Figuring It Out
When you were eight years old,
I opened your bedroom door
two days after Christmas to find
that you had taken a screwdriver
and disassembled every toy that
we had given you- the robotic
dinosaur, the RC car, everything
we had saved for, everything we
had waited in late night lines for.
And I know you could not know
then the adult calculus that ripped
through my mind, the tectonic
parental shifting of complex
emotional layers, the blinding
ache of processing budgets and
mechanics and history and hopes,
while still cradling the one prime,
the more than myself that is you.
And as fathers do, I suppose, I
tried to respond in the language
of rules, to speak in the straight
lines of cause and effect and cost,
until that moment became a story
we told about you, a way to
explain who you are- tinkerer,
engineer, good with your hands-
a simple definition, something
we could work with, respond to.
As if anyone can be reduced to
common language, to a set of
ingredients, pulled from a human
pantry, mixed into a recipe, as if
who you are is mine to define,
as if I could ever have that right,
as if you weren't as immense as
an ocean, as separate as the moon,
but you are my boy, a cosmic
reality that cannot be reduced, or
diagrammed, or measured, or
limited, or plotted on a map.
And so I use these inadequate tools,
these broad-brush words to bring
you into focus, to create a sense
of knowing you, to define you
through this story as curious,
to imagine that you see the world
as something to be examined and
figured out, which comforts me
because I have a way to see myself
in you, I can begin to explain this
unexplainable aching and joyful
tide, pushed and pulled by you.
And today, though you are twenty-
two, I know that you cannot know
that it would break my heart to
think that you had already taken
the world apart and had decided
there was nothing magical there,
nothing there worth finding.
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