remember me as a time of day

When do the kids take over responsibility for their own lives?

As a father who has messed up more than a few times with my own children, including my oldest teen-age daughter who no longer speaks to me, I have immense compassion for my friend as he tries to solve his dilemma: In one sense, he’s a Dad who loves his son and feels an obligation to help him. In another way, he also knows his son is a now man/boy who needs to be responsible for his own life if he wants to grow. In other words, he’s screwed either way.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says to me. “I feel like I can’t afford to make a mistake.”

“Don’t look at me, I have no experience with drugs,” I say to deflect. “And, I’ve made tons of mistakes with my own kids. I’m no expert.”

I’m no expert.

I remember when my two older daughters were still very young, one was still in a high chair, and I was an actor portraying a father rather than a real dad. I was so scared of making a mistake that would totally ruin the future of my precious little girls.

The question, “How come, Daddy?” used to throw me into conniptions. What if I gave them a bullshit answer because I didn’t know the answer and years later they called me out? What if I was totally wrong?

A thousand years ago when I envisioned some sort of life as a writer I wrote this (It’s a little ironic that it’s so appropriate now):

“How come, Daddy?”

The littlest one fidgets in her high chair, rubbing the jelly off the bread and peanut butter, and then inserts her entire finger into her small mouth, which this day, like other days, is awash with the morning’s foods: cheddar cheese from the scrambled eggs, crumbs from the toast, and smears of vanilla yogurt, her favorite.

She likes to repeat what my oldest daughter has just said, saying it often enough that the words take on a life of their own. They float here in the dining room, with the vines painted on the stucco-colored walls and the French doors. The morning sun exposes the smudges from little fingers in the doors’ panes of glass that the cleaning potion missed but which I notice only now. “Daddy, how come?” intones the older one. Though only four, she already appears way too grown up. I wonder if she might just skip portions of her childhood, leap-frog over entire years so that in no time she will be a young woman with little time for her old man.

While my daughters eat they are watching a Disney movie. It’s not something my wife likes me to do, let them watch TV and eat at the same time, but their chairs have perfect lines of sight to the enormous electronic baby sitter inside the armoire. Meanwhile I am looking for a five-letter word for “Madras money.” My attentions run between the newspaper, opened fully across the dining room table to the crossword puzzle that confounds me with its checkerboard riddles, and the kitchen sink, laden with crusty dishes from the night before demanding soap and some scrubbing. Everywhere but my two little girls.

But my distractions don’t matter to them. They are oblivious to my crossword puzzle conundrum. I have learned that “How come?” knows no boundaries of time or place or even the proper rules of engagement. I might go for the easy way out: Sometimes the girls ask and I filch answers out of thin air while I continue to devote attention to my distractions.

My little girls do not realize how double-edged their questions have become. When they ask “How come?” I face an opportunity to bolster their knowledge and reward their curiosity. But each “How come?” is also an opportunity to fail, to disappoint, to let them down because they will discover I am an impostor, a mere mortal, a faker posing as a father, someone only portraying the Supreme Being who knows all the answers.

I probably badgered my parents with bucketfuls of “How come?” I know this is the province of every Mom and Dad. So, as the volume and frequency of their questions rise to glass-shattering levels, I finally turn away from my crossword or turn off the radio or stop doing the dishes and I listen to them.

I get down off my chair and face them, these little packages of a thousand questions. All of a sudden, sitting on the wood floor, its gouges and wear a reminder of other parents and their children, and looking into their eyes, I forget the dangers of not appearing to know everything. They teach me to see a much less complicated place. The how comes so prominent in my daughters’ lexicons are chances to see the world from three feet tall.

All of a sudden, it is I who learn something from their take on the world, a view not yet tainted by the “important concerns” of our adult world; an outlook unblemished by the hundreds of credit card offers for zero interest that come in the mail everyday, or the images cast by teen idols decked out in tight, strategically torn jeans and equally planned tank tops in TV commercials for soft drinks, or the ecstasy promised from driving the newest leather-interiored, gas-guzzling, road-hogging SUV to the mall.

My children teach me that it is we adults who routinely twist things into Gordian knots, who shrink from saying what we really think—or even try not to think what we think we should not. It is in a How come? that I can find table-turning education at the hands of daughters and then I have the privilege of understanding them—and life—better.

As they await my answers I think that I spend too much time in the adult world worrying about adult things. About pleasing bosses and customers or how I can HBO without paying for it, or whether I will ever see the Detroit Tigers win a pennant. I’m lucky I don’t play golf or I would have even more to fret about.

Once they asked what had become of our two cats, Tigger and Roo. They hadn’t said anything before about why Tigger and Roo weren’t sitting in the windowsills or on lying on the couch anymore. I explained that cats sometimes just get sick and they die.

“How come, Daddy?”

“Well, just like when you great-grandmother Mimo got sick. She died too.”

“Are you going to die, Daddy?”

“Yes, honey, one day I will die.”

As I wipe breakfast from the little one’s face and she and her bigger sister, satisfied for now at the answers the impostor has offered, turn back to their Disney movie, I understand how this time is a precious, short-lived way station. My two little girls will grow up all too soon, the make-believe and the music of their childhood faded into memories.

And they won’t need me so much because they will discover their own answers. I will be left here in the dining room with the echoes of “How come, Daddy?” And, hopefully, once in a while, they will find that their Dad was really was not such an impostor after all.

I pulled up the essay from more than 10 years ago reinforce my point about both the timeliness of our roles as parents and the limits of our responsibility to get our kids to adulthood. I struggle with both of these ideas everyday.

I miss the days when my daughters adored me unquestionably and needed me. At the same time, it’s extremely cool to see them grow into the little women they are today.

Everything has both pain and joy. I know my friend is wrestling with questions that have no perfect answers. Just like we all do.