I Would Die for Them and I Miss Me: While Father Loving Children

The Man I Grieved the Day I Became a Father

The twins were maybe three when I found the photo on my phone that I did not remember taking and could not stop looking at. It was not of them. It was of me, from before, some night out years earlier, and I looked at that man the way you would look at a coat you gave away and then saw someone else wearing on the street. Familiar. Gone. Not coming back. I sat on the edge of the tub while a bath ran for two people who now organized my entire existence, and I grieved a guy who was, technically, me, and who was, factually, dead.

The Ground the Tension Stands On

I need to say the load-bearing thing before anything else, because this essay is a knife and I do not want it turned the wrong way. I would die for them. Not as a phrase. As a fact I have checked in myself and found true and unremarkable, the way you know your own address. There is no version of my life I would trade for the one without them. That is not the tension. That is the ground the tension stands on.

The tension is that the same day I became their father, someone I had been for thirty-odd years quietly left the building, and nobody held a service, and I was not allowed to be sad about it, because being sad about it looks like ingratitude, and ingratitude toward children is the one sin the culture will not let a parent confess out loud.

What You Lose, in Unglamorous Pieces

You lose the self in specific, unglamorous pieces. You lose the ability to finish a thought. You lose the shower that was yours, the coffee that was hot, the Saturday that had no shape until you gave it one. You lose privacy so total that you will, one day, use a bathroom with an audience and not even register it as strange until a childless friend visits and looks at you like you have joined a cult. You lose the version of your relationship that existed before you were both management. You lose spontaneity first, and you do not miss it until years later when someone suggests something at 9 p.m. and your whole body says no, out of pure logistical reflex, and you realize the word yes used to be free and now it costs a babysitter and a war.

What She Lost, From the Border

And I watched their mother lose more, and lose it in her body, which is a country I do not have a passport to, so I will report only what I saw from the border. I saw the physical occupation of it, the way pregnancy is spoken about like a glow and lived like a tenancy where someone else holds the lease to your own frame. I saw the recovery no one filmed. I saw her answer to a name, Mom, that arrived and slowly, gently, started to file over the top of the name she had had her whole life, until strangers, teachers, other parents, the world, addressed her almost entirely by her function. I got to keep being Joseph who is also a dad. She became Mom who used to be someone. The culture did that. It was not neutral about which of us got to stay a person.

Holding Both

So we hold both, and holding both is the actual work no one warns you about. Not the sleepless nights, everyone warns you about the sleepless nights, the sleepless nights are amateur hour. The real work is standing in your own kitchen loving two people so much it feels like a medical event, while quietly, in a back room of yourself, mourning the person who had time to be bored, and knowing you cannot say it at the dinner table, cannot say it to most friends, cannot say it without someone rushing in to reassure you that it is all worth it, worth it, that phrase, the one they hand you to make you stop talking about the cost.

Both Photos, Only One Still Breathing

It is worth it. That is not even in question, which is exactly why it is not a comfort. I found that old photo again the other night, still on my phone, I never deleted it, and one of the twins climbed into my lap while I was looking at it and asked who that was. "That's me," I said, "before." She looked at the picture, then at my face, doing the comparison children do without cruelty, and she said, "you look happy," and went back to her drawing, and left me sitting there with the whole thing in my hands. Both photos. The one on the screen and the one in my lap. Both of them me. Only one of them still breathing, and the breathing one would not give her back for anything, and misses him anyway, tonight, quietly, the way you miss a house you chose to leave.