I never understood my childhood until I became a parent.
A few weeks ago I was reading This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and found myself on an emotional pendulum swinging from tears to laughter and back. I related to young Toby’s experience—divorce, abuse, abandonment—as well as his emotional and psychological landscape.
Later, as an adult, Tobias had the pinnacle experience of becoming a father. It was the moment he held his first child for the first time that crystallized every experience. In that instant, he said he felt a love he never felt before. But more than anything he said he felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility towards this new creature, this new being that was pitifully dependent on him for everything—protection, sustenance, love, life itself—that Tobias said he could never fathom abandoning his child. Furthermore, he couldn’t fathom how his father abandoned him.
When I held my daughter Aspen for the first time, I had a similar experience. A nurse delivered her to me as I was sitting in a stiff wooden chair in the hospital room. Aspen was wrapped in blankets, her swollen pink cheeks poking out from the thin white beanie on her head. I held her close to my chest, putting my head into her blankets . . . and cried. And by that, I mean wept. Heaving sobs. Waves of joy, sadness, purpose, meaning, love, THE WHOLE COSMIC ENCHILADA, all of it crashed upon me and the presence of the mysterium tremendum opened the crown chakra for a split second before weighing upon my shoulders.
When I stopped sobbing and reclined against the vinyl cushion of the chair, eyes glossy, cheeks wet and flushed, I was transformed, a new man. A father. From this point forward, life would never again be just about me. I felt it in the marrow of my bones—every electron and neutron was on fire, as if my DNA was changing in some Bruce Banner way. In a good way, that is, like, if The Hulk was a hippie.
Seven years have passed since that electric magical moment and nothing in my emotional and psychological landscape has changed. Every time I look at Aspen, I can tap into that deep well of feeling and drink a few cupfuls of that elixir. And when I do, I sometimes see reflections of my childhood through the lenses of my Dad Glasses.
When I was brought into this world, my circumstances couldn’t have been any stranger. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, to a seventeen-year-old mother and a nineteen-year-old soldier in the US Army, for some reason clouded in mystery though I was told it had something to do with swinging and smoking hash, my mother carted me off to the United States on an emergency Red Cross flight when I was still an infant. It was 1974.
The following two years of my life could be a Coen Brothers movie. My mother went to my paternal grandfather for help. But he had his hands full building his industrial roofing corporation in Houston, Texas, as well as dealing with my father who was AWOL and losing his mind. So he sent me off to a family friend up north in Wichita Falls whose family would care for me until he figured out what to do next. Meanwhile, my other grandfather got wind of my situation and flipped the hell out. Granddad showed up on that Wichita Falls doorstep, armed, and “persuaded” them to hand me over. After the police caught up to us on I-45, I was then put in the care of my great-aunt Babs in Austin while my mother was a cocktail waitress at a bar. She got involved in an affair with the manager of the joint, a Viet Nam combat vet twelve years her senior who was married with kids. They got into some trouble and had to split the scene, so they got saved by The Lord in Lubbock and fled to Fresno, California, in a light blue Volkswagen Beetle towing a small U-Haul trailer. My first memory features me jumping up and down in the backseat, my hands on each of their headrests for balance, looking out the windows seeing the deserted wasteland of Arizona along I-10, my mother laughing and hollering at me to sit back down.
I was adopted a few years later in 1981, but I didn’t know any different. As far as I knew, Dad was my dad. I don’t remember anything about it at all, to the effect I didn’t learn I was adopted until the summer of 1986 when I was twelve. A few weeks later my folks filed for divorce and I met my biological father at Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas.
It was a bittersweet moment, one that deserves much more exposition than I’m willing to dive into here. And my teenage years were only more bizarre. Suffice to say these tragic circumstances lit within me the desire that one day, if it should ever happen, I would be a good dad. More than anything in life—writer, photographer, teacher—that’s what I wanted to be.
Please keep the applause to a minimum. I get it. The ambition to be a good dad probably doesn’t strike most folks as ambitious at all. It’s either expected or tangential to another goal—like having a successful career. Besides, Bad Dads make all the news and popular TV shows. But I’ve been attempting to right some wrongs in my life. Break some cycles. I’ve been doing it my entire adulthood, though I’ve admittedly kamikazed a few things here and there. But it’s not like I knew how to fly or was trained at all. From a distance at best. Hell, I’m still figuring shit out. It’s why I continue to read more than I write. But being an engaged father and a good dad has been a song of redemption in my life. It’s why the focus of my creative output over the past several years has been on family adventures. Family and nature have been restorative for me.
Nature has been an important theme throughout my life. I continue to spend as much time as possible outside doing things because nature—in direct opposition to my experiential life—makes sense. When I’m in nature, I can “leave all the chaos and disorder, back there, over his shoulder,” as Jim Morrison said. I can go for a hike and it clears my mind. I can split firewood, and everything comes into perspective.
When I was attending Cal State Fresno in 2003, I took a class called Environmental Psychology. At the time it was a burgeoning field with lots of experimental thought. The class confirmed my gut instincts about nature’s therapeutic effects on humans. Time spent in natural environments calms us. It reduces stress, the #1 killer of our species. Did you know that when trees are stressed, they scream?
Well, now you do.
I’m convinced time in nature heals us. It’s a prescription everyone should be taking daily. I certainly should be. As I later researched, people who experienced trauma or who are suffering from PTSD find solace in nature, which makes sense to me. After eighteen months of therapy, I’ve recently been handed the diagnosis of Complex PTSD and ADD. Back to the woods I go…
Considering nature’s restorative properties and its potential for fun and adventure, I’ve been bringing my wife and kids on as many adventures as possible. So why not document a few of them? Make little stories out of our road trips and camping trips?
With my family, I’ve been attempting to create memorable experiences. But it’s more than that. I want to invite my family into a story. Especially Indy and Cooper, who had a rough start. They needed to be introduced to a big world of potential and adventure to shake off the chains of early childhood trauma and start rewriting the narrative in their heads. Every hike, road trip, or ski trip has the potential to be an experience remembered, a story told. But it’s bigger than that still.
I’ve invited my family to be part of a larger story than just a hike or a road trip. I’ve invited them to be part of a story that shoots them out of a cannon, confident to go into the world and land on their feet, on a trajectory to fulfill their potential. But I need to explain something.
Against popular opinion, none of this is or has been easy. I know how it looks. Social media presents life with a ribbon on it and when people “get real” on those platforms they’re just off-putting and weird. But believe me—behind all the pictures, the smiles, all the good times—it’s taken a lot of struggle. In the manuscript that’s presently on submission to publishers, there’s a theme—How I Rescued My Family and Gave Them a New Life. It’s just as true, though, to say—My Family Rescued Me and Gave Me a New Life.
The manuscript opens with a few scenes depicting my life after I hit rock bottom, doing community service at the Ozark Humane Society in Harrison, Arkansas. I was thirty-nine and my only ambition was to piece together what was left of my shipwrecked life, complete probation, then put my Australian Shepherd Ollie in the passenger seat of my truck and head off to northwestern Montana to get into adventures in perpetuity, my own Zen and the Art of Tacoma Maintenance. But then along came Chelsea. . . .
Just as I want to inspire my family to be their best selves, truth is, they inspire me to be my best self. My family rescued me from a life of abandonment and purposelessness, a life spent “wandering, wandering in hopeless night” as Jim Morrison croons in “Stoned Immaculate.” So, our relationship has been symbiotic as well as serendipitous, and I’ve been fortunate, lucky, blessed, call me what you want.
Of course, Chels and the kids have their own plays to star in. They have their own stories to tell, their own dragons to slay. Chels and I have raised the kids to understand the element of story in our lives. It’s an important value, the power of myth. I believe we’ve instilled in them a desire to go out into the world and be the heroes of their own journeys.
Perhaps by doing so, I right the biggest wrongs in my life.
As usual, a very well written story 👏 . Thank you for sharing, blessings to you and your wonderful family, love y’all ❤️ 😍. Your other Grandpa.
Archie Hall
arst93722@sbcglobal.net
Thanks for reading! Y’know, one of the positive highlights of my life was my childhood growing up in Fresno. I was telling cousin Rob the other day how lucky we were to grow up in such a loving family. It’s a gift I see us all passing on to the next generation. There’s no better blessing or inheritance.