happy father's day (the color)

on failures and fathers and color and country

What has been most surprising about it all, being a dad, is the failing.

The flailing.

The stammering when my brain lacks the words a three year old would understand so it produces instead no words at all. “Coffee is for adults because - you can’t - no. No coffee. Me coffee you no coffee.” 

These woes of inadequacy are not the exception nor are they exceptional; they are the norm. The rule. The constant and the mundane, the beauty and the horror.

The space between what is and what ought to be. 

The expectation and it’s far flung cry, reality. 

It’s bedtime — that’s an expectation. The reality is that Wilder our 3 year old doesn’t want to sleep until he’s run through the house naked screaming “this is not my hat,” an activity that, importantly, has no end. 

We don’t throw stuff at your little sister - expectation. Reality: he hucks cars and blocks and more at his little sister and says he’s sharing. 

Expectation: we make the buttery bread without the crust exactly to specification. Reality: he does not eat it nor does he eat anything else for nine straight days before eating one Dunkin’ Donut’s rainbow sprinkles donut with pink glaze that will somehow sustain him not just for this year but truly for all the years to come. 

That seismic gap between expectation and reality is, itself, a tragedy.

It is also, by definition, comedy, though we are hard pressed to see it that way. We are not taught as kids to feel okay in the wide expanse between what we want to happen and what happens because the bigger that gap, the bigger the failure. 

And life, we are taught, is not about failure. It is about success, which we define as bridging the gap between your expectation (I want to be a ______) and your reality (I studied for a while and now I am a ______). 

Which works, sort of, for the stuff that we are told we can be when we grow up. 

Fireman.

Doctor. 

Astronaut. 

Not that we end up becoming these things. No one is actually a marine biologist.

And according to the answers we give as kids to the question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?”, no one grows up to be a dad.

Which is weird given that ‘dad,’ more than any other thing, is what most boys become. 

But how could ‘dad’ be a job when all you do is fail at it? Like, my grade as a father would be an F. And not a high F that borders on the D, a low F - 5%? 10% on a great day? The glimmers of success are there - 10% is not 0% - but even those feel sort of like happy accidents - broken clock is right twice a day situations - not really my doing. 

If I was a doctor who ended up blowing it with 90% of his patients - telling most of them they were fine when they were sick and assuring the sick ones that they were fine - this would not be okay. It would be, as my dad says now to customer service representatives with whom he disagrees, ‘the U word,’ which means, of course, Unacceptable. 

color or country 

Freshman year of college, in the dorm-room next to mine, lived a lanky kid named Ryan. Ryan wore track pants and ran around the green catching leaves. He’d chase them down with a sincerity that bordered on the cosmic. It was hilarious, too, though he was not doing it for laughs.

He was a computer science kid, and one night he shared with us a game he and his CS buddies had invented called ‘color or country.’ 

The rules were simple - the two players go back and forth saying either a color or a country. If you say a color, the game continues. If you say a country, you lose.

Let’s just try one, Ryan says, he’ll start: Pink. 

My turn: Black. 

His turn: Pink. 

Wait - you can say the same color twice? 

Yep, he says. Pink. 

Ok…um, red. 

Nice, he says, then: Spain, the color. 

That’s a country, I say.

No, he says, I said it was a color so it’s a color. 

The rules make no sense while also making the most sense in the world.

Our friend Dan and Ryan play for over an hour. Dan employs the Strong Blue strategy, which Ryan says he’s seen before. 

Blue, Dan says.

Orange.

Blue.

Canada - the color.

Blue. 

“Teal - the country” - the color. 

It’s 10pm and there’s some party so Dan throws in the towel: France. 

Everyone screams like it’s the game winning run of the World Series and Ryan leaps into the air his body unable to contain his glee. 

Good game, Dan says.

Good game - the color, Ryan says back.  

In school, we learn about a life of logic and order and merit and skill. Games of chess and War and victory like those I learned as a 5 year old in Ukraine before moving to the US when I was six.

But parenting feels like one giant game of color or country, an absurd game with rules that make no sense - feats of strength and decades long battles of endurance whose purpose and perhaps maybe even joy come largely from our ridiculous commitment to it. 

Why do I keep failing, I ask myself, not realizing that I’m simply playing the wrong game. 

Blue, I say to Wilder, knowing full well I am right. Put your shoes on. Blue.  

Red, he says back, throwing his shoes into the dishwasher. 

Blue, I repeat. 

Cheese - the color, he says. 

Blue, I say.

Rainbow, he says.

Blue, I say.

Cacoola, he says.

Green, I say, enraged.  

Dada is a butt - the color, he says.

Despite myself, I laugh in the color orange.

Blue, he giggles back.

Unacceptable, I say trying to regain composure.

Acceptable - the color, he says.

Unacceptable, I say.

Acceptable - the color, he says.

Marine biologist, I say.

Dad, he says.

Ukraine, I say.

USA, he says.

USSR, I say.

USA, he says.

Papa, I say.

Dad, he says.

Dad, I say.

Marine biologist, he says.

Blue, I say.

Blooooooooooooooo, he says.

Blue, I say.

Blue, he says.

Blue, I say.

Blue, he says.

I love blue, I say.

I love blue, he says.

I love you - the color, I say.

I love you - the country, he says.

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