We were sitting in Lynnwood (WA) Olive Garden tonight, conversing sans child (Isabel is staying with friends...) as we await my wife's final amniocentesis prior to what will probably be Rory Alexander's birth at UW Medical Center. Once in my life I was a high five figure professional. I consulted for Fortune 100 companies, I ran trading floor technology for firms with names like JP Morgan, Montgomery Securities, Merrill Lynch, etc. My life involved rising well before dawn, transiting by BART or commuting long hours to Silicon Valley. My mind and day was wrapped in whatever business model or technology the corporate world demanded of me. Not too strangely, I felt spent and drawn at the end of every week; sometimes every day.
For the past seven years (save two short contracts with Microsoft), I have done something entirely different. I have been a 'SAHD' or "Stay at Home Dad". However, when I consider my days and weeks as a "SAHD", I am overtaken by a single thought: my level of exhaustion far outpaces anything that will be possibly sustainable in my ongoing middle age. Strangely, this thought is not any different than the same thought I had in my thirties when I started transitioning from construction to high-tech. Nor is it any different than the thoughts I had when I transitioned from S.F. Investment Banking world and Silicon Valley 'start-ups' to life as a father in Bellingham. Of course, I am little different in my responsibilities and habits than most stay at home parents: I garden, I write, I code, I remodel, I attend school field trips and concerts, etc. Still, I am not too often completely overwhelmed with the amount of work it takes to emotionally and physically support my wife and my daughter. And yet on Friday we will we have another child, should luck and fate have it. And I will raise another newborn while my constant partner works her way through another case load of patients; providing us with wealth, love, motherhood, and the means to keep our debt-strapped middle-class family on the merry-go-round of home payments, hybrids, and school tuition. Someday, Rory Alexander will most probably graduate from College. And I will be seventy-one!
Raising Isabel as a young infant was perhaps the single most beautiful and terrifying experience of my life. Especially, when she was very young, my fatherhood was rent with a concern for her fragility, for the fear that some accident or disaster might harm her. (Actually, this fear has never really left me!) One weekend we took a trip to the Willows on Lummi Island when Isabel was very young; perhaps 10 weeks or less. We just needed some time out of the house. (The first month or two of an infant's life involves 'irregular' hours for parents...) The owners had had a cancellation and gave us a suite at a small room's price. We were astounded and relieved and had a wonderful time. In any event, I was lying in near slumber on the cottage bed , the light of late fall streaming through large plate glass windows. Rosario strait winnowed blue waves of beauty below. Quite suddenly, without much warning, my mind proceeded to walk me through a categorical list of every near-death or death-defying moment my previous 42 years had accumulated. The list surprised me in its variety and completeness: the night I stepped onto the 'wrong street' after exiting the 24th BART in S.F. Mission District, the 'near death' experience when my 'meta-pneumonia' took me to 104.9 F, the 'face to the floor' moment as I responded to UZI fire over my back bedroom one night in Oakland. ( I swear when I finally arose that DOS 6.2 was blinking a message I have never seen before or since...). The few times I have stared down mountain lions, lost my footing on ice in the back country, or chased a black bear from my food bag in the high Sierras, or done something stupid with my open ocean kayak came back to me at this time. But there was one such experience, somewhat casually dispensed with at the age of eighteen, that I have never forgotten. For reasons I don't completely understand, the memory of it returns at moments like this in my life, when the most critical and terrifying events (e.g. birth of your child) are imminent.
There is a section of the Northern California coast called "The Lost Coast". Highway One diverges from this area and with the exception of boating and timbering, there is little industry or population. At the foot of the this "Lost Coast" lies a beautiful preserved parkland called "The Sinkyone Wilderness". It is a stunning piece of land that features coastal mountains studded with virgin Douglass Fir; something always very hard to find! The land includes mountains which crash down into the sea leaving stunning 'brown sand' beaches to tangle with the San Andreas fault which turns in from the sea here to strafe the land with a sag pond and then (with a decided geographic slice) runs back out to indomitable Pacific. "You can climb along the trail and down to the beach in morning," the camp steward told me. "You can walk the distance back to camp on the beach if you do it before the tide comes back in."
My eighteen year old mind should have registered more caution when I heard the words, "before the tide comes back in." But no matter. After my brush with death on that beach, it would forever more do so. The cliffs of the Sinkyone Wilderness descend right upon the ocean. When the tide is out, a beautiful and clean but narrow 'brown sand' beach with surging surf presented itself to me. But after I had traveled for no more than a half mile or so, the Pacific Ocean lept suddenly to meet the brown sandstone cliffs behind me on all sides. It was not so interested in my safety or presence. The crumbling cliff walls rose forty to eighty feet above the ocean and were carved up like a fractal. I had spent a lot of time hiking alone on rough Northern California headlands and beaches and had never come to trouble. But I had missed the cues here.
All I could do was run as far back into the deepening brown sand fractal cliff as I could, cling to the rock wall with as much strength as an athletic eighteen year old could muster, and then hold on while I felt the Pacific literally try to suck me off the rocks. I was shocked at the strength of waves. In retrospect, I realized the ocean shelf dropped quickly and immediately from the beach in Sinkyone. Substantial currents compressed onto the beach and the backwash sucked everything right back into the yearning maw of the deep Pacific. There was a reason that beach was so clean! As the waves retreated I summoned all the speed my hiking boots could make in wet sand, running around the corner of each new cliff, then seeking the farthest retreat from the steadily growing waves until I could run again.
This process repeated itself for what seemed to be at least ten or fifteen minutes while the waves continued to rise. At one point I scaled a crumbing but sheer cliff vertically about forty feet and then backed down, realizing that if I fell from that height I would die in lump on the ocean washed brown sandstone that had begun to substitute for beach by now. Most near death experiences simply provoke our instant reaction to battle. There is no time for reflection. But this experience dragged on for some time. As I ran blindly around each brown fractal cliff corner seeking refuge, I realized at some point that my normally flawless intuition had simply just missed the cues. The last few moments of my young life were about to end badly in very cold water.
It is not a normal moment in life when you have such a realization. The will and adrenaline surge through your body. I would not be sucked into that ocean! Sadly, there seemed no respite to my efforts at running blindly around each fractal corner hoping to find an exit or refuge deep enough to keep me from the watery maw. But then, quite surprisingly, I happened onto a lush rivlet cascading down the mountain and followed it back up the trail to safety. Very suddenly, I was nonplussed by everything that had just occurred, mentioning only briefly to the camp steward what had happened. One of the joys of being young is that trauma just doesn't haunt you much. But some experiences we never forget...
And so at moments like this in my fatherhood, when I feel overwhelmed by the seemingly usual combination of (lack of) health, energy, money, marriage, or parental skillsets...I remember that lithe eighteen year old, clinging to the rocks. I am not yet ready to let the yearning maw drag me in during the 50th year of my life either. Not while I still have my wits about me. Of course, an occasional plate of fettucine with meat sauce served with a glass of moscato at a local Olive Garden helps. A lot!
Cheers,
-RMF
09/072011
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