Month: October 2015

I came to the decision early on in this process to limit my posts about divorce. It isn’t fair to the ex to go on and on about such things. Therefore, this isn’t a post about divorce, but a post about parenting in the after. As much as I like to think I consider the impact of divorce on kids, it isn’t something I actually know how to consider. I can speculate and presume for days. I can fall back on the old adage, ‘they’re young and will get over it’ but the truth is I don’t know. What I do know is that it is hard for kids as young as mine to really comprehend divorce beyond the confusion of having two homes, two separate lives, and two separate sets of parents. It seems that for me, the youngest is having the hardest time dealing with all of it; he doesn’t quite know how to react.

Kids react differently to stressors and divorce is a greater form of that. It is a permanent condition that fractures both trust and understanding, taking away a child’s ability to be truly comfortable at ‘home’ given that often home shifts every few days. I struggle with that aspect of it personally. I will never get used to hearing my kids talk about my house or mommy’s house, never once deigning to call either their home. I also struggle with the idea that when they are with one parent they are missing the other. This temporary yet regularly scheduled sense of loss will indeed follow them throughout childhood. I don’t know what impact it will have on them emotionally, short of resulting in my trying even harder to enjoy the moments we have together and thus possibly providing unrealistic expectations of how parent-child relationships are supposed to be.  I do it because I love them and part of that love is wanting to protect them and wanting them to feel safe. I want to be a good dad, but I don’t want that to mean that they don’t miss their mom. I want her to be a good mom, but I don’t want that to mean they don’t miss me.

Parenting is hard with both parents, but parenting in the after of divorce is something I’m learning to live with.

 

I figured out a pattern: When I get the rule out early in the day I tend to write more that evening. This is not to say the rule is a chore, but instead is a catalyst; a responsibility that reminds me of what I need to do in order to feel satisfied with my day. Writing brings me complete satisfaction. My worst day ever was better than it should have been because I wrote. I unburdened myself of the enormous pile of words laying on my psyche.

When I was a kid, I decided that lies were like thin layers of cloth one placed on top of their consciousness. The more lies the harder it becomes for your thoughts to shine through. The blog is not that kind of weight, but the general idea of the thought was that these lies become, like everything else, responsibilities and responsibilities are what shape you and create the pathways of what you are able to do.

The more I step into the writer’s life, the more I feel capable of doing. I feel strong and proud about the work I am starting to put forth as a writer and as a teacher as well. I think that feeling good about these things I do lead to doing these things better.

There ain’t nothing better than that.

Ben Carson isn’t the guy.

I know a lot of people are high on the image of Carson, a true-speaking Washington outsider with supposedly hardline Republican principals and  , apparently, the appeasing skin color. I am not high on him at all. He is a smart man, but smart isn’t enough to be a president. He is fragmented and carries a tone that suggests that he would struggle in high-stakes negotiations with world leaders and would be unable to handle the press. Basically, as a charismatic figure, he is no Reagan. He is no Obama. He’s a Bush. No, not the good one.

In terms of the democratic race, there isn’t a story there. The news keeps trying to make one, because they have to say something, but there isn’t anything there. No fire but lots of smoke and mirrors. Clinton is going to be the nominee and the voters know it. Do I want her to be my president? Not particularly. I am not excited by the prospect of a Clinton white house (that isn’t run by Bill, of course), but I respect that the White House will stay the course and, unfortunately, continue this cycle of political disarray that has become the way our government operates. I am less excited about the prospect of a hardline Republican in cahoots with a Republican senate and house that repeals everything from health care (what a mess that would be) to women’s rights and goes hunting for Reagan-era economic policies in an era that has evolved so far beyond those antiquated structures that to go back would be tantamount to American economic suicide.

So yeah, I’m back on Trump again.

 

Lately I’ve become the kind of guy who finds fault in stuff. I will, for example, look at an event I’m a part of and dissect the planning and execution, finding holes and complaining about how things could have been so much better. Still, I remain the guy on the other side of that fence who has planned events and had holes and felt pretty darn annoyed when someone pointed out all the things that sucked and overlooked the good. So, I’ve been on both sides of it and I understand intimately the amount of work it takes to put on an event, run a team, etc.

Still I complain.

I don’t think that makes me a jerk. I think it is important to point out flaws in the system in order to improve the system. It is equally important to handle it respectfully, if bluntly, though the two never seem to have much in common. I fear that too often people are overly concerned with the feelings of the individuals who are messing up and less concerned about conveying the information accurately. Its one of those, “We don’t want Adam to feel bad, but…” situations.

Fortunately, I’m not talking about anything or anyone specific today. It is just a thought bubble that popped up while I was developing a calendar of the stuff I need to do and plan over the next 21 days.  Yes, three weeks from now I expect to have a great deal of stuff handled and be in a position where, moving forward, life is organized enough to provide me with room to relax and focus on self-confidence and self-improvement. These are the areas that take the biggest hit when I am swamped, backlogged, and struggling to find balance.

Fortunately, these are the things that are buoyed by a healthy support structure. I’m working on that part too.

Some Thoughts:

1. Football: Giants are tied for first in the NFC East and will move to 1st all alone if they win and the Cowboys take that (inevitable) loss to the Patriots. I’m excited about this season, in spite of what was perceived (prematurely) as a bad start. Still, we could use a good defensive trade… or Landry. We would benefit from that dude…

I decided, on a bit of a lark, to move the waiver to Tuesday’s this season. The thought behind this is that it makes more sense to talk about players being added and dropped when the information could prove useful as opposed to after the wire has already ended on a Wednesday. Now I will probably reflect on some losses and gains come Wednesdays, but for now I am content with discussing player movements at a more relevant time.

One player move that worked in the short term was the pickup of Dunbar (RB) for the Cowboys. He was a PPR pickup and paid out some as a flex this week. It wasn’t terribly much but it floated me and my partner to a win. Of course, he tore his knee up in that game so he will be on the IR moving forward. Who should I replace him with at flex? There are a handful of choices.

Eric Decker/Leonard Hankerson, WR
Flex is about a playmaker who gets points. Decker has fit quite naturally into his #2 position, and generates +10 points each time he plays, with a possibility of breaking 20 every game. I mean EVERY game. Hankerson is a feast or famine option based on how well Julio Jones is being held in check. I’d go for Decker if available.

Kick Pick
The kicker is an oft overlooked position that has increasing value this season, given the proliferation of sputtering offenses. To that end I suggest bringing in a streamer. There is still enough talent out there that you are best off taking the week by week look for the best possible D. Matchup. Few teams are getting shut out. Most are putting up 9, and we know how they get there.

D-Nice
Don’t fret if you cannot get the Broncos or the Seahawks. Odds are the Giants are available. I’m serious. Though often laughed at due to a lack of real starpower on the D-line, the Giants have quietly become a force to be reckoned with. Considering their schedule moving forward, I think there is real hope here.

 

My mid-kid was flipping through some of my books today, eyeballing stuff i’ve published and growing more and more curious with each turning page. It helped remind me that I keep my boys out of a great deal of my life, peeling back the layers of onion at a rate I find appropriate. Perhaps what I find appropriate isn’t the way to go. These are curious boys who deserve to know more about their pop (nope, can’t say pop and feel like I belong to this century–dad it is) and what he does when they aren’t around.

I started reading around them more–monkey see monkey do. It half-worked for the kittens when their mom attempted to train them. I figure it ought to work for the boys, but so far the 50/50 rule applies. Maybe introducing them to the writer’s life will work at that same rate or better. I’m hopeful.

Some Thoughts:

1. Before long I’ll have outpaced even the Shadowrun years with this post…
2. Giants and Jets and Bills remaining schedules are conducive to winning. What if these three teams wind up in the playoffs (with the latter two being AFC wildcards behind those dang Patriots)? Best FB year ever.
3. What would make it better would be if Landry was traded to the Giants, giving us Cruz, Landry, Randle, and Beckham. The trade seems very unlikely, because Landry represents talent and heart, but the G-men need that 4th wide and then need a TE and maybe a few DE to be really tough.
4. 99 Homes looks very interesting… or really stupid. The director, Ramin Bahrani is the real deal.
5. Refs stole the game from the Lions tonight. The VP of officiating straight up admitted it.
6. All day McDonalds bfast is a thing. Wait… I don’t care.

At the beginning of this new week I am excited to note that I have been getting into a good routine with getting work done and moving past simply catching up on classes. Now, I’m not there yet, but I’m getting closer. The stuff about decluttering my life is a huge part of that. The rest of what is happening has to do with recognizing that opportunity is a fickle sort of thing and you mustn’t ignore it. I choose not to ignore it ever again.

So, here I am reflecting on all of this and still, in the corner of my mind, carrying all of that stuff around from yesterday and trying to unpack what it means. In terms of the football stuff, I recognize that the coach, being the leader of a winning high school program, has other things going on. The larger program, his actual job, acquires the greater part of his mental energy. This smaller team is really about a father teaching a son his trade, and that can be dangerous, because it can prevent him from recognizing that the rest of us are fathers and mothers with as much at stake and some of us have been down there between the hash marks and recognize what we are doing as giving our kids an opportunity to experience something we loved. Beyond that, it can be hard to be a winner and have a system and recognize that your system might not work under all conditions.

Still, meditation teaches me to accept and appreciate all situations as temporary and to get out of them what I can. I can learn a lot about me from what I am watching them go through and how I am reacting. I can also learn about myself by what I choose to do moving forward…

Especially if what I choose to do is nothing at all.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Very successful day for my pro football teams. Someone had to lose and I am grateful that it was the Bills. I only like the Bills because of Rex Ryan, and that cannot supersede my Giant fan-ness. The Jets handled business across the pond and now have a well deserved rest week.
2. Fantasy isn’t looking as epic. I’m in a battle in both leagues and it comes down to RB and QB play tonight from both teams.

At some point frustration just boils over. It doesn’t necessarily come from one thing or even two, but once it does it isn’t long before I’m some blog bound version of Lewis Black just spitting vitriolic verse after vitriolic verse with no end in sight. The tipping point came near half-time in the pee wee tackle football game when my son, who’d only been a part of less than a handful of snaps till then, trotted off the field after a on-sides kick and fixed me with ‘the look’. I’m intimately familiar with the look. I taught it to him. Its the look that says, WTF am I even doing here, and please realize that from this moment forward I fully intend to check the F out. Moments later a teammate who does get minutes came over to the sideline, motioned for my son to get up and then proceeded to take his seat.

I was done.

Then my boys told me they were done. Looks like both of my football age kids have decided to take a break from tackle next fall season. They explained that the issue was boredom and lack of enjoyment. Both recognize that there is little to know chance of them playing on the offensive side of the ball except as linemen. Neither are over 68 lbs, so even that proposition isn’t going to yield much success or joy for the sport. In fact, the joy for the sport has largely been killed off in both boys. I’m not surprised. They spend the majority of their practices standing in a straight line, watching the starters practice, or getting pummeled by linemen at least twice their size. This is hardly acceptable, but even less so when you consider that we have a roster no larger than 18 and most practices and games we only have 16 players and start 11. Of the remaining 5 non-starters, only two get the minimum or near minimum in snaps allowed for players (5). The other three see limited and situational action–mostly as linemen. In fact, unless you’re a starter you’re only ever coming in on offense as a lineman. My boys come in on defense as cornerbacks, and the older one, who isn’t much for tackling, doesn’t see hardly any time at all on that side of the ball either. In fact, only 2-3 players ever touch the ball on offense. It has become so predictable that this last game I watched the opposing coach point out the offensive play while we were breaking huddle. He did this multiple times. So, is it really a surprise when they decide football is crap and they ought to stick to soccer where they can get minutes and have practices that actually challenge then within their zone of proximal development?

Now its a rant.

Meanwhile I am here fighting a kitten invasion. I didn’t realize how much of a cat person I wasn’t until I had five. It is beyond reasonable to have that much raw kitten energy (and training ‘accidents’) under one roof. It is clearly time for these little guys and gals to move on before they decide this is gonna be their home for ever.

I could go on, but I promised I’d keep these blogs to ten minutes…

I stumbled across The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and realized that my finding that book was no accident. I think I’ve been looking for it for a while; struggling to figure out why, despite having a large home, I never have room for anything. That question was answered straight away: I keep a great deal of stuff I don’t need.

I started cutting back on clutter this summer, hoping to affect my kids in some way. I’ve become increasingly aware of this responsibility I have as a father to set a good example for the boys around me and to be a really good person so that they know what being good looks like and hopefully make the decision to be good as well. This choice is more about keeping only what we need and gaining a better appreciation of what we have in the process. We do in fact have a lot of extraneous junk. I’m talking straight up trash–old pieces of leftover paper from cutouts and letters from stick on letter packs that were never used. This is solely the hall closet, mind you. I have a lot more to dig through before I hit the gold mine of stuff to get rid of.

It ought to take us a few weeks to really pare down, but this is the right way to go.

I’ve posted a lot of words this year about youth football and how I’ve felt about the season thus far. I go back and forth about my motives here. It is hard to get a real sense of what is brewing beneath all of the personal disappointment and confusion I feel about how my own children are being utilized on the team. I am used to watching my boys be team MVP candidates and, at the very least, be in the conversation for playing time. It is a hard shot to go from that to hoping my kids get in the game for at least five plays over the span of two hours. Still, as I continue to unpack the way I was feeling and process everything I watch go down in practice and on the field, I am closer to recognizing the real issue at play here: I am noticing a groundswell around youth football in the way it is played and reacted to. We are quickly taking sides for or against a sport that isn’t going away and in that we are losing sight of and ability to control the real issue at play here, which is how do we make this sport we love more safe for the people we love who are playing it?

I read an article on Grantland about the recent death of High School player Evan Murray that stated, “American football is the great, gravitational force at the center of the universe in which our spectacle sports operate. It is fine to operate from the moral high ground, but the fact remains that the existential crisis of physical destruction in American football is an existential crisis at the heart of American sports.” There is truth in those words and truth in the idea that, perhaps, we shouldn’t let our kids play this sport. Well, I prefer they play the sport now and develop the fundamentals for safety instead of being thrust into it at an age and a style of coaching more concerned with wins (and thus job security) than the safety of the kids. It is a slippery slope at all levels. Coaches and players and parents want wins. We want to cheer the big hits and in fact do cheer the hits that end with a player being carted off the field. As a result, we lean on the players and plays that get the wins and the big cheers.

Ostensibly, my son is not being given the chance to do what he is good at, which is utilize his speed, because he hasn’t shown that toughness to go out there and tackle the way some of the other kids do. I get it. When I played the first thing the coaches did was throw me, a raw walk-on, onto special teams and demand that I lay out to bring down the returner. What my boys’ coach did was to throw my eldest on the offensive line and tell him to block boys who are, at the lightest, twenty pounds heavier than his 68 lb frame. It is worse in practice where he lines up against kids who are anywhere from 120 to 187lbs and is expected to hold them back for ten seconds. That is when he isn’t lined up against his 65 lb little brother in one on one drills, which is a whole different set of issues a father can only hope he doesn’t have to deal with (fortunately, I turned it around so they war on the field and not in the living room).

I will continue to unpack this and continue to search for understanding. I know this: I am spending a great deal of mental energy thinking about coaching and I’m not actually coaching right now. That seems like a waste of psychological resources.