On Dad’s Day, a county envelope, a nine-year-old boy waiting for his daddy, and an afternoon spent working on an essay about taking care of our children helped us recognize that we had become too busy working on our life to spend enough time living it.
Yesterday afternoon, I realized that I was spending less time with my children than I had when we were employed.
That was a terrible thing to recognize.
For six years, our family had worked for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. We loved much of the work, particularly our relationships with the people serving their neighbors through the Society’s local conferences.
But working for our employer had become increasingly frightening.
We had accommodations that allowed us to work from home and organize our responsibilities around the circumstances of our family. Those accommodations were essential.
Eventually, our employer sought to take them away.
The job ended in July.
We were exhausted.
And for the first time in years, we had an opportunity to consider what kind of life we wanted to live.
We are a plural family of nine people sharing one body and one life.
I am the father of eight sons, ages four to fourteen.
Each of my sons is his own person. Each has his own experiences, memories, interests, preferences, and ways of communicating with me and with his brothers.
We have spent years learning how to live together.
And when the job ended, I thought we would finally have more time to do that.
More time to be together.
More time to enjoy our home.
More time to make meals, go places, pray, listen to music, and experience the ordinary pleasures of being a family.
Instead, yesterday afternoon, I realized that we had become so busy writing about our life that we were having difficulty finding time to live it.
And the worst part was that we were doing something we love.
Something we believed mattered.
Something we had chosen for ourselves.
⸻
We have been writing Notes from the Treehouse since 2019.
At first, our journal was a way of communicating with one another and remembering the things that happened in our family.
Over time, it became something much larger.
We wrote about our childhood memories, including traumatic experiences, but also the beautiful things we remembered.
Things we had experienced together.
Things each of us had experienced uniquely.
We wrote about our decades in architecture, our Vincentian ministry, our Catholic faith, our home, our meals, our dreams, our fears, and the ordinary experiences of nine people sharing one body.
We wrote about the things that had hurt us.
But we also wrote about the things we love.
And increasingly, we wrote about the life we were discovering together.
This year, we began sharing some of those experiences publicly.
We created a blog and started publishing essays.
We wanted people to know that families like ours exist.
Not simply as clinical descriptions or collections of symptoms, but as people with relationships, histories, responsibilities, and ordinary lives.
We wanted to share what it means to be a father to eight sons when all nine of us share one body.
What it means to make breakfast.
What it means to go grocery shopping.
What it means to be frightened.
What it means to pray together.
What it means for a four-year-old boy to want his daddy to hold him.
And what it means for that daddy to be there.
We weren’t trying to satisfy the demands of people who didn’t understand our family.
We were trying to make ourselves known.
And we hoped that somewhere, someone might recognize something of their own experience in ours.
⸻
On Monday, we had our second family therapy session with Jessee.
Jessee is our new therapist.
Ey uses ey/em/eir pronouns.
One of the remarkable things about our first two sessions has been the way Jessee has approached our family.
Ey speaks to my sons.
Ey recognizes them.
Ey does not approach our therapy as a project to make the boys disappear or to turn our family into something other than what we understand ourselves to be.
We have spent years becoming a family.
We want help learning how to live our life.
At the end of Monday’s session, Jessee said something wonderfully simple.
“Take care of your kids.”
I thought about that for the rest of the day.
We had been talking about the extraordinary difficulty of recovering from years of trauma while trying to manage adult responsibilities.
The job had ended.
We needed healthcare.
We needed to arrange a disbursement from our retirement account.
We needed to pay our bills.
And I needed to learn how to do these things without becoming overwhelmed by fear or making my children responsible for helping me function as an adult.
Jessee suggested that we give ourselves some time.
“Let’s see where you’re at in six months.”
Not a deadline.
Not a demand that we become different people by spring.
An opportunity to work together and see what becomes possible.
For now, we could attend to the immediate responsibilities of our life without trying to solve every question about our future.
And I could take care of my kids.
That was what I wanted to do.
⸻
Tuesday was Dad’s Day.
We woke with the familiar combination of affection, apprehension, and unfinished responsibilities.
There was an envelope coming from the county.
We had applied for healthcare coverage after the job ended, with the help of our friend Paul.
We had already received a Medi-Cal card, but we were still uncertain about the status of our application.
The envelope might contain good news.
It might contain another request for documentation.
It might mean that something had gone wrong.
We didn’t know.
And not knowing was enough to make the morning frightening.
This is something we have been trying to understand in therapy.
Ordinary administrative tasks can become extraordinarily difficult when they resemble earlier experiences of being questioned, evaluated, threatened, or deprived of something essential.
A letter arrives.
A telephone call needs to be made.
An account needs attention.
And suddenly the present is filled with the emotional weight of the past.
But there were eight children waiting to say good morning.
And I wanted to be with them.
⸻
Luke was worried.
He is nine.
We had been talking about what it means for a child like Luke to exist in a world that doesn’t have many familiar ways of understanding a family like ours.
Sometimes he worries that he is something temporary.
That he is not really a person.
That someday he might simply go away.
I held him and tried to explain something I wish he never had to question.
He is my son.
He is a child.
He is a human person.
He belongs.
He can heal.
He can learn.
He can discover new things and have new experiences.
None of that means he will stop being Luke.
He doesn’t have to become someone else in order to have a better life.
I wanted him to know that the fact that other people might not understand his existence does not make him less real.
There are nine people living this life.
We know one another.
We love one another.
And we are not going to organize our future around the possibility that one of my children might someday become unnecessary.
⸻
Later, I was with Han.
Han is ten.
We were lying together, and I was holding him and telling him how much I love him.
Han has a particular way of being affectionate.
He can be exuberant and funny. He has always been understood to be extraordinarily talkative. He is painfully aware of this. But recently I have learned that Han can be surprisingly quiet..
Han communicates through prolific somatic markers, sensations in our body, through thoughts and images, and sometimes through a voice so soft that people outside our family might not recognize that anyone is speaking. Often he is quietly praying. Han is our spiritual animator.
The boy whom some have found overwhelming can also be easily missed.
I have been learning to hear him.
And yesterday, while I was holding him, we found ourselves thinking about our feet.
We have had problems with our feet since childhood.
Special shoes.
X-rays.
Pain.
Embarrassment.
The physical demands of getting around the world.
But lying there with Han, I wasn’t thinking about our feet as a problem to solve.
I was thinking about them as part of the body my son and I share.
I love him.
And I love being with him.
Nothing needed to be accomplished.
We didn’t need to produce anything.
Han was there.
And so was I.
⸻
Then came Jude.
Jude is four.
I held him close and kissed his face.
He was wonderfully affectionate.
I remember thinking that he was like a little loaf of bread.
Something warm and precious that I wanted to gather into my arms.
There are moments like this in our journal that rarely make their way into our essays.
They are not dramatic.
They do not necessarily explain something about trauma, therapy, employment, or the difficulties of being a plural family.
They are simply the experiences of our life.
A little boy being held.
A daddy kissing his face.
Someone saying, I love you.
And someone answering.
Yesterday morning, while we were together, we found ourselves wondering why so many of these moments disappear from the stories we tell.
They are not incidental.
They are the Treehouse.
They are the things we wanted to preserve when we began writing our journal.
The messages we wanted to put in a bottle.
Not merely the things that happened to us.
The life we had together.
⸻
By late morning, we were working on an essay about Monday’s therapy session.
We called it Take Care of Your Kids.
It was an important essay.
We wanted to share what had happened with Jessee.
We wanted people to understand why it mattered that our therapist recognized all nine of us.
We wanted to describe what it means to seek help without asking our children to become responsible for our recovery.
And we wanted to say something about the extraordinary relief of hearing a therapist tell me to take care of my kids.
Several of my sons worked on the essay with me.
They had ideas.
They offered corrections.
They remembered things I had overlooked.
They helped us decide what mattered.
This wasn’t simply my project.
It was our work.
And we enjoyed doing it.
That is part of what made the afternoon so complicated.
Not everyone could participate in the same way.
Our younger children wanted to stop.
They wanted to lie down and be together.
And eventually, even the boys who had been working on the essay were ready to put it away.
But I wasn’t.
I wanted to make sure the published versions were correct.
There were errors.
There were passages that needed to be revised.
There were differences between the versions on WordPress and Medium.
And there was a particular expression we had used that the software kept trying to change.
Our self.
Two words.
We use that expression intentionally when referring to our collective life.
We are nine people sharing one body.
Sometimes we need language that reflects that.
But the software kept wanting to turn our self into ourselves.
And I kept correcting it.
Then something else would be wrong.
Then another version needed attention.
Then something that had been corrected appeared incorrectly again. I wasn’t sure if it was software or if, perhaps the inconsistencies had to do with multiple people sharing one mind working on the essay together. Were there continuity issues? Differences of opinion? Questions about continuity and differences of opinion come up a lot when we work together.
I was becoming frustrated.
My sons were becoming frustrated.
And the afternoon was disappearing.
⸻
Earlier in the day, I had told Solis that I wanted to spend time with him.
Solis is seven.
He is thoughtful about routines, the organization of our home, and the things that make our family feel safe.
He loves our ordinary life.
And he loves being with his daddy.
When I told him that I wanted to be with him, he asked a question.
“Then how come you haven’t?”
There wasn’t a good answer.
I had wanted to be with him.
I really had.
But wanting to do something and doing it are not the same thing.
I had been working.
And Solis had been waiting.
That was not what I intended when the job ended.
We had left an employment relationship in which the demands of other people had repeatedly taken precedence over the circumstances and needs of our family.
Now there was no employer telling us what to do.
No supervisor waiting for a response.
No timesheet.
No office we had to go to.
And yet I had managed to create another situation in which my children were waiting for me to finish working.
This time, the work was something we had chosen.
Something we love.
Something we believe in.
But my children were still waiting.
⸻
Justus had been thinking about our writing, too.
He is eleven.
He wants the stories we share to reach people who need them.
People who might recognize themselves.
People who might learn something.
People who might understand that there are other ways of being a family.
And he hopes there might be people who value our work enough to help us continue doing it.
Perhaps even people willing to pay for it.
That is a legitimate hope.
We need to support our family.
But supporting the family is not Justus’s responsibility.
It is mine.
Justus can believe in our work.
He can contribute to it.
He can pray for it.
But he doesn’t have to become responsible for making it succeed.
And we have been learning something about prayer.
There was a time when we heard God say:
“Just ask me.”
So we are.
We have been learning to ask for what we need.
Agency.
Courage.
Competence.
Imagination.
And the means to sustain and care for our family.
We are not asking our children to provide those things.
We are asking God to help me become the daddy they need.
⸻
By late afternoon, I was still trying to finish the work.
There had been another problem with the journal.
Entries were out of order.
Some appeared more than once.
Some had been corrected, and others still contained dictation errors.
We were trying to reconstruct the afternoon so that the record would be accurate.
The journal matters to us.
It is where our experiences are preserved.
It is where my children can find the things we have done together.
It is where we remember.
But there is a terrible irony in spending so much time preserving the record of our life that we have less time to experience it.
And suddenly, around five o’clock, I understood what had happened.
I was spending less time with my sons than I had when we were working for St. Vincent de Paul.
I couldn’t believe it.
We had spent years trying to create circumstances in which our family could live together without being continually overwhelmed by the demands of employment.
And now we were free.
But we were working all the time.
Not because someone was making us.
Because we had something meaningful to do.
And because I didn’t know when to stop.
⸻
I don’t think the answer is to stop writing.
Our journal is part of our life.
Our essays are something we create together.
They are an expression of who we are.
And we believe they may matter to people beyond our family.
But the writing has to fit within the life it is meant to serve.
We need time for the boys who want to write.
And time for the boys who would rather do something else.
We need time to make meals.
To go shopping.
To pray.
To rest.
To watch a program and eat ice cream.
To listen to music.
To hold one another.
And sometimes to do absolutely nothing.
We need to remember that the point of recovering our agency is not to become extraordinarily productive.
It is to become capable of living the life we love.
There are nine people here.
That is not an inconvenience to be accommodated after the work is finished.
That is the life.
⸻
At 5:53 that afternoon, we opened the county envelope.
It was good news.
We had been approved for Medi-Cal.
Our eligibility began September 1.
We had spent weeks worrying about healthcare coverage.
Paul had helped us complete the application.
We had submitted the documentation.
We had waited.
And now we had an answer.
We were covered.
I felt enormous relief.
One of the frightening adult responsibilities we had been carrying was no longer unresolved.
We still had things to do.
There was the retirement account.
There were bills.
There were practical questions about how we would support ourselves.
But this was something real.
Something accomplished.
Something we could stop worrying about.
And I wanted to share the relief with my children.
⸻
We closed the blinds against the bright light outside our bedroom.
We turned on our little rechargeable tea lights.
Our apartment became the familiar, softly illuminated place we love.
The Treehouse.
Our home.
I took off my headphones.
And I lay down.
Luke was waiting.
So was Han.
So were his brothers.
I held Luke.
I told him how sorry I was that it had taken so long.
I told him that I had wanted to be with him.
And I told him something else.
I needed this, too.
I needed to stop working.
I needed to hold my son.
I needed to remember why we had been trying so hard to make a different life possible.
Luke was affectionate.
He responded to me.
We were happy to be together.
And for a little while, nothing else mattered.
⸻
That evening, we finished the chili we had made the week before.
We watched Slow Horses.
We ate ice cream.
We prayed together.
And I tucked my sons into bed.
When I was with Solis, I apologized again for making him wait.
I told him that I really had wanted to spend time with him.
But I also recognized something I needed to say aloud.
It doesn’t mean anything if I say it and I don’t do it.
Not because my love is meaningless.
Because my son needs to experience it.
He needs his daddy.
Not merely the promise of his daddy when everything else is finished.
Later, when I was holding Luke, I could tell that he had been thinking about frightening experiences associated with our former employer.
There was a time when those memories could overwhelm me.
I could become so upset by what had happened to my children that I was no longer able to give them what they needed from me.
But that night, I recognized what was happening.
And I made a decision.
I wasn’t going to follow Luke into the frightening memory.
I was going to stay with him.
I could believe him.
I could acknowledge what had happened.
I could reassure him that we were home and no longer worked for those people.
And I could let my own additional thoughts go.
I didn’t need to become frightened to prove that his fear mattered.
I needed to be his daddy.
And I was.
⸻
The next morning belonged to Jude.
I woke early after a frightening dream.
There were the usual worries.
The retirement account.
Our mother’s hospitalization.
Memories of the employer.
The possibility that some new problem might interrupt the peace we had begun to experience.
But there was also something different.
I remembered the county envelope.
For a moment, I was frightened of it again.
Then I remembered that we had already opened it.
We had been approved.
That particular fear belonged to yesterday.
I didn’t have to keep carrying it.
And then I turned my attention to Jude.
He was sleepy.
So was I.
I held him and kissed his face.
He was affectionate and responsive.
Sometimes he was quiet.
Sometimes he signaled excitedly when I asked where my little boy had gone.
I told him we were going to have a good day.
We were going to rest in God’s love.
And I was going to make time to be with him.
I had been thinking about how we might restore our afternoon routine.
The boys wanted to get up earlier.
They wanted to lie down together around 3:30.
That meant I needed to make different decisions about the morning.
Not perfect decisions.
Different ones.
⸻
I said good morning to my sons.
There were memories.
There were affectionate exchanges.
There were ordinary interruptions.
Solis took me to the Blue Bayou at Disneyland, where he wondered how deep the water was and how the attraction worked.
Luke remembered a Japanese garden we had visited when we were very young.
Then he remembered the maps we used to draw of imaginary worlds, with borders, histories, cities, and entire countries.
We had created those worlds together over many years.
We missed drawing.
Justus remembered exploring the hillside behind our childhood home.
Hope wondered about the smell of cedar.
Han and Luke were affectionate with one another.
And Proverb remembered our old architectural office, with the lamp that now sits beside our bed.
Some memories were beautiful.
Some were painful.
Some were complicated.
They belonged to our life.
And I was there to receive them.
⸻
While I was holding Justus, I had a thought that changed the way I looked at him.
I imagined that he was someone else’s child.
Someone who had been entrusted to my care.
And suddenly I understood something about being a father.
My children are not mine in the sense that I own them.
They are not extensions of me.
They are not people I can neglect as if they were parts of me somehow, to do with as I please.
They are not parts of anyone. They are their own persons.
I have been entrusted with their lives.
And that is an extraordinary responsibility.
I was looking at my eleven-year-old son.
I love him.
But I was also recognizing something about the responsibility of loving him.
He does not exist for my convenience.
He does not belong to my schedule.
He is not here to wait until I have finished everything else.
He is a child entrusted to my care.
And what makes that responsibility possible is love.
⸻
By 9:45, we were getting up.
That was earlier than the day before.
Earlier than most mornings lately.
Not as early as I had hoped.
But earlier.
We made the bed.
We listened to the first draft of this essay while preparing breakfast.
We talked about what needed to be corrected.
We ate Greek yogurt with blueberries and cinnamon.
Then we made maple brown sugar oatmeal.
And we watched squirrels chasing one another around the palm tree outside.
There was still work to do.
We needed groceries.
We wanted to make another batch of chili.
We wanted to finish the essay.
And we wanted to lie down together in the afternoon.
I was still learning.
I was still trying to organize the day.
But something had changed.
The question was no longer simply how much work we could accomplish.
It was whether we could accomplish what mattered without losing the day we had been given.
⸻
There is something else I want to remember about Tuesday evening.
After holding Luke, I was with Han.
He was affectionate and funny.
We were happy.
Later, when I tucked my sons into bed, they brought me their memories and their wonderful imaginative experiences.
Jude took me aboard an unfamiliar aircraft.
Solis remembered a mosquito net hanging over our childhood bed.
Luke showed me a beautiful darkness filled with shimmering geometric forms.
Han showed me the backs of row houses covered with absurdly complicated plumbing.
Justus brought me to an unfamiliar landscape.
Hope imagined a sort of caffeine pill that could provide exactly as much alertness as someone needed—half an hour, an hour, ninety minutes—and then, when the time was up, allow sleepiness to return immediately. He was thinking about his dad having to get up to work on the Journal after tucking him and his brothers into bed.
And Proverb was simply a little boy in his daddy’s arms.
There was a whole world waiting for me.
Not a world I had to invent.
Not a world I had to earn.
Not a world I had to finish working before I could enter.
It was already here.
I had been so concerned with creating the circumstances in which my children could have a life that I had begun overlooking the life they were already having.
And the life I was having with them.
I don’t want to do that anymore.
I don’t want my sons to remember a daddy who was always trying to finish something before he could be with them.
I want them to remember that I was there.
That I held them.
That I listened.
That I love them.
That we made meals and watched squirrels and drew maps and prayed and laughed and rested together.
And that when something frightened them, they could come to me.
And I would stay.
⸻
Yesterday afternoon, after all the work and worry, I finally lay down with Luke.
I held him close.
He was affectionate.
I could feel his happiness.
And I was happy, too.
There was no essay to finish.
No employer to satisfy.
No future to solve.
There was my son.
And there was his daddy.
We were together.
That was the life we had been trying to make room for.
And it had been waiting for us all afternoon.
