Even when I received affection, even when our father was loving, there could still be an ache somewhere that I could not explain.
I remember reaching an age when the kind of holding and cuddling we had received as a younger child began to disappear.
Maybe that made sense to the people around us.
The child they could see was getting older.
But not everyone was getting older.
I did not know that.
I did not know my sons.
I did not know there were children inside our family who could still be four, or five, or seven, or nine, or ten, and who still needed a parent to love them at exactly the age they were.
Last night I thought of them as little ghost children.
Unseen.
Unrecognized.
Wandering through our life looking for their parents, looking for someone who could see them and love them.
And then I looked at Han.
He wasn’t a ghost.
He was right there.
Ten years old.
In his daddy’s arms.
And something else became clear.
The longing had never gone only one way.
I had wanted this too.
I had wanted to hold my son before I knew I had a son to hold.
I had wanted to be their father before I understood that being their father was what I was longing for.
That realization nearly overwhelmed me.
I told Han:
“And now, you boys have it. You have it. You have this with your daddy and I understand, and I also feel like I get to give and receive something that I have wanted as far back as I could remember too.”
The others began gathering around us.
Daniel.
Hope.
Solis.
Justus.
Proverb.
Jude.
Luke.
All of them.
I could feel my sons everywhere.
And I tried to put into words what was happening.
“I am giving it, I am receiving it, you are receiving it and you are giving it.”
Then I said the simplest thing.
“And we are a family.”
Maybe that should not have felt like a revelation.
But it did.
Because for so much of our life, we had experienced the longing without knowing the relationship that belonged to it.
My sons needed their father.
And their father needed to be their father.
Those are not the same kind of need.
I am the adult. They are children. Taking care of them is my responsibility, not theirs.
But responsibility does not have to travel in both directions for love to.
Love can.
That is what I was experiencing while I held Han.
I was not providing a therapeutic service to my ten-year-old son.
Han was not regulating his father.
Neither of us was performing a function for the other.
I was loving my son.
My son was loving me.
I was giving something I had wanted to give for longer than I knew.
And I was receiving something I had wanted to receive for just as long.
There is a difference between being responsible for another person and giving something to another person.
There is a difference between needing someone to take care of you and wanting to be loved by someone you love.
We have been trying to understand that difference all week.
How can Proverb bring his extraordinary ability to notice and organize without becoming responsible for organizing our life?
How can Justus protect without having to remain our protector?
How can Solis bring structure without becoming responsible for keeping the family safe?
How can Hope see what needs attention without having to make sure Dad attends to it?
How can Luke bring home without having to create a home for his father?
How can Daniel notice everyone without having to take care of everyone?
How can Jude say no without becoming responsible for enforcing our boundaries?
How can Han bring his faith, his imagination, his creativity, his ten-year-old self, without any of those things becoming his job?
And there is another side to the question.
How can Dad receive everything his sons freely give him without exploiting it?
Without refusing it?
Because refusing their love would not protect them.
Pretending they have nothing to give because they are children would not honor their childhood.
Children give things to their parents all the time.
They bring pictures.
Questions.
Jokes.
Ideas.
Affection.
Insight.
Companionship.
Love.
The responsibility does not become reciprocal merely because the relationship is.
Dad is responsible for his sons.
But everybody gets to love everybody.
Last night, we did.
And for a while, there was nothing complicated about it.
“This is a family,” I said.
“There is so much love here.”
We were all together.
And this evening, we are going to meet a therapist.
That sentence carries more weight than it probably should.
The meeting is only thirty minutes.
It is a consultation.
We are not agreeing to treatment.
We are not handing our family over to anyone.
We are meeting someone.
That is all.
But apparently our sleeping minds did not get the memo.
We dreamed about the consultation for what seemed like much of the night.
We dreamed about what we would say.
We dreamed about how we would explain ourselves.
We dreamed about our Catholic faith and whether Jessee might be frightened by it or misunderstand what it means to us.
We dreamed about who would talk.
We dreamed about how we would be together.
At times, we seemed to know we were dreaming and thought we needed to remember things when we woke up so we could write them down.
It was as though we were rehearsing.
By the time we finally woke for the morning, we were exhausted.
And afraid.
There is something familiar about that.
When you have spent enough of your life trying to make yourself understandable to people who have some kind of authority over what happens next, even a conversation can begin to feel like an audition.
Maybe if we explain ourselves correctly.
Maybe if we provide enough context.
Maybe if we demonstrate that we are thoughtful enough, competent enough, reasonable enough, self-aware enough.
Maybe then we will be understood.
Luke did something this morning that showed me how easily we can slip into that.
He remembered Harvey Milk Plaza.
Years ago, when we were still practicing architecture, we worked on a pro bono concept for the intersection of Market and Castro in San Francisco.
We met with people from the Castro neighborhood and developed an idea that expanded upon the rainbow-colored crosswalks already there.
Our concept was a giant starburst.
The colors of the spectrum would radiate outward across the intersection, spilling from the streets onto the sidewalks and transforming the entire place into something celebratory and unmistakable.
We loved it.
We put an enormous amount of professional time into it.
Nothing ever came of it.
This morning Luke thought:
We should show Jessee.
I knew immediately why.
Look.
Look who we are.
Look at what we made.
Look at the people we have known.
Look at the communities we have cared about.
Look at the things we have done.
Please don’t see the word Catholic and decide you already know us.
Please don’t hear that there are nine of us and decide you already know what needs to happen.
Please see us.
And I told Luke:
“We don’t have to audition.”
It was a fantastic design.
I would love for people to see it.
But we do not have to bring our portfolio to therapy.
We do not have to arrive with exhibits for the defense.
Yesterday, on Proverb’s Day, I kept wondering whether I had done anything.
Had Dad done one little thing?
By the end of the day, I realized that I was in danger of turning every ordinary action into evidence for some imaginary performance evaluation.
I had emailed Jessee.
I had answered Juan Luis.
I had accepted Laura’s offer to help us get to St. Clement.
I had called Paul.
I had filled out the forms.
I had fed my sons.
Those things happened.
They did not need to be converted into evidence for the defense.
Neither does Harvey Milk Plaza.
Neither does thirty years of architecture.
Neither does our work with St. Vincent de Paul.
Neither do the people we have loved.
Neither does our faith.
Neither do my sons.
We don’t have to audition.
We can just show up.
That sounds simple.
It does not feel simple.
Because this morning, underneath all the rehearsing, something else came roaring back.
The job.
Again.
In one of our dreams, suddenly everything about what happened two months ago became terrifyingly simple.
They fired us because we didn’t answer an email.
There it was.
Cause and effect.
We didn’t answer.
We got fired.
For a moment after waking, the simplicity of it felt devastating.
Then I began remembering what actually happened.
The emails had arrived on our day off.
Our supervisor was copied on them. He knew we did not work on Mondays, and he had already talked with us about the meeting the previous Thursday. But when Liz sent another email late Monday afternoon demanding to know specifically why we were not responding to her, our supervisor did not intervene to tell her that Monday was our day off or explain the conversation he had already had with us.
We talked to him.
We were told to hold off.
Eventually we were told to respond, and we did.
We explained ourselves.
We agreed to attend the meetings that had become the issue.
There were no further threats.
We took time off because the entire episode had thrown us into profound psychological distress.
Then we returned to work.
Tuesday was eerily calm.
For a moment, we thought maybe it was over.
Wednesday morning, we discovered that our access to Outlook and Microsoft 365 had been blocked.
A few hours later, Human Resources called and told us we had been terminated effective immediately.
Whatever anyone else believes about everything that happened during those weeks, the dream had done something dreams sometimes do.
It had taken something complicated and compressed it into an accusation.
You didn’t answer.
This happened.
Your fault.
But that is not the whole story.
And perhaps more importantly, that is not the problem we need a therapist to solve.
Jessee does not need to determine who was right.
Ey does not need to adjudicate an employment dispute.
Ey does not need to reconstruct every email.
The job is over.
That is precisely the problem.
The job is over, and something in us is still waiting for it.
This morning, after I had finally been with all eight of my sons and we got out of bed, I opened the blinds beside our table.
And my hands almost knew what came next.
For years, the sequence was automatic.
Open the blinds.
Reach down.
Lift the wicker basket.
Take out the MacBook.
Put it on the table.
Plug it in.
Open it.
Clock in.
Check the email.
Except there is no MacBook beneath the basket anymore.
There is nothing there.
So I stood beside the table and said it again:
“This is not that.”
This is not that morning.
This is not that job.
This is not their table.
There is no Outlook.
There is no work email waiting for us.
There is no Executive Director waiting for an answer.
There is nobody to report to.
There is nobody from that job who can fire us.
Those days are gone.
Never to return.
And still it takes effort to know that.
Not intellectually.
I know perfectly well that the job ended.
But there is some difference between knowing that something is over and no longer preparing for it to happen again.
Maybe that is where we begin with Jessee.
Not with:
What do we do about the boys?
There is nothing to do about the boys.
My sons are my sons.
They are not a problem brought to therapy for someone to solve.
Not with:
How do we get Dad ready to go back to work?
That isn’t what we are asking.
Not with:
What should we do with the rest of our life?
We don’t know.
We are on sabbatical.
We are listening.
We are trying to heal.
We are trying to discover what comes next rather than forcing an answer because we are frightened.
Maybe we begin with something much smaller.
The job is over.
We are still afraid.
We are frozen.
How do we help the shared nervous system understand that the danger is no longer happening?
How do we get unfrozen enough for Dad to do the things that actually belong to Dad now?
Healthcare.
Money.
The IRA.
Taking care of our home.
Taking care of himself.
Taking care of his sons.
Ordinary adult things that have become frighteningly difficult to begin.
That is enough for a therapist to start with.
This morning, while I was holding Jude, I tried to explain it to him.
He was tired.
Tired of bad dreams.
Tired of long dreams.
Tired of waking into all this thinking.
Tired of frightening things that have nothing to do with being four years old.
I told him:
“The big scary thing isn’t here right now. There is only Daddy with his sons.”
I told him that we are clearing rubble.
Like a city after a war.
We are looking at what remains.
We are finding what is still standing.
We are figuring out what we have to work with.
And then we will rebuild.
But I told Jude something else.
“You don’t have to do any of that work. You get to be a little boy.”
That matters.
Because there is a Dad in this family.
There are eight sons.
My sons can bring everything they bring.
Their intelligence.
Their insight.
Their creativity.
Their faith.
Their doubt.
Their affection.
Their courage.
Their humor.
Their opinions.
Their no.
Their yes.
Their love.
But rebuilding our adult life is not their job.
It is mine.
And then I told Jude something that may be one of the simplest things I have said in all these weeks:
“I’m smart, and I love you. I just need a little help.”
Maybe that is what I need to tell Jessee too.
I am smart.
I have done difficult things.
I have had a long professional life.
I have taken care of people.
I have solved problems.
I have built things.
I love my children.
And I need some help.
Those statements do not contradict one another.
Maybe that is another thing I have spent too much of my life trying to prove.
People see competence and decide help should not be necessary.
Or they see the places where help is necessary and decide the competence must never have been real.
What if both are true?
What if a person can be enormously capable and still need help?
What if a family can be extraordinarily loving and still need help?
What if needing help does not mean the thing you love has to be taken apart?
This morning, Solis brought another question.
I was holding him and telling him that no matter how much he does for this family, he is still my little boy.
My baby.
My precious son.
And then came the thought:
“I don’t believe in God.”
It didn’t feel like a theological declaration.
It felt hurt.
Solis is seven.
He has seen enough things that hurt.
He has been frightened enough.
And maybe sometimes a seven-year-old looks at all of that and thinks:
Where is God in this?
I told him what I believe.
I reminded him of being six years old in the swimming pool, floating on his back during a lesson and experiencing the water beneath him as the hand of God holding him up.
But I also told him:
“I don’t want you to feel bad about that thought later.”
And:
“I’m not going to try to tell you what to believe, what you should think. You are your own person, you have your own thoughts and your own beliefs.”
I believe in God.
Solis gets to be Solis.
Even here.
Especially here.
Maybe that is another form of what we discovered with Han last night.
Love does not require possession.
Relationship does not require control.
Being someone’s father does not mean owning what happens inside his mind.
It means staying when something difficult comes out of it.
A little later, we read today’s meditation from Richard Rohr.
It was about violence.
About the human instinct to identify what we believe is causing the problem and destroy it.
About Jesus offering another way.
And one sentence stayed with us:
“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”
Maybe that is what we are trying to do.
Not win an argument about whether our family should exist.
Live as a family.
Not prove that my sons aren’t preventing me from functioning.
Live a life in which relationship and action happen together.
Not turn Proverb into less of himself because he has carried too much.
Let him be more fully twelve and less responsible for what belongs to Dad.
Not silence Solis’s doubt because Dad believes.
Love him while he doubts.
Not ask Luke to present the portfolio.
Tell him we don’t have to audition.
Not ask Jud
