Category / Family

by Michael

If You Need Something To Do Today

Kwanzaa is a celebration growing out of the cultural tradition, experience, and values of African Americans.  According to Dr. Maulana Karenga, the holiday’s creator, the celebration is a reaffirmation of integrity, beauty, and meaning which come from and to the human family through African and African American thought and practice. 

If you’re interested in seeing and learning more about Kwanzaa or if you’re looking for something to do today, stop by WVON’s pre-Kwanzaa celebration.  Here is all the information you need:

WVON Pre-Kwanzaa Celebration
UIC Forum
725 W. Roosevelt
Chicago
Saturday, December 11 at 10am
FREE Admission

Schedule of Events

10:00am – 11:00am
Betty Shabazz International Charter School Kwanzaa Kick-Off Concert choir

11:00am – 11:45pm
Drumming Interactive Performance

11:00am – 3:30pm
Children’s Pavilion (Storytellers, Instruction on Kwanzaa principals, face painting, and African dance lessons)

12:00pm – 3:30pm
Literary Pavilion

12:00pm – 1:00pm
Panel – “MIS Educating the Negro” – Moderated by Cliff Kelley (Panelist include Pam Lawrence, CEO of Meca Elementary, and Dr Carol Lee (co-founder of Institute of Positive Education)

1:00pm – 2:00pm
Natural Haircare Workshop

1:00pm – 2:00pm
Speaker – Dr Julia Hare “Black Women: Together We Stand”

2:00pm – 2:30pm
Kwanzaa Awards

2:30pm – 3:30pm
Keynote Address – Dr. Julieanne Malveaux

3:30pm – 4:30pm
Panel – “Black Men in the Age of Obama” – Moderated by Matt McGill (Panelist includes WVON personality Lenny McAllister, Attorney Ted London, and community activist Toussaint Loiser)

by Michael

When The Boy Speaks, Will He Say These…?

No.  Stop it.  Don’t do that.  Leave that alone.  These are four of the most common responses I’ve heard myself offering my son. 

I started with “No” or “No, Bryce.”  You can imagine why I’d say this, right?  He starts eating the window sill or licking the screen or slamming the remote control on the floor.  He eats his mother’s shoes in the closet.  He pulls the tiny rubber covers from behind the doorstops in the bathroom.  There are so many reasons to tell a little boy no.  He responds to the word.  He stops.  He looks at me.  At this point, he’s even stopped smiling that cute little grin that expresses the truth in his mind that he’s really going to get me one day.  When I say, “No,” he stops. 

But I tired of hearing myself saying no.  It made me feel stingy, less generous.  So I changed it up a bit and introduced new vocabulary.  I am, after all, teaching my child words by using them.  I wouldn’t want him limited as he develops his cognitive apparatus.  I don’t want him constrained by one-syllable words.  Hence, the two-syllable, “Stop it.” 

Stop it is very effective for Bryce right now.  He pauses, sometimes in the middle of an act.  I catch him pulling at a cord or as he removes the silver key in the fireplace.  He pushes the dishwasher rack while I’m removing the clean plates or right before I can keep him from the knives.  He stands behind me so I can’t walk away from the sink with his bottle, or with some water, trying to move.  Stop it.  Effective.  He obeys.  This is important.  I will not have a disobedient child in this house.  But “Stop it” sounds hard coming from my lips.  I can’t say it softly. 

So I started using the favorite phrase, “Don’t do that.”  I attach this response as quickly as I can to something the boy has done.  I’m remembering my days in class when I say this.  I’m thinking of Dr. Delaney’s explanation of Pavlov or B.F. Skinner is Psych 360.  He associates his behavior with my response.  “Don’t do that.”  The phrase isn’t as hard as “Stop it” but it’s firm.  He sees my face and gets it.

“Leave that alone” started when the kid started pulling and taking things I didn’t want him to.  Maybe he was pulling the stapler off the desk.  Yanking the laptop battery from a power surge.  Tempting to swipe a pair of glasses, to eat the round cap covering the toilet screw.  Pulling everything out the to-be-recycled bag on the floor under the thermostat.

No.

Stop it.

Don’t do that.

Leave that alone.

I shouldn’t be surprised if and when the boy’s first words are one of these.  Can you think of any other options I can employ for the boy at this point?  I’m happy to add them to my options.

by Michael

Cheap Weddings, Expensive Relationships

I was driving to class the other morning when something about Miss. Katherine and Prince William’s engagement and upcoming wedding came on the station.  The journalist interviewed business owners in and around London, and the retailers and shopkeepers spoke of how they hoped the royal wedding would translate into new customers, new sales, and larger profits.  There was no real mention of how expensive the wedding would be.  The story focused on the wedding’s impact on the local and near-local economies in Scotland and London and other places where the pair has spent time.

Most people don’t contribute to the national economy when they take vows.  But it occurred to me when listening to the story, as it has before, that people spend a lot of money on weddings. 

There are halls and hotels to book, flowers to smell and buy, cakes to taste and eat, clothes and shoes and accessories and transportation.  Music and drinks and souvenirs and photographers–the list keeps listing longer.  Couples make hard choices about who can or can’t come because every head is a cost.  But weddings don’t have to be expensive.  They can be cheap.  In fact, given the choice between an expensive wedding and a poor marriage, the best option for most awake people is the marriage. 

All relationships require work.  Work sometimes feels like an overpriced item.  But working on a relationship’s health leads to personal and interpersonal strength which can’t be calculated.  I wonder if it’s helpful to see preparation for a relationship, or a marriage for that matter, as planning an event everyday that pays huge profits.

“Paying” for a good marriage and “spending” time on the relationship may not be attractive or memorable to the people at an event, but it may be worthwhile in the long run.  It may expose the health of what’s really between two people months and years after people have forgotten whether a couple put pretty pens or bright white candles on every plate at a reception.

I’m getting into gear over at my church office as several couples have gotten engaged.  I expect to see several couples as they plan for vows, even though the last two years were slow relative to weddings.  I don’t see all of them.  I send some to other pastors and some to professional counselors, because of everything from scheduling conflicts to needs beyond my ability.  And I hope that these folks can focus on their relationships and planning for a life, rather than planning for a day.  I will certainly tell that to the folks I see.

Any thoughts?

by Michael

Finding New Ways to Slam a Phone

The boy amazes me because everyday he finds a new way to slam the phone.  He doesn’t slam his play phone.  He pushes it until it scrapes or scoots across the floor but he won’t slam it.  No, he slams the real phone.  Everyday for minutes and minutes and not quite hours he slams the phone.

He started right before we had to buy a new one.  We had two handsets.  One broke months ago.  When we replaced the whole phone system, the second, now unused, real cordless phone became his latest delight.  It joined the ranks of teethers and remotes and sits in his basket of favorite things, waiting for him to tip it over so that everything from books to toys spills on the floor to offer a personal joy-filled greeting to the kid who came back to play.

He takes the phone, pushing it in front of him as he crawls.  In between pushes, he’ll glance up or to the side.  He’ll look for me or his mother.  He’s getting clingy, as Dawn says, so he wants to know where we are.  He’ll moan and whine and pretend to cry until he sees us.  But there he is with the phone.  He’ll stop crawling, sit up and lift the phone to his mouth.

I remember when it mattered what he put in his mouth.  I remember pulling boots from his hands.  I remember running in front of him to remove purses from his path.  I remember taking the soft rubber covers off the bathroom doors so he couldn’t pull them up and try to taste them.  They still wait on the bathroom counter, hoping to find their homes again, and Dawn reminds me to be careful because the tub and walls can get scratched easily.

It still matters that the boy wants to eat shoes.  That’s my limit.  I mean, they are shoes.  But it matters less since he puts everything in his mouth.  Everything.  I’m told it’s his way of learning the world.  Part of what makes this stage so funny is that it makes me remember some of the stuff my family said I ate.  Which you couldn’t pay me to post on a blog.

Aside from his diet of all things reachable, he lifts his phone, beating it on the floor in general and on the concrete slab at the balcony window sill.  He pounds it against the fireplace until the mounting echoes a hollow tone, contrasting the slap and scape of the phone against the wood floor.  He’ll pull it and clap that thing in his hands like a tambourine.  He’s making music already.

by Michael

You Tell Me: What Belongs on That List of Things Spouses Do?

I am a proponent of marriage.  That’s what I told a friend of mine the other day.  I hear myself saying that all the time to couples who come to my office.  Marriage is one of the ways that God will change you, I tell them.  There are only a few tools or roles or identities that we have that we face everyday.  When you’re married, whatever you do, you do it as a married person.  Good or bad, you are married.

That means that the list of things to do as a married man or woman is long.  Much of it is captured under the old language inside the vow for better or worse.  What do you say sits inside that vow–from your experience or from somebody else’s?  What’s on that list of things spouses do?

by Michael

Ten Things Different As Compared To This Time Last Year

I don’t know how to interpret the non-response to the book giveaway.  Maybe you’ll tell me.  So, even though I don’t have a winner to announce, I do hope you enjoyed the interview and I do have this post on a view things I’ve noticed from this time last year.

  1. I can tell you the number of times Dawn has sat across the table from me, just us, talking about something other than diapers, feeding schedules, formula, and other random things related mostly to the influence of sleep deprivation.
  2. I am still not a morning person.
  3. A schedule consisting mostly of driving a tender package around and doctor-visiting and note-taking, all while being afraid since nobody else seemed to know the rules of the road.  Actually I was doing this with my pregnant wife a year ago.
  4. The three pictures of me as a newborn, as a one-year old, and as a 7th grader on my refrigerator, placed there by my mother to show the similar features between me and the boy.
  5. My gym membership goes unused much more regularly.
  6. I only carve out one day per week to have evening meetings and my Sundays have become much longer because of it.
  7. I smile at other people’s kids because they make me think of my own.
  8. When I consider doing something I shouldn’t, I think about the boy’s face over my shoulder in the car, his eyes following mine as he peers through the gap in the seat shade, and it makes me remember responsibility again–to both God and the people who matter.
  9. I clean up.  All the time.  Even when other people are doing it too.  It never stops.
  10. People have literally forgotten my name, identity, and use, preferring 1) to label me “Bryce’s father,” 2) to ask me where he is first and where his mother is second, and 3) to compare me and my features to his as if I weren’t here first.
by Michael

Writing Someone Else’s Story

As I said in the last post, my father-in-law died the other week and among the many responsibilities inside the family after his death was the task of preparing his obituary for the memorial service.  My wife worked on it while we were at grandma’s house or while we were on the way back from Albion, and then she gave it to me to type up. 

As I typed, read, and revised it in order to send it to Dawn and her sister for review, I thought about what it takes to write someone else’s story.  I thought about the details that we knew and the ones we didn’t.  I wondered how much filled the spaces between each line of Mr. McKinney’s life, spaces we couldn’t recall, spaces we’d never appreciate.

There’s always more to a person’s life than we know, isn’t it?  The unspoken words that bring meaning to our narratives.  The events that stay with us even when no framed picture captures them.  The dates we don’t forget.  The people we love but hardly see.

Writing someone else’s story helps me imagine.  What was he thinking?  How did it feel to watch that happen, to experience that beginning or that ending or that conflict or that pain?  It’s an exercise in imagining and an exercise in pulling what’s known with what’s not.  And even then, with imagination and facts and dates, that story will never really be written well, written fully.

by Michael

Guitars, BBQ sauce, Big Cars, and My Father-in-Law, Mr. John McKinney

I wrote a post or two about my father-in-law here and here.  He was recovering from a major stroke, living with a failing heart, and what the old folks used to say was sugar.  Mr. McKinney died last Sunday night, eight days after we’d last seen him, at Allegiance Hospital in Jackson, Michigan. 

Yesterday we celebrated him at a memorial service.  I wanted to post a few thoughts about him, about me.

When I think about Mr. McKinney, I think of the way he grabbed and pulled me into a hug, slapping my back, saying “Hey, Mike” in an almost song, every time we saw each other.  I think about the pictures on all the walls at his business, photos of blues singers and bands I was too young to recognize.  I think of all the guitars hanging under those pictures.  I think of amps and note spellers and organs.  I smell the smoke somehow seeping through the walls from the bar next to his last store on Western.

I think of how, without fail, he asked me about work and cars.  How’s the job?  How’s the car?  He believed in work.  He loved cars.  I think of his nice 1976 Jaguar–that I still haven’t ridden in–and all the other long cars Dawn told me about that he once drove.

I think about diabetes and one touch tests and how more people are expected to get the disease.  I think about my attempts and his family’s attempts to convince him to live better, to ingest his medication, to take his health seriously.  I think about the sinking feeling of failure I carried when leaving Ingalls earlier this year or that one day five years ago leaving St. Francis (when it was St. Francis) with me and Dawn dressed up and celebrating valentine’s day under the shadow of a doctor’s hardly heard admonitions.  I think about the way Mr. McKinney, with just a little pride, told the chaplain standing over his bed once that he had no need for him because his son-in-law was a minister.

During the earlier days of our relationship, I think of the way my then girlfriend used to claim drinking her father’s bbq sauce because it was so good.  I remember tasting the bbq sauce at his home in Hazelcrest on summer days and hearing the bones fall to the floor to Mack and Shane, his beloved shepherd and lab.  I think about his words when I asked for his permission to marry his daughter.  I think about the joy in his tone when he found out all those years later that our boy was coming.  I think about the yelling and screaming the boy rendered last spring when Mr. McKinney rode in the back of the car, to the train station, trying to feed Bryce a bottle when all the boy did was yell or sing or terrify his grandfather that last time before any more hospitals had him.  I think about the bursts of progress between those long days after we had our first son, when any change gave us hope.  I miss him.  I miss him being in that hospital, at his mother’s or anywhere, slapping my back, brightening up at the sight of my wife and his daughter.  I miss a lot already.

by Michael

Click These Links

  • Read how Tayari Jones talks about prettiness and publishing as she thinks about the upcoming release of Silver Girl.
  • This post is a great reminder from a father for a father and for a mother too about what not to do.
  • My friend and coworker, David Swanson wrote a thoughtful short piece on church segregation and has a piercing question at the end of this post.
  • Zadie Smith tells a lovely, funny story when explaining in an unexpected way how friends are generous.
  • Mario Vargas Llosa’s writing is discussed at the Guardian in ways that put forward some interesting intersections between writing and politics.
by Michael

He’s Crawling

He is my boy.  And yes, he’s crawling. 

It started as a stretch a couple days ago.  I told people over the last few weeks that the boy was thinking hard about crawling.  I could watch him thinking about moving.  His eyes followed things he wanted to snatch.  He tracked me or his mother.  He looked out the window, at the bookshelf, over at the swing.  His arms extended and his legs did the same.  His little belly spotted on the carpet and I imagined that if he were in the water, he’d be swimming.  If he were in the air, he’d be flying.  But he wasn’t moving.  He wasn’t crawling, at the time. 

It became a scoot.  His thighs bulged over his little legs.  His knees postured as if to kneel.  He scooted.  Backward.  It was funny.  He wanted to move so he did.  He just moved in the opposite direction he really wanted to.  I laughed.  My wife just smiled and sang that little “Oh, look him” song.  It was hard not to look at him.  He’s cute.  But I never imagined myself sitting and watching a baby sitting in one spot, wanting only to move.  He grunted and grunted.  He looked at me like I was holding his feet or something.

He started to sit up on his own.  He had already been rolling over.  But the day I walked over to the crib and saw him sitting there, like I was late for something, I knew the end was near.  The end of my confidence.  The end of my certainty that he’d be in the same place I put him.  I saw the end coming, the sun setting, the night coming on all those stationary certainties.  The boy would be moving soon. 

I told Dawn.  I told other people.  They confirmed it: he’d be crawling.  And the prophecies came true.  He just started crawling, moving like he was late for a meeting, like he hadn’t seen every spot in our home for the last almost-seven months.

by Michael

Reasons I Get Nervous When My Son Smiles At Me

Everyday my son smiles at me, at least three times.  He smiles when I come into the room I’ve loaned him to give him that last bottle at night.  He smiles and sometimes giggles when I come home from work.  He smiles when I sing or play with him.  He even bucks and kicks and tries to jump when I come in after being gone during long stretches in the day. 

I tell my wife that I’m very aware that one day this will stop.  I told her that the first smiles were mostly hers.  During those days when I felt like he didn’t recognize me, or, worse, that he recognized me as some wierd, hairy big guy who kept returning to his space.  I tell Dawn that those days traded themselves for the mornings where, if you look at how he acts, you’d think I was the best person on earth.  Still, this is the same little boy who will one day disobey me on purpose, conduct himself in ways that make me sick or mad or crazy.  He will one day do things that make me just about forget these splendid smiles.  So I suck up these moments, and each time I walk away I bit more human.

But I’m a little nervous.  I’ll tell you why.

1) I’m not as good as he thinks I am.  I’ve spent the last six plus months responding to this person’s needs.  Somewhere in his brain he’s concluded that I’m a good guy.  I’m not as good and delightful as he thinks.  I know that already.  One day he’ll get it, and I think he’ll smile less.

2) I’ve made mistakes that’s he’s already forgotten.  I remember things he can’t because his memory structures are yet to be fully formed.  He clearly remembers that I belong.  I think he’s finished with stage where he’s asking himself why we’re always around and never seem to stay away.  Still, he doesn’t recall the little wrongs, the missteps and mistakes, the mumbles under my breath at 2AM or those several hours later when I still haven’t had my required allotment of sleep.

3) I’m slow at matching my life with his grin.  In some ways, each time the boy delights in my company or laughs at something I said that really wasn’t funny or giggles because I tickled him or just because he is truly happy I’m with him, I see the distance between whatever’s happening in those eyes and what’s happening inside me.  Having a child, one who lives where I live and doesn’t go away–not that I have any other kind, just to be clear–makes you grow.  You see the kid, identify the praise in that smile, and walk away saying, “I’ve got a lot to live up to.” 

4) I will certainly screw something up soon enough.  Maybe even later today.  Even if I’m a good dad, even if I get some marks for all the things only God saw–things the boy will one day devalue in some stubborn fit and grasp for independence–I am certain to mess up.  A lot.  I can see it already.  Some embarassing comment made at the wrong time in the company of his friends.  A misguided response to some secret he’s told me.  Making him wear the wrong set of clothes for a field trip.  Making him do anything. 

There is so much room for him to reserve those beautiful smiles.  I’m nervous.  And I’m collecting each smile the best way I can.  I’m trying to see his presence in my life as a gift like those stencils boast on the wall in my used-to-be-office-now-turned-baby-space.  I’m trying to notice how God is using him to change me and make me a man who lives up toward something as a big as a boy’s smile and as wide the world around him.

by Michael

America’s Next Top Model…For Fatherhood.

I’ve been considering the engaging and insightful responses Dr. Butler gave to my questions.  For days now I’ve been rolling them around in my head.  Thinking about the boy.  Thinking about the way he looks at me when I come home from work.  Thinking about how I want to do this well, fatherhood. 

I’m encouraged by the sharp, intellectually-satisfying, and richly faithful (and faith-filled) responses the professor gave.  I’m not attempting a review of the book, either in this post or in the interview itself.  But I will jump off of a response that Dr. Butler gave in order to make or underline or highlight one point: new fathers need models.

You’re familiar with the phenomenal television show, America’s Next Top Model.  How can you not be?  Tyra Banks created something interesting and all-kinda-thoughts-provoking in that show.  But my goal isn’t to speak about that show.  Well, one thing.  My wife watched, or watches, that show like she needs a conversion and it’s the only religious episode in town.  We have one television.  And I just stopped trying to hold the remote when that thing comes on.  But I digress.

Dr. Butler wrote

A father is not only one who takes responsibility for his actions, he takes responsibility to care for, provide for, nurture, and protect his children.  This deep sense of responsibility is guided by his commitment to being present and fully participate in every aspect of his children’s lives.  Many men understand responsibility to mean that we work hard to be good providers; but responsibility that is guided by relationship means that we work hard to give of ourselves those things that we have worked hard to provide.  It is our presence, participation, and active giving that makes all the difference in the world.

Dr. Butler is lifting up a value, responsibility guided by relationship in order that we might give ourselves.  Not just our things.  Not just money and stuff. 

New fathers need models to do this.  It’s not something we learn in an age when too many sisters are raising children without fathers in particular or without male presence in general.  It’s something we have to pay attention to.  It’s something we might not even know we don’t know. 

Presence.  Being there.  Sticking around.  It’s bodily.  It’s emotional and mental. 

We have to learn how to stay put when we want to leave.  We have to see and copy the hard soul and psychological work of anchoring our heads where our feet are, rather than running away physically or mentally.  We have resist the urge, the inclination, or the habit of walking out, or shutting down, or clamming up.  I didn’t see this everyday growing up.  But I knew that I needed to capture everything I could and still do from my father when we did interact.  I know now that I have to ask him hard questions that may surprise him but probably really won’t.  I know I have to take good notes from the men in my life, the long list of men who’re raising good kids and who are aiding me in my quest to do the same.

When talking about the mentoring relationship where this learning happens, Dr. Butler said

It is the ability to tell and listen to the stories of life’s ups and downs.  Also, finding mentors requires an openness to believe that another as a good word about life to share.  Becoming a good father means that a man is willing to sit down to tell and listen to stories that speak about the everyday up and down experiences of life.

I love this language.  The everyday up and down experiences of life.  Who talks about that?  Who listens to that?  Who wants to?  Really.  It’s boring, we say.  It’s unhelpful, I think.  We could go on and on without heeding this counsel. 

We must find and feed the mentoring relationships that equip us for the good journey of fatherhood and parenthood.  When we believe that another man has a story to share, it removes the notorious lie that burrows into the head of a novice dad, the lie that says you’re in this alone.  It’s never true that we have to parent alone, and mentoring reminds us of that.  The community of others reminds us. 

I’m glad for the answers that are in this interview and for the wisdom in this book.  I’m glad that Dr. Butler is pointing out that there are models, top models, for fatherhood, and not just the ones on television.