Category: Essays

They say parenting is the hardest job in the world. But those people have clearly never tried to accomplish something while parenting five children, while ankle-deep in toilet water, while wondering whether an ER window replacement comes with a punch card.

Earlier this week, I had to remind myself multiple times, through gritted teeth and damp socks, that I do love my kids. I do. I have to keep saying it like a mantra. Like I’m trying to hypnotize myself into not running away to Montana and starting a new life as a fly-fishing instructor named Doug.

It started, innocently enough, with a toilet. A clogged one. Now, I’m no stranger to clogged toilets. We have five kids. I own a plunger like some people own a car, but instead of using it, my kids decided the solution was: more water. Just keep flushing. Over and over. Surely, if the water sees how committed we are, it’ll change its mind and go down.

Spoiler: it did not go down. 

It came up. Then it came out. Then it migrated down the hall like a cheerful salmon in a spring flood. Ten loads of laundry later (because of course it soaked into the towels, the rugs, and three of the kids somehow) I reminded myself again: I love them. I do. 

Then there was the root canal.

SK2, he’s 14 now, high-functioning autistic, and engaged in an ongoing Cold War with dental hygiene. It’s a contentious relationship. He brushes like he’s trying to gently pet a ghost. The result? A $1,000 root canal that doubled as a ransom payment to the Tooth Mafia. I could’ve spent that money on a new couch. Or a downpayment on next year’s vacation. Or enough plungers to build a raft and sail away from all of this.

But then came last night.

My wife and SK4 were off learning CPR. They must have had a premonition because, back at home, SK3 decided to spice up our evening by tripping and falling through a window. That’s not a metaphor. That’s an actual thing that happened. One minute, we’re watching YouTube, and the next, it was Die Hard: The Suburban Years live and in person. 

Glass everywhere. Blood. Screaming. SK5 crying in the corner like an extra from a war movie.

Then something amazing happened. SK2, the dental delinquent himself, sprung into action. Calm. Focused. First aid kit like a mini paramedic. He kept his brother still, talked him through the pain, patched him up while I was still Googling “how to tell if your child is made of glass.” It turns out the real health and safety lesson wasn’t happening at CPR class. It was happening in my living room. 

They’re often like this. Beautiful in the chaos. This morning, for example, SK4 … sweet, responsible SK4 … helped my wife set up her classroom for the new school year. SK1 texted me from Philmont, all excited to come home. “Miss you, Dad,” he wrote. And I nearly cried. Until I remembered the window.

And yeah, SK3? As I sat with him in the ER last night, he looked at me, all stitched and bandaged, and asked, “Dad… have you ever done something like this?”

“Well, there was that time I lit my best friend’s house on fire.”

His eyes widened, and I told him the story: how we put the fire out, how my friend went to the hospital, and how I sat in a smoke-filled living room waiting for his dad to come home and decide whether to murder me or adopt me out of spite.

And we laughed. Right there in the ER. Me, thinking about smoke. Him, thinking about glass. Both of us, bleeding in our own way.

And in that moment, I realized: They’re gonna be okay. They really are. Even when they destroy everything. Especially when they destroy everything. They’re good people with good hearts. Somewhere under the bandages, the dental bills, and the gallons of toilet water, there they are. My kids.

And I do love them. I swear I do.

Even if I keep the plunger on a leash now. Just in case.

There are places in the world that feel mythic before you ever set foot in them. For some, it’s Paris. For others, it’s Machu Picchu, or that one Target that still has a working Starbucks inside. For me, it was Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico.

When I was a teenager, sunburned and underpaid, I worked at Camp Friedlander Boy Scout camp just outside Cincinnati. My job was mostly mosquito-based: attracting them, swatting them, then explaining to scouts the difference between “first aid” and “bad luck.” We had a staff t-shirt, a walkie-talkie that only worked when you weren’t holding it, and a collective dream.

Philmont.

Philmont was our Everest. It was where the real scouts went. The ones who drank iodine-flavored creek water and told time by the sun. We told stories about it as if we’d read them in The Odyssey. 

“Did you hear about Ryan’s cousin?” someone would ask, huddled around a lukewarm pudding cup. “He summited Baldy Mountain. Saw a bear. Came back different.”

A friend worked a whole summer there, once. He came back thinner, tanner, and with an expression that suggested he had seen God, pr at least someone who resembled Him, and smelled like freeze-dried beef stroganoff.

I, of course, never went. The opportunity just never aligned. There was always school, or a job, or a pressing need to gsther financies that never seemed to materialize. Eventually, Philmont faded from dream to regret, settling into the quiet cabinet of adolescent longings, somewhere between “owning a motorcycle” and “learning how to flirt.”

Fast forward a few decades. Five kids and, oh yes, 200 fewer pounds later, and my son is going. Not just going; returning. His second trip. Like he’s a regular. Like it’s his summer home in the high desert, and he’s just popping back in to see if the trout missed him.

He’s lean, strong, and almost sixtee . His backpack is bigger than my dreams. He’s not worried about anything. Not the altitude, not the weather, not the rattlesnakes. He texts me a photo from base camp. He’s grinning. Behind him: blue sky, mountains so sharp they could slice you, and a gang of scouts who all look like they know how to build an emergency shelter out of two sticks and a dirty sock.

I look at the picture and I feel the strangest sensation. It’s not envy, but something adjacent. Longing’s more mature cousin. I think they call it “joy.”

Because this is the thing they don’t tell you about parenting: it’s not just watching your kids grow up. It’s watching them walk through doors that were locked to you, and cheering instead of knocking.

I’ll admit, I Googled “Philmont adult treks” once. A flash of hope, maybe. I thought: You’ve lost the weight. You could train. You could do this. But the training would have to be so intensive that I’d have to quit my job, abandon my family, and maybe replace my knees with something titanium. I’m in better shape now, but I’m not in Philmont shape. I’m in “carry groceries without wheezing” shape. “Chase my kids one block and then gice up” shape. Not “twelve days above 8,000 feet with 45 lbs on my back shape.

So I don’t go.

Instead, I sit on my couch in Central Florida where the altitude isseven feet above sea level, scrolling through photos my son sends when he has service. I see pine forests and rocky ridgelines. A mule deer. A panoramic of Tooth of Time. And in every picture, he’s smiling. Tired, sunburnt, radiant.

I smile too. It’s enough.

Because the truth is, we all have a “Philmont.” A place we dreamed of going, a peak we didn’t reach. And if we’re really lucky, we get to watch someone we love climb it instead.

That’s the trick, I think. Knowing when to let go of your old dreams, and how to hold on to theirs instead. Not with bitterness, not with wistfulness, but with a quiet, campfire-lit joy.

Besides, somebody’s got to stay behind and wait for the stories.

One of my biggest struggles as a writer over the years has been figuring out how to handle the cavalcade of “asides” that show up in my writing. My rough drafts are a dizzying landscape of ideas so haphazard, it would be like the worst, ADHD-fueled, Seth MacFarlane nightmare of a storyline that consists of a main character saying one thing, followed by a complex web of nested pop culture references that continued, Inception-style, all the way to the end. 

It’s bad.

To handle this, I would almost always use parentheses (like this, but with multiple ideas and paragraphs therein (which is a great way to confuse people (but can also be fun because it FEELS vaguely math-y (even though it isn’t because no numbers are involved (which is a great way to do math, if you ask me (at least until you’re trying to engineer something like a bridge or an airplane, because all these words and no numbers is how you end up killing people (and that’s bad (usually))))). 

To handle this – and cut down on parenthesis inception – I landed on the em-dash. I had avoided it for years, because it felt strange (and also: I didn’t really understand it all that well (my elementary school teachers did a poor.job teaching me that (they are all dead now, so I can say that without angering them (probably))). 

I settled into it, I figured it out, and my writing got better. 

“This is what growth is!” I told myself. I was happy. 

Then ChatGPT happened. Now, all those people who WANTED to be grammar Nazis (but never had the balls to do it (because they are cowards (stupid cowards (stupid, lazy, selfish, cowards!)!)) came out in force to let everyone know that any instance of em-dashes AUTOMAGICALLY means you used Chatty Geepts, Cope Pilot, Clawed, or some other AI to generate your post. 

How dare you!

Yes. I generated my LinkedOn, FaseBok, or InstantGram post – which got three whole likes (and a retwit from someone in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia!) – with [enter your AI], and will now use my newfound glory to take over the world!

Things are going to start happening to me, now! (*cue evil laughter*).

Here’s the kicker (<— a phrase of which our good friend, Chatty Geepts is quite fond).

I don’t use AI to generate content. Ask anyone I write with. Ask my bosses at my various jobs over the years who have suffered through my weekly status updates (one of them said “You don’t write updates. You write Testaments).

I LIKE to write. Why would I give that up?

But also: I use AI to evaluate some of what I write. It gives me good feedback, helps me see my blind spots, and in a pinch, it can help me spell words like “pulchritudinous” AND find ways to work it into a post! That works for me. 

I’m not judge-y. If someone out there can find a way to make their ideas make sense by prompting AI, so much the better. It’s just a faster and more efficient way for all the Stephen King clones or Stack Overflow Engineers that had already been flooding the market for decades to keep on doing what they’re doing. 

If you’re not using AI to help your job in SOME way, you’re going to be the guy in waist-high pants and thick glasses, screaming at the neighborhood kids to get off your lawn, and that’s going to happen fast. 

AI is innovative, but true, revolutionary innovation still exists solely in the human realm. It might evolve one day, but if we ever DO get to a point where the robots are more creative than us—hell, that sounds like a party to me. 

Somewhere between the marshmallow goo still fused to our camping gear and the smell of half-washed socks wafting from a duffel bag that has more battle scars than some gruzzled vets, I realized I’d been working a side hustle as a chauffeur for the SKs. Which isnt surprising. All parents do this, more or less.

Our calendar reads like a tactical military schedule. Scouts every weekend. Every. Single. One. If we’re not camping, we are prepping to camp, or engaged in the deeply humbling task of cleaning up from the last one. It’s a lifestyle, really, a pungent, dirt-streaked lifestyle that requires a tetanus shot and a strong stomach. We’ve got more canvas and propane gear in our garage than most national parks.

Then there’s robotics. The nerd Olympics. Where my children, brilliant and curious, build machines that can do things I never learned, like shoot rubber balls into goals and follow taped lines on the floor like little Roomba assassins. The kids talk about torque and coding and precision motors, and I just nod, wondering when these bots will unionize and demand USB ports in the bathroom.

At least sports were simpler. A ball. A net. A sunburn. Now it’s motors and logic boards and ethical concerns about whether teaching robots to “destroy the other team’s base” is a stepping stone to Skynet. But sure, it’s fine. It’s all “for college.”

The older three were small once. They wanted me to watch their every cartwheel and catch. Now, they emerge only to forage. They are like cryptids: rumored to exist,but rarely seen. I pass them in the hall, and they grunt, a sound I assume means “hello,” “I require food,” or “what does this rash mean?”

It’s a language unto itself.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of them on Discord or Twitch, their faces glowing blue with the light of digital warfare. I want to interrupt, to be invited in, but there are barriers now. Unspoken but undeniable.

This is supposed to happen, I know. It’s normal. Healthy, even. They are becoming men, inching away from the protective gravity of home and into the wide, weird world of adulthood. I’m proud of them, deeply so. They are kind, clever, sarcastic in a way that makes me both furious and impressed. But some nights, I walk past their rooms and wish I could hear them whispering again, planning Lego heists or giggling about a fart with the awe and reverence of a sacred mystery. 

I miss those boys. Oh, they’re still here. They just aren’t those boys anymore and, while its a joy to know they men theyre becomming, its also sad. It’s a kind of mourning that sneaks up on you. You never expect to grieve someone who hasn’t left, but here I am, tearing up while reheating Chipotle Chicken at 11:30p.m.

Now, there’s SK5, the girl.

She’s six, going on unstoppable. Gymnastics is her new thing. Why not add another logistical nightmare to our weekly puzzle, right? She cartwheels everywhere, does sudden splits in the living room just because, and will soon be able to walk on her hands as well as her feet. 

Watching her is like watching joy with arms. I sit on the sidelines at her weekly class, surrounded by parents with water bottles the size of toddlers, trying not to take up two seats. I’m built like a defensive lineman, after all, even after the weight loss. Every movement I make seems to require an apology and a repositioning of limbs.

Mid-session, she breaks formation and runs over, sweaty and glowing.

“I love you, Daddy,” she says, and then she’s off again, vaulting back into the fray, a tiny superhero in a sparkly leotard.

In that moment, I know: the letting go has started again. Tiny at first. Sweet. Manageable. But it will grow. And someday, she too will grunt and retreat to her room, and I’ll be left wondering where the little girl in the rainbow socks disappeared to.

Parenting is a series of small, beautiful betrayals. You build the world for them, then cheer as they leave it. You’re the training wheels they outgrow. The flashlight they stop needing. The driver they someday don’t call.

But for now, there’s another practice tomorrow. And camping this weekend. And robots to build. And somewhere in all of it, maybe, hopefully, a hug.

At least until she learns to teleport.

The invitation read:

“Flag Retirement Ceremony. 10am. Bring your old, worn flags and your sense of gratitude.”

Gratitude I had. Several worn flags I had. What I lacked was a sense of how exactly this would go. The words flag retirement ceremony sound official, vaguely military, and not entirely suited for a man like me whose idea of ceremony is remembering to stand up during the National Anthem while balancing a cup of overpriced ballpark beer.

But my wife, ever the optimist, saw it as an opportunity: “it’s service,” she saif. “It’ll be good for the kids,” she said, loading the car with all the enthusiasm of a woman who has wrangled five children into church pews, dentist chairs, and trips to Disney World without losing a single one.

So there we were: me, my wife, and our five children, arriving at a small local park like the opening scene of a patriotic sitcom. The Florida sun was in full, blazing glory, hitting its peak over a row of pines. The local scout troops were already there, my kids now among them, organizing a stack of folded, faded American flags that looked like they’d seen more history than most of the people holding them.

Flag Day gets short shrift in our country. It’s lost in thw shuffle between the end of school and the beginning of summer. The 4th of July gets all the attention with loud fireworks, parades, hot dogs, and the kids arguing over who got to wave the biggest flag at the parade route. Flag Day is different. Quieter. The kind of quiet that makes you nervous at first, until you realize you’re supposed to feel something. Then, you do.

A Vietnam veteran with a silver beard and pressed slacks talked to my kids as we presented our pile of flags for returement. His voice was gravelly but warm. 

“These flags have served their purpose,” he said. “They’ve flown over homes, schools, and cemeteries. They’ve seen weddings, funerals, homecomings, and heartbreak.”

I looked down at my kids, standing in a row like Russian nesting dolls. The oldest trued looking stoic. The youngest cartwheeled around like she had discovered a new form of transportation. One of the middle kids mouted the Pledge of Allegiance as it was being recited, the words half-learned, half-invented.

One by one, families stepped forward to deliver their flags. Some were frayed at the edges, others nearly pink from too much Florida sun. Person after person carefully laid each flag onto the fire, where they folded into themselves, flames curling the fabric, their work done, an exhalation after a long shift, the end of watch. 

Our turn came. We stepped up together, each holding our flag across our hearts as we had been instructed in accordance with the proper procedures Official ceremony

We placed our flags on the edge of the flame. For a moment, they resisted, like they wanted to cling to existence. Then they surrendered, red, white, and blue curling into orange and black.

There’s something haunting about burning a flag. You’re told all your life to treat it with respect, to never let it touch the ground, to fold it with precision as though your mistakes might dishonor the nation and the sacrifices if thise who gave their all for the freedoms it represents. Now here we were, watching ours go up in smoke, not out of disrespect, but as an act of reverence. An ending done the right way.

The kids stood quietly. Those in scout uniforms saluted. I don’t know what exactly they were feeling. I barely knew what I was feeling. Pride, certainly. Sadness, maybe. Gratitude, definitely.

Summer holidays often trick us into thinking patriotism is fireworks and cookouts, that loving your country means singing along to Lee Greenwood and wearing flag-print board shorts. But standing there, watching our flags retire into flame, I was reminded that it’s also about endings. About change. About remembering that this nation, like the tattered flag I retired, has been through a lot, is going through a lot, and that burning amd retiring a flag properly is not erasing its story but honoring the fact that its story was worth telling in the first place.

In the moments after the ceremony, the kids buzzing again with energy, I glanced at my wife and said, “That was actually kind of beautiful.”

She smiled. “See? I told you it would be good for the kids.”

It was good for me, too.

Maybe this is how we shoukd remember our origins, not just with the noise and the parades, but with the quiet, with the letting go, with the understanding that even in the act of retiring an old flag, we’re recommitting ourselves to the idea that this country, for all its frayed edges and faded colors, is still worth standing up for. 

Happy Flag Day.

So I’m in the office breakroom, just standing there, minding my own business, trying to get a cup of that tasty, lukewarm coffee-flavored watwr when these two ladies stroll in and start talking. Not near me; next to me. RIGHT next to me. Like, I’m suddenly the potted plant in their conversation.

I’m the ficus. I don’t exist.

And one of them goes, “I’m retiring soon … gonna help my husband with his painting business.”

Okay, nice. You hear “painting business,” and you think ladders, tarps, beige walls, fumes that make you think the Beatles were right. But no. Her husband is an artist. He paints FOR A LIVING. 

“Lucky bastard,” I think. 

She says, “Well, he doesn’t want me in the studio too much because he needs space to create.”

Alright, solid. Makes sense. Creative people need silence, solitude, and a room with just the right kind of despair lighting. The usual. 

Then the other woman leans in with this nuclear-level nonsense and says, “Well, HE’S got the easy part. All he has to do is create. YOU’RE doing the real work!”

WHAT!? All he has to do is create!?

Listen, sweetheart. Creating is not the easy part. Creating is spiritual plumbing with a hammer. It’s waking up at 3 a.m. with a brilliant idea and forgetting it by 3:05 because your brain decided it needed to think about whether penguins have knees.

“Creating is the easy part” is something only people who’ve never created a damn thing say, amd they say it brazenly, without shame or self-awareness. You think art just oozes out like soft-serve? Like he sits down, lights a candle, farts a masterpiece and hits print?

No! Creation is torture with a side of taxes. It’s bleeding your soul out through your eyeballs and hoping someone on Etsy buys it for $35. And that’s if they don’t leave a one-star review because it “didn’t match the couch.”

You know what’s easy? Filing paperwork. You know exactly how many forms there are. You know where they go. You know when you’re done. Try creating something from scratch. It’s like trying to birth a unicorn on a deadline with no epidural.

And artists? Real artists? They’re haunted. They see beauty and pain and truth in the shape of a coffee stain. They feel everything. That’s the job. To feel. Constantly. It’s like being emotionally lactose intolerant in a world made of cheese.

But sure, yeah, he’s got the “easy part.” All he has to do is pour his entire essence into a canvas, risk his mental health, manage the crushing fear that he’ll never be relevant, and then sell his soul on Instagram for algorithm points. Easy peasy.

Meanwhile, I’m standing there with my sad cup of breakroom crap in a cup, stuck in this verbal drive-by, thinking, “I just wanted coffee. Not a TED Talk on how to accidentally insult every artist who ever lived.”

So here’s my PSA, friends. Next time you think creating is easy, try staring at a blank page for three hours and see if your brain doesn’t start chewing its own leg off. And when you’re done, let the artist work. 

And give him the good coffee.