Epilogue: Kids and Dad

I wake up Elisa at 6:40am and she starts to get out of bed. I turn back to the living room to say bye to Aidan and Lydia who are leaving for school together.  I had been expecting they would be growing further apart but they seem to be getting closer this past year.
Elisa dresses and doesn’t want to eat breakfast, which is normal. We go downstairs, I order a car via Didi, and we wait five minutes for it to arrive. I have a busy day in front of me and am in A go mode. Elisa is not. The car arrives and during the 10 minute drive she teases me about my bald spot, my belly, my intellect. I tease her back. When we get to her school two things cross my mind. The first, is a recurring one, the gratitude I have for these moments. Even though my weekly single dadum is five years in, I often reflect back on the moment I figured out I could swing it with my work schedule. And how that changed everything for me. And it’s a lot easier now than when I started since the kids are older. My second thought is, I recall my dad ever walking me to school. Not a complaint, just a realization.
And then I’m walking to the subway thinking of my father. I’ve been wanting to write about him, and have tried to, but I keep losing the narrative, so I stop. I hope and expect that someday I will because I do want my kids to have a sense, a 360 degree sense, of where they came from. And just for my own personal story.
I want to tell them that their grandfather had an edge. That like me, people didn’t see him relaxed often. That like me, he cared about things. That his life was a journey and the man he was when I was born wasn’t the man he was when he died. That he became more self aware or at least incorporated that awareness into his actions. I want them to know that we were all afraid of him and with reason. And I hope they are not afraid of me although I know sometimes Aidan is. I want them to know that my dad showed up. That he couched my baseball teams, came to my basketball games, got me a job in college. But I also want them to know he didn’t really seem to enjoy any of these things. That coaching baseball never seemed like fun to him, just a responsibility. I want to tell them that he worked 24 hours shifts as a fireman. That he would work day on, day off, day on, day off, day on, three days off. That we would track the days when he worked for we could breathe on those days. And we would dread when the three or four days off in a row came.
I want them to know that my relationship with my father was complicated. He was my dad. He cared. It came out in ways.