Monday was good.  Mostly.

I won’t tell you about the shadow parts—that strange time in the late afternoon that I’m sure I’ve alluded to in previous posts.  Me and my son melting down from exhaustion and sleepiness and boredom with each other.  Me and him wishing for someone to come between us, to save us from the other, to help us take refuge from the other while being away from the other.  Me and the boy crumbling under the weight of all that good time that a father spends with his son, even though that father is sleep-deprived and growing sharp and impatient as 5pm drags until 5:53pm when my wife came through with a refreshed lightness which could only be heard as God’s song in the early evening.  You don’t want to read about that.

So I’ll tell you about something else.  Something more exciting.  Something that will surely capture your interest.  What did me and the boy do last Monday?  We walked to an art museum to find that the gallery had changed its hours and that they were, on Mondays, closed.  I muttered to Bryce that this was becoming a little trend between us, places being closed.  I told him that I needed a different off day, and he didn’t appreciate the thickness of the statement.  He didn’t even catch the joke that I hardly had an off day.  He, instead, looked down Greenwood like he was figuring out where we’d go next.

We turned down 55th and walked to the store.  I can go to the store three times a week and will still need something.  So we headed shopping to grab items.  He looked and pointed to squirrels.  I looked ahead and rambled about nothing to no one the way people who talk to themselves normally do, being shielded by the perception that I was speaking to my son who really didn’t understand much and which revealed that I was, in fact, talking to myself.

We strolled through the aisles of an unnamed store over on Lake Park at the corner of 55th Street, and when I refused to pay $2 extra for the same thing I could get at a cheaper store, we went to that other store.  I walked slowly, saddened that we weren’t stationing ourselves in front of some beautiful splash of orange or green or purple.

I wanted to see art.  I had imagined it that morning.  All these years in the neighborhood and I was finally going to the Smart Museum.  I had been to the Hyde Park Art Center.  I spend most of my waking hours at Little Black Pearl.  And I was going to accompany my boy to see the neighborhood’s other storehouse of artistic expression.  I wore a Wheaton sweatshirt.  And when we walked into the museum, three things happened.  The smell of coffee wafted in invisible circles around my nose.  A nice and smiling man answered the question I raised, You’re not open?, with “I hope you didn’t drive from Wheaton.  And we turned around, waving goodbye to the man and the coffee and the museum.

I hate it when my plans splinter.  I said this to my son.  During my scattered ramblings while he was pointing out birds and calling squirrels dogs.  Everything that isn’t a bird is a woof woof.  Or whoof whoof.  Why should I be concerned to spell correctly what my son says?

So Monday was boring in a sentimental way.  It was boring in the same that one thousand weeks are boring when you spend your days and nights doing nothing spectacular right before you wake up and realize that you’ve spent a life walking around a neighborhood and never noticing.  It was boring the way all early days of parenting are boring.  Boring because nothing—absolutely nothing—about poop is exciting when you’ve cleaned it from the same bottom, talked about it with your wife and with the grands and with people who never wanted to know about your son’s poop.

Regular days are boring, end of sentence.  And somehow it’s the regular days, the walks, the meltdowns, the off days that aren’t exactly off days that combine to form our lives.  I’m not quite okay with that.  I want to reach for something a bit more glorious, not quite so earthy, on days with my son.  I want us to make memories that he in his little 18-month mind will remember even though his memory structures aren’t fully formed.  I want to live things that are fun and laughable and which cramp my fingers to write about there’s so much detail.

I started blogging these Monday memories because I didn’t have breaks (much less what my colleagues call Sabbath) as a new parent with such a full life.  And I didn’t like it.  I still don’t.

I’ve given a lot away since the boy came along.  And unbeknownst to me, I will give up more.  I will give it all up—if I do this thing right—because that’s what my life, which is a Christian experience, is about.  I won’t leave all my countless Mondays with any of it.  Boring or not.  And Monday was a reminder of that, which is what I mean when I say that it was mostly good.  There was no art in front of me, not the splashy, thrilling kind at least.  But there was a piece being constructed.  There was a project being chipped at.  The more I think about these days, and all the other ones, the more I see that the project is me.

Monday morning I opened my eyes with an ache stretching around my forehead and dancing over my eyes.  It felt like a pulse or a beat, something musical, that was only magnified when I pulled Bryce out of his crib and he went for that blasted guitar.  It was the red one.  He would wait until later to give me the yellow one.  When he finished the first guitar solo, he grabbed those other noisemakers, the toddler rattlers with tiny beads inside them.  Every shake was a reminder that I was in pain.  Not sharp pain but dull, sinking, bulging pain.

I didn’t know my throat was sore until I swallowed my first drink of water and almost stopped drinking.  I started my trusted tea pot, the helpful kettle that keeps water warm after boiling.  I would drink the entire pot over those next two hours.  My strategy when colds come is to drown them with my arsenal of teas, relieved only by water.  I knew I needed to sleep but that was a dream I wouldn’t have.  I looked at Bryce, explained that I wasn’t feeling well.  I don’t think he responded.  Maybe he said something.  Maybe he turned his head the way he does when he has no clue what you’re saying.  I told him my throat was sore, that my head was hurt.  He wanted breakfast.

I fed him, moving so slow that he took my hand and pulled it to his mouth.  He’s mastered feeding himself with spoons as long as your fingers are pulling the spoons.  He can guide your hand to his lips but he can’t guide the food on the spoon to his lips as well.  Who can understand it?  I had no appetite.  I ate anyway.  I alternated his food with my food.  As a said, I wasn’t hungry.  When we finished feeding, I remember wishing that nap time, two and a half hours later, would magically appear.  I remember feeling tired but not sleepy.  I remember going to the cabinet and pulling out a few teas.  I would drink Egyptian Licorice.  Not sure why.  I had a few Traditional Medicinals, which were the obvious choices, but who likes to do the obvious thing when you have a 17th-month old son singing songs so that the neighbors on the ground floor can hear him at 7:15AM?

I drank my tea.  My boy watched me.  He gave me some grace, but it was short-lived.  He turned into a terror as the morning went on.  He wouldn’t listen.  He would stare at me.  He was quite the independent child.  He was sitting, standing, kneeling and leaping on my nerves.  I told him to go away, to go to his room, to give me some space.  He stood there.  I reminded him that I was sick, that I needed him to do something other than bother me.  He, you guessed, stood there.  Nap time came.  I couldn’t fall asleep until 20 minutes before he woke up.  It was terrible because my head bounced all that day.  It became the primary soundtrack of my time with the boy.

When his mother came home, he ran to her as he does when she returns home.  I was stirring risotto.  They gathered into their embrace, the boy yaying and mommying, his mother soaking it up like dry sponge.  I shook my head, thankful that I could share the boy’s last hour or so with another adult.  I was glad to see Dawn.  She pitied me and asked if I was okay.  I looked at Bryce.  He wouldn’t tell his mom that I was sick.  After all those explanations, he was silent.  I told her of in a sentence of my headache, sore throat, and sourness.  I looked at him—he was smiling and starting into some song about hunger—and wondered what the next week would bring.

I have lamented the loss of my weekly personal day away from work since becoming a father.  It’s not been possible to have the same time I did when we didn’t have Bryce.

Last week Angela Zirk gave me a gift, a five-hour frame where she came by to sit and play and entertain—and be entertained by—the boy.  She was kind enough to reply to a status update of mine the week before.  I posted something about needing to find a new job on Mondays, a job that paid me to work.  There was a word or two in the update about my emotional health.  It was funny, I think, to people who don’t spend an entire day with a kid who can’t talk.  Angela said she would come by and babysit the next Monday.  Angela loves me.  I knew it before she came last week, before she came a while back even.  But if I had any doubt, she clarified that she still cares.

The last time Angela babysat the boy, I started a list of things I’d do if someone did what Angela did, gave me time to get away.  So I consulted that list last week.  I texted David Swanson when my wife wouldn’t break my tie.  I wanted to do some of what I used to do on Mondays.  My choices were to either exercise or to go to one of my favorite places to write for a while.  When Angela said how long she would be at my home, I was actually able to do both!

I still need to figure out what it means for me to have a small child while, at the same time, having time off.  I’m quickly believing that the two don’t consist, but I’m a man of faith.  Maybe I can learn how to enjoy Mondays with my kid as opposed to seeing his constant presence as stopping me from something.  I’ve spoken about this to people I trust, and I still hit a wall.  The kid wakes me up, has his own agenda, and often what he wants is the opposite of what I want.  On Mondays or on other days too.

That said, I want to find moments of enjoyment on the day-off with the boy.  So here is a short summary of what memorable moments me and the kid had this past Monday.  I won’t tell you everything.  I can’t make the entire day that interesting.  But I’ll start with him waking from his nap.  He’s been down to one nap for a couple months now.  He takes it around 11am and sleeps until 1pm or so.  Generally, he’s ready to be changed when he rises.  He’s also pretty close to needing to eat.  I had already mapped out an afternoon activity for us.  We’d eat and we’d visit one of my favorite places.

We didn’t have any food in the house that a baby could eat, so we went to Ms. Biscuit.  I ordered him something I knew he could eat, something he liked.  Of course, he wouldn’t eat anything.  Anything at all.  This is very unique behavior for my son.  I offered him my food, which he usually has no problem eating.  He took about two spoons of food.  I was angry.  Nonetheless, I finished my lunch.  I told him he’d be hungry later, that I would refuse him food, that I’d laugh as he cried out in exasperation.  None of this worked to get him to eat.

After we left the restaurant, I latched the kid in the car, and we drove to the Garfield Park Conservatory.  I wanted to introduce him to something beautiful.  I love botanical gardens and conservatories.  This was the first time I’d been to one since Bryce’s birth, outside a brief visit to a garden in DC.  Thankfully he enjoyed the place.  Several of the exhibits were closed because of recent hailstorm.  But we walked through four areas.  We “read” the names of big leafy green things.  I watched his eyes bulge when we strolled by a double coconut tree, the largest in the country according to the tag.  He squealed and laughed when we walked through sensory garden and fingered a plant that curled when we touched its spines.  He ambled about the place.  He was afraid of a huge pod looking thing that I figured was a cross between an over-sized coffee bean and an alien.  Bryce loved the small waterfall, and though I didn’t put him in it or let him walk through it, I did sprinkle water from his sippy cup on top of his head.  He laughed, though he never looked up to see that I was the one tossing the water.  We were both surprised at how humid it was.  Well, maybe he wasn’t since he didn’t know what to expect.  But I used to visit mostly in the winters and couldn’t remember not feeling a difference between August Chicago outside and the atmosphere inside.  Anyway…

We left the garden and walked around for a while until I remembered how hot we were, got back to the car, and drove to the produce store before going home.  At the store, we played short songs on cantaloupes, and he pointed to the pints of blueberries because he loves blueberries.  He sang about bananas, again, his way of affirming his love for the food.  When we were on the way home, I tickled his feet at stoplights, and we scanned radio stations, listening to Sade and Michael Jackson and jazz.

When we got home, I assembled his potty.  I introduced him to it.  I told him that the day was coming soon that he would get really comfortable with the toilet which turns into a step stool.  He laughed.  What does that mean?

I know that every Monday won’t be as much fun as the other day, but this last one is a good starting place for my remembrances.  At least I can look back on more nutty Mondays and stay hopeful for another one like this one.

This is a perfect image for how fathering often feels.  I saw it this morning on my way to Target to pick up diapers and milk.  I missed the detail that the boy was down to four diapers.  His grandmother was in route.  I should have gone to the store yesterday, but yesterday had its own long list of things to do for me.

I have this expectation to be a certain kind of a father.  I want my son to see me when I’m good, when I’m finished, when the construction that is my spiritual life is complete.  And yet that isn’t real.  What’s real is that I’m open while I’m wrecked, while I’m worked over, while I’m dusty, while I’m, at worst, even uninhabitable.  But that’s what he has, a dad with brokenness.  A dad with edges that are far too sharp.  A dad who may well have a beautiful plan in front of him.  A dad who may one day be a strong, sturdy this or that but who, these days, is a project, a work in progress, a mess on its way to something else.