epilepsy dad

Tag: family

  • Once a Month

    Once a Month

    The text came in at 7:15 on a Thursday night. Hey. Please do me a favor and play tomorrow. No charge. I hate 5 players. Messes up the drills. Pleeeeeeze.

    I’d told him a few weeks earlier that I was cutting back. Tennis had been my thing for years. I liked the people. I liked him. I’d driven him to a cataract surgery once, sat in the waiting room like it was nothing. We had a rhythm on the court, the kind that builds up over enough Saturdays that you stop thinking about it.

    The divorce didn’t leave room for it. French lessons went first. I’m still doing Duolingo, which keeps something alive even if it’s not the same as sitting across from a real person working through conversation. Guitar lessons went too, mine, not his. His stayed. That wasn’t a hard call.

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  • To Live Without You

    To Live Without You

    Perhaps that is what it means to be a father — to teach your child to live without you.

    Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

    Sometimes I think that’s exactly right.

    Sometimes I think it’s only half of it.

    The practical side I understand. Teaching him to live without me means teaching him what will hold him up when I’m not there. How to shave. How to read a label at the grocery store, compare prices, figure out what to make with what’s available. How to take his medications, manage a schedule, navigate a system that wasn’t built with him in mind. Life skills, one by one, transferred from my hands to his.

    Some of those I’ve been teaching deliberately. Some of them he’s picked up on his own without me realizing. He learned to trim his nails while I wasn’t paying attention. He manages more than I sometimes give him credit for.

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  • The Thing About Ted Lasso

    The Thing About Ted Lasso

    I’ve written about Ted Lasso before. About curiosity, about being curious not judgmental. That’s the part of him that’s easy to take. The warmth, the belief in people, the way he walks into a room and makes everyone feel like they matter.

    But lately I’ve been thinking about the part that’s harder to see.

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  • He Just Knows

    He Just Knows

    There’s a term for the feeling that you’re not as good as people think you are. That you’ve fooled them somehow, and eventually they’ll figure it out. That your success is luck or accident rather than skill or effort. Impostor syndrome is real. It keeps genuinely talented people from putting their work into the world, from taking the seat, from raising their hand.

    My son doesn’t have it.

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  • Spikes on the Seismograph

    Spikes on the Seismograph

    I got feedback from the editor a few weeks ago.

    The notes were better than I expected. The voice is working. He found no places where it breaks. He called it a strong draft and said he didn’t have a long list of major overhauls. For a first editorial assessment on a memoir I wrote alone over several years, that landed well.

    But one note stayed with me.

    The arc flattens in the back half. The first seventy or eighty pages have urgency and momentum. After the new normal is established, readers lose the driving question. He wanted to feel spikes on the seismograph. Major moments, framed with more intention, so readers stay invested.

    I knew exactly what he meant. I’ve been reading spikes on a graph for twelve years. Just not a seismograph.

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