They’re All Spoon Fights
A few weeks back I was sitting at a local café with my friend Michael drinking coffee and talking about life and stuff. Our kids. He’s another “Old Dude New Dad” — someone who became a first-time Dad at about age 50.
His daughter had come home from school with a new phrase, “Spoon fights.” Some kids had gotten into a fight over a spoon, the teachers broke it up and used it as a teachable moment about not fighting over petty things, “It’s just a spoon.” Which became a thing — “Don’t get into a spoon fight.” And so, when she gets home from school, Greta’s telling Michael about it and says, “If you think about it, all fights are Spoon Fights.”
“She’s totally right, Michael” I said, “Give her a hug and a high five and tell her how wise she is. She’s totally right — 99% of everything is just silly, pointless arguments about spoons.”
He laughed, I laughed, we moved on to other topics.
These days I spend a lot of time just kind of listening, a little bit stuck. It is a lot like when I was a teenager, feeling like I have all this stuff to say but also feeling very self-conscious about saying it. Sometimes I’ll feel comfortable but sometimes I feel like the things I’m trying to articulate are too convoluted or complex or scattered for me to articulate, that people probably wouldn’t want to hear it anyway. Every once in a while, I manage to be funny. But also, things have been really difficult this past few years and I don’t want to be that guy who always bums you out….
But if I had kept talking, this is probably what I would have said:
“You know, 2022 has been a shit year so far. Really, really hard. 2020, 2021, also shit years. To be honest, everything’s been really hard since we moved to California. With a few exceptional moments here and there, it has been really fucking difficult. But this last year ….”
“I’ve been learning so much since Jacob was born in 2018. He wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t out here. That’s a gift. And every day I just …. It’s like I can’t even fathom how much I love him. Like, it is just overwhelming. I mean, really, like, it is something I never imagined existed or was possible to feel. He just fills me with joy, wonder, gratitude and delight. And sometimes I want to pull my hair out and scream because he’s so fucking impossible and demanding and exhausting but then I see him do something amazing or hear him say something wise, perceptive or insightful, sometimes we hug and my whole being is suffused with good feelings, euphoric …. It’s like drugs.
“But it has been hard. I mean, I knew that raising, taking care of a kid, was going to be hard. But I didn’t realize exactly how hard — and in ways that are so different than how I imagined it would be. And you realize — I realized — how the world is just not designed for taking care of kids, our systems are not designed for taking care of kids, not really. America, anyway, is just so fucking hard, our society is just … brutal. Individual people, I mean, when you’re at the end of your rope, you know, people can amaze you with their grace and kindness and generosity, usually when you’re just about ready to fall apart. But mostly, this society as a whole, it is very hard, uncaring — frankly a very cruel place. Designed to fuck people over, to turn us against each other, make our lives difficult. And it just, it can get you, it gets me worked up. People are celebrated for being assholes. I’ve always known that on some level, intellectually, was true, but now it’s not an abstract idea anymore….
“Or like when my Mom died in May, after this brutal… I mean she had the dementia and the cancer, you know? And it was so hard to take care of her and at the end it was so hard, she was just, it was fucking horrible to see her — no memory, terrified, hallucinating, skeletal, cancer-ridden — she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, rocking back and forth in pain. All those weeks we were in the hospital first with my Dad and then my mom…. You know Dad got out of the nursing and rehab facility just a few days after Mom went to the hospital. At least they had a few hours together where she knew who he was and they could kind of say goodbye. And thank god they gave her morphine in hospice, just a little, so she could rest, get some peace, die in peace, you know?
“And you know, like, ever since then, right? Like, you know how my brother and father, the whole rest of the family is super orthodox, right? So, when we sat shiva it was like — it wasn’t like, you know, culturally Jewish or Reform Jewish or whatever shiva, it was like, serious shiva. No bathing, no shaving, sitting on the little chairs, minyans every morning and every evening, never leaving the house, all the mirrors covered with sheets, no fancy buffets or booze, it was sparse, it is, it was …. I mean just sitting there, spending so much time in that space, listening to people tell their stories about Mom, share their memories, telling stories of their own. You know, they’re re-telling the greatest hits about Mom, small anecdotes, and then a lot of stuff I had never heard before because, you know, we weren’t exactly estranged but we didn’t … we had a lot of issues. And when my folks got religious I was already out of the house — that’s 25 years where we weren’t really in each other’s lives very much. So, in some ways they were describing a woman I didn’t know.
“There were 25 years of my mother’s life that I didn’t really know her. Every time I came home, or called home, I found myself cornered, forced into the same claustrophobic version of myself, the same position I occupied growing up; being with my mother — she was small, five feet tall on a good day, but took up a lot of space — there wasn’t room for anyone else. But, I realized that it must have been infuriating for her too — every time I called her or came home, she was still my mother, she had to be the person she was when I was a kid, or in high school. I saw through — or believed I saw through — her performance. “So, now she’s religious”, I’d think, “now she’s such a friendly, interested, appreciative person, she’s got them all fooled.” I suppose from her perspective that as long as I was watching she never stood a chance of actually becoming someone different, someone better, someone new. I don’t know if that was what she wanted. I don’t know if she was ever that self-aware. But I think we were always stuck being, like, the worst versions of ourselves in each other’s eyes. We could never let the other one be better, different, I guess.
“So, it’s like I started out heading into the seven days of shiva with a lot of preconceived notions about what was going to happen and how I was going to feel … and at times it was like what I expected but mostly, looking back, it wasn’t, you know? The seven days of shiva were more like preparation — a period of clarification, circumspection, purification, a cleaning out, a deepening…. And when I came out the other end of that week I was, I felt, like, only then did I even start to understand a little bit about who my Mom might have been outside of my knowing her, after seven days I was only just starting to be ready to actually mourn, you know?
“Because it’s like, and I don’t mean to sound too flowery but this phrase keeps coming to the surface for me — that there is a knowing that only death allows, uncluttered as it is by the busy-ness of living. It’s like, there’s no way my mom and I would ever be able to get to know each other — not really — because we set each other off just by being near each other, just being in the same room. There was too much history, too much hurt. We could try to be pleasant to each other but the busy-ness of living, the concerns, the fixations seen through the narrow lens on Life that being alive requires …. How do you break though that? So, with Mom it is not so much that the story has ended. When someone dies, the relationship continues. My sister-in-law told me that. It will continue as long as the departed exists in memory — but once they’ve passed, the living are freed from the constraints of space, time and forced perspective. You know?
“And ever since all of that, you know, I’ve kind of lost my patience for bullshit, for politics, for outrage, for all this “these people suck and those people suck” and blah blah blah. You know? I just …. It’s all such trivial bullshit. Pretty much everything in the world is trivial bullshit when you right down to it. Spoon fights.
“I mean, we convince ourselves that things we’re worried about are actually important, worth fighting over or fighting for — work, politics, status, ambition — we spend our days outraged, angry, agitated, frustrated, jealous, ambitious, joylessly pursuing happiness, frantically pursuing purpose, until we reach the end of each day exhausted and unsatisfied, always confident that the following day, or the day after that, will bring fulfilment and meaning and happiness — but it never arrives. Why? Because we’re wrong. We think that all these things are what life is all about, but we’re wrong. The work of being in the world is caring for each other. That’s it. That’s the whole thing, man.
“You know, one of those days when my Mom was in the assisted living and my Dad was in the hospital, my brother and I were driving from Mom to see Dad and, I don’t remember what we were talking about, but my brother said — remember he’s Orthodox — and he told. me, “When you’re driving the car, you worry. You worry if you’re going to get a speeding ticket, if you’re going to get in an accident, get lost, run out of gas. There’s a lot to worry about when you’re driving the car. But when you realize that you’re not driving the car, you don’t worry so much.”
“A couple of nights earlier we’d been sitting around, drinking some of my Dad’s whiskey, trying to just let go of some of this stress a little bit and we got to talking about God, what we believe in, stuff like that. And my brother says, “So, you are willing to believe that everything in existence is interconnected in ways that are beyond our comprehension, you are willing to believe that everything happens as it must happen, but you are unwilling to accept the idea of God?”
“Right,” I said.
“You know, you might as well just believe in God,” he said. (I don’t remember if he actually said that, but it felt like that was what he was thinking.)
“But anyway, I don’t know what I believe. I believe what I believe, I’m not ready to believe in God, whatever. But I do feel, deeply, that we are not driving. That we only think we are driving the car, it is an illusion. Sure, we have free will, sure we can make decisions, take actions, work to alter the outcome of things. But we’re not driving the car. At best we’re kids playing in the way back of the station wagon. We’re not driving the car, it doesn’t serve us to worry about that. The only thing we’re here to do is to care for each other, that’s the whole of it. And if there’s any change that we can truly make in the world, it’s by working towards that, by getting that clarity about what human beings are meant to do. Care. Care about each other, take care of each other, take care of the planet, the animals, be in the world as if you care for something other than just yourself.
“Of course, I don’t have any fucking idea how I’m going to do that. I don’t even … I have a hard time imagining what that looks like. But I know that the way things are, the whole thing is designed, like all of our systems are designed, to do the exact opposite, to keep us from caring for each other, keep us from seeing what’s really going.
“Honestly, it scares me. I feel like I used to, when I was a teenager, you know? I used to really care about stuff. About people. I was one of those sincere, earnest, kids. But also, goofy. But serious. And I don’t know what happened. At some point I just took on this thing, this feeling, that if I showed anybody that I cared about them, or cared about anything, that it would make me weak, that I’d be made fun of or something. And I could never let down my guard, not ever. Couldn’t relax, or laugh, or open up. I just, I mean, things aren’t really that different now except now I know it.
“Like, it is crazy to be my age, to be ancient as fuck, and realize that … it’s like those Red Pill people…. to realize that the way you’ve understood the world, and the way you have behaved in the world, the way I have behaved in the world, has been completely wrong. Or at least founded on some flawed assumptions. Assumptions that were so deep I didn’t even know they were assumptions. But, it is like the opposite of the Red Pill people. I realized that no-one was out to get me. Absolutely no-one. My entire life I faced the world like a battle, like everyone was an obstacle, out to fuck with me, undermine me, take away whatever I had, make sure I didn’t get what I want. Everyone was fucking with me all the time. I mean, someone could say, like, “Nice shirt,” and I’d be like, “What are they trying to pull over on me? What do they want from me?” It’s hard to convey the scope of it, the all-encompassing-ness of it. Like, literally everything I experienced, every interaction, every conversation, everything, was fraught with menace, danger, ill intent. Dude. I still struggle with it, even since I figured it out.
“So now what happens is I have a thought and I’ll stop and check it out and ask myself, “Is this real or imagined. Is this person really out to get me? Is this email, text, question, whatever… is it really someone trying to fuck with me, insult me, obstruct me or piss me off? Is this a pity thing? Or am I just tripping?” and if, after careful consideration I still can’t quite figure it out, or shake it, then I ask Deborah. I’ll be like, “I’m having this thought. I got this message from this person and I can’t figure out how to interpret it,” or something like that. And she’ll be like, “Okay, take a moment and think about it. Have you done anything to this person?” No. “Is there any reason that they might be upset with you?” And I’ll tell her some crazy reason and she’ll say, “Stop and listen to yourself. Does that sound likely or logical?” and I’ll be like “No.” and she’ll say, “Remember, you’re not that important. I mean, most people aren’t thinking about you at all. They’re thinking about themselves. 99% of the time whatever you’re feeling, whatever someone is doing or how they’re reacting, has nothing to do with you whatsoever. Take a breath, calm down, move on.”
“So, I’m grateful for that. Grateful to have this person in my life who somehow puts up with me and helps me keep my head together, helps me be better. I’m really lucky. But I’m also worried if it is too late. Like, is it too late to correct course? To do things better? I don’t regret the life I’ve lived, I’ve done the best I could, I think I’ve done some cool stuff, been somewhat productive, helpful even. But I could have done or been more, maybe, if my head had been in another place. I don’t know that I have another 25 years to do stuff, not to mention the energy. I mean, some days I’m really feeling it, you know? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I waited to become a Dad, I don’t think I’d have had the patience or perspective to do it before now. The things that he does are so triggering for me — I know, I know — but that’s the best way to describe it. The shouting, the hitting, the volatility — its normal for a toddler but it triggers me and if I’d tried to be a parent even a few years earlier I would not have had the ability to ride it out, to let it go. I’d have been just like my Mom.
“But I feel old sometimes, in my body more than my spirit. And it freaks me out. Anyway. I hope I get another chance. I hope I get another act, another chapter. I hope I can figure things out. I hope I can get a do-over on some of these things, with some of these people. “I hope I can, I hope I can” …. like The Little Engine That Could! Ha! And on that note…
I’ve gotta get home. I’ve got to do the laundry and make dinner and do some work for my job too. You know how it is. Great to see you and catch up. Let’s do it again soon.
