epilepsy dad

Tag: family

  • Some Good, Some Bad

    Some Good, Some Bad

    We were in the car, on the way to an appointment. It was after school, and we had done our “three things” conversation already, where he tells me three things about his school day.

    We passed a car on the side of the road, and the conversation shifted to owning a car. Maintenance, or insurance, something about what it costs to keep one running.

    “At least I don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “Because I can’t drive.”

    He said it the way he’d say anything else. No weight on it. It sat in the middle of a sentence about something other than him.

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  • 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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