I am not prepared to say my childhood was good. Such terms are relative to the people you end up spending your life around. At the same time I am not going to say my childhood was bad. I see situations in writings and on the news that suggest it could’ve been much worse. I feel the only way to know the value of your own childhood is through experiencing that of another child–walking a mile in their shoes or even just watching from the sidelines. I did that tonight. After an incredibly long and rewarding evening of coaching football, I slumped against the bathroom wall to monitor my 4 yr old as he played in the tub. It took me back to I time when I did just that, and the memories warmed me.
I lived three distinctly different childhoods. The early years were defined by my stepdad. I went everywhere and did everything with him. He passed when I was 12, a devastating moment that ushered in the second phase of childhood. A year after his passing I was dumped on my birth father’s doorstep in Long Island (somehow I’d become unmanageable in that time). This began the second, and terribly short-lived, phase of my childhood. The last cut a scar across the high school years when the major questions like ‘who are you dating’ were replaced by, ‘where are you living tonight? tomorrow? next month?’ I spent time staying with my mom when she let me, my grandma, friends, and two terrifying nights in a shelter.
Looking at my little guy now, I can see he is well into that first memorable phase of life. He’s lucky to have a mom that thinks the world of him, and a dad that wants to be around him to cuddle him and make him feel loved. With xmas closing in I am still scrambling to find gifts for my boys. Deep down inside I hope they recognize that the gifts don’t matter as much as being there does. In a few years they’ll be pre-teens and I don’t know what that phase of life is going to look like. I have no expectations of dying, but I’m not the one who picks such things. I know what it was like to age without a true father. I don’t feel I was enough of a pain to justify the hell I went through as a teen, but I could see any single mom saddled with 3 boys losing her mind and taking that hurt and rage out on her boys the way it happened to me. I was an only child and look how that situation turned out.
I also can’t spend to many moments worrying about tomorrow, because today is happening right now. He’s still there, steps away, playing with his Thomas the Train and making believe the train can also be a boat. He’s taking hold of his imagination and letting magical worlds unfurl themselves. He is doing exactly what he should be doing right now, so I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.