They were some of the most profound words I’d ever heard. It just took me a few months to realize it.
I was at my parents’ house, I’m sure complaining about all the places I have to drive my kids. It’s my only topic of conversation these days because it’s all I ever do. If you call me at any hour of the day or night, there’s a 99 percent chance I’m on the way to pick up a kid or drop one off. If I’m lucky, it will be the right kid. I already had one incident where I took the wrong child to the wrong soccer game, but, with three kids with three games in three consecutive time slots, the mix-up was inevitable. It’s not like I’m going to write this stuff down to keep it straight. The kid in question is just lucky I realized the mistake (okay, my wife Lola realized it and called me after I left the house) before I dropped her off and left her stranded at the field. I’ll take the kids anywhere they want or need to go, but I refuse to stay during the event. It’s a moot point, however, because I couldn’t stick around, even if I wanted to. I have to go drive another kid somewhere else.
As I went on and on about the transportation obligations that define my life, my mom interjected. “You’re just like your dad,” she said. “He used to drive you everywhere.” At the time, I barely registered the remark because I was too busy ranting. God gave me two ears and one mouth so I’d be twice as good at hearing myself talk. I thought about her words again this Saturday, though, after dropping off my youngest at a birthday party and my oldest at a dance. Did my dad really drive me “everywhere?” And, if so, how had I forgotten? I signed up for my first sport in fourth grade in an ill-fated attempt at baseball. My career record of a 0.0 batting average still stands as a monument to futility. It can’t be beaten unless baseball introduces negative numbers. I began driving myself places when I turned sixteen. In between those two points, my dad took me all over creation. My mom ran the aftercare program at school. Apparently watching her own horde of children wasn’t enough, so she supervised an extra twenty to thirty kids for two hours every day after the final bell. That meant my dad had to take me to all of my sports and extracurricular activities. We’re talking every practice, every meet, and every game. I signed up for everything because I didn’t yet realize free time is life’s most precious resource. How many hundreds (nay, thousands) of times did he drop me off or pick me up?
I couldn’t tell you. I remember almost none of them.
Out of the incalculable number trips he made on my behalf, I remember two. One, because there was something on NPR about Somalia and it was the first time I talked to him about current events, and the other because I was deliberately being a jerk just to make him mad. It’s fitting that fifty percent of my memories with him in the car about me being the worst. The rest of those trips are a complete blank in my mind.
There’s an episode of Doctor Who where a girl becomes immortal. The Doctor visits her again thousands of years later. She doesn’t remember her childhood, or most of her life, really. She has an infinite lifespan with a finite memory. She can’t hold onto everything, so she writes down the events of her life in books and puts them on a shelf, never to be read again. There’s no way anyone can expect to remember all the minor moments in their life. We’re only human. But when you have that minor moment thousands of times in a row, you’d think it would show up in your memories more than twice. Apparently not.
Until my mom reminded me of how often my dad used to drive me places, I hadn’t thought about it since I was fifteen years and eleven months old. Before that moment of belated realization, how did I think I got everywhere? I didn’t walk or teleport there. I never got my letter from Hogwarts, so I couldn’t travel by chimney. Somehow, that plot hole of how I got places never bothered me when I waltzed down memory lane. The day I obtained my driver’s license, I left my dad behind and never looked back. Truthfully, I think he was more excited than I was. There’s a reason he got me and all of my siblings super cheap used cars as soon as we turned sixteen.
Here’s the hard truth about being a parent: You will be forgotten. Not entirely, but mostly. It’s a fool’s errand to think your kids will appreciate all you do for them. We’re background characters, the supporting cast to their lives. As I drive my kids from sport to extracurricular activity to party, I sometimes tell myself that at least my offspring are grateful for what I do. Insert hysterical laughter here. Of course they aren’t, and they shouldn’t be. On a good day, I’m lucky if they remember I exist. That’s a feature, not a bug. We all need to be a little bit selfish. It’s a harsh world out there, and if you don’t look out for yourself, no one else will, either. It just sucks when you’re the giver rather than the taker. Rest assured it will be paid forward when your kids are taken for granted by your grandkids. Unless your kids remain childless, in which case they’ll get away with it. No wonder the birth rate is dropping.
That realization helped me feel less bad about being a subpar parent. My fellow moms and dads who also drive their kids everywhere are doing so much more than I am. It’s not that they’re taking their kids more places. That’s physically impossible unless they found a way to bend the laws of space and time to add more hours to the day. Instead, they’re outperforming me because, when they take their kids somewhere, they actually stay. If I did that with my children, I would literally never be home. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. I could sell my house and live in a camper, forever at home at whatever auditorium or sports field I’m chained to for that day. At first I felt bad that other parents stuck around to watch their kids pick grass on the soccer field for an hour while I fled. But, thanks to my mom’s reminder, I realized that whether I stayed or left, my kids won’t remember it anyway. It was all about them, not me. The great thing about being a background character is that nobody notices you unless you really, really screw up.
I wrote an entire book about that, yet somehow I still forget sometimes. That’s because all that knowledge is now in a book instead of in my head. (Mandatory plug for [Bare Minimum Parenting: The Ultimate Guide to Not Quite Ruining Your Child].) It would be different if I had grown up to be a pro athlete. Then I could have gone on stage and thanked my dad for driving me to all those practices and games and meets. Obviously, that never happened. All I learned from doing all the things is that I hate doing all the things. There are no hall of fame induction speeches for quitters, unless quitting gets its own hall of fame. Too bad anyone who attempts to start one will never follow through. Instead of turning me into the person I am today, all those extracurricular activities were an irrelevant detour that took up my entire childhood. I hope my dad’s car got good gas mileage.
My own kids won’t remember that I dropped them off and picked them up from six different places Saturday. That’s for the best. If I lose my cool because, ten seconds before we need to leave, they can’t find their uniform, I get an infinite number of do-overs. Of course, there’s always the risk they’ll remember some small snippet of our time together in the van, and that moment will take on a disproportionately large significance in defining their childhoods. Hopefully it’s the time I stopped to get them ice cream and not the time I said the forbidden word when someone cut me off in traffic. In case you’re wondering, that word was “Voldemort.” I just have to hope my children’s very human memories will work out in my favor. Who am I kidding? I have no doubt that the only things they’ll remember about me will be from when I was at my worst.
I might not remember all the times my dad drove me places, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: I never thanked him. Unless I had an entire personality transplant at some forgotten point in my past, I was just as self-centered then as I am now. Fortunately, there’s time to correct that error, not by becoming a better person, but by saying the right thing for once in my life. Thanks, Dad, for driving me everywhere. I know you don’t read these newsletters, but maybe Mom will tell you about this. And if not, well, that’s okay, too. I wouldn’t want you to think I finally got a heart. You raised me better than that. At least I think you did. To be honest, I can’t remember.
In a way, these newsletters are my external memory. I’m recording the moments my finite mind would never hold onto otherwise. When I migrated my newsletter to Substack, I had to go through all the old issues one by one to manually import them. As I perused them, it was like I was reading about someone else. The character flaws were familiar, but the events had long since disappeared from my conscious thoughts. It was a bad idea to start writing all this stuff down. If I hadn’t created a record, I could have gotten away with it scot-free. Those car rides with my dad are far from the only memories I’ve forgotten. My mom also reminded me that she used to read me book after book when I was very young. She had more time back then. For two and a half glorious years, I was an only child. Then Mom messed it up by having six more kids. Surely she was just trying to recreate the perfection she found with kid number one. I might not remember her reading all those books to me, but I did grow up to be an author. Maybe even the things we don’t remember can still affect who we become. Uh oh. Don’t tell my kids.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.
James
Mom's Most Profound Words