Where Did My Kids Go? Reflections on Father’s Day.

A rude awakening on a holiday meant for fathers to celebrate fatherhood.

This morning, I woke up early, awakened by a terrible nightmare. I was re-living a moment from many years ago when I took one of my sons to an ice cream store.

He was jumping for joy and squealing with excitement to be having “guy time” with me and getting ice cream.

In my dream, everything was the same as it was in that moment of real life, but somehow I knew I was dreaming, and I knew I was “rewatching” an old memory, as though it were on a TV screen.

Then, I started panicking, asking:

“What happened to that little boy?”

“Where is my son?! Where did he go?”

Over the past few years, I’ve had a horrible, urgent feeling like this, and it grows as time passes.

I look back at pictures and family videos of my kids, and I wonder what happened to those precious little children who called me “daddy” and asked me to help them tie their shoes, get them in and out of their car seats, and kiss their booboos.

But I’ve never felt it in such stark terms until this morning.

The little boy in that memory?

He’s gone. He doesn’t exist anymore.

If you heard me say that without context, you might think my son had died or was kidnapped. How else could you explain how he was here but isn’t anymore?

Where did he go?

When I woke up with this awful realization, I was almost crying. I had a strange ache inside.

“My little son was taken from me,” I thought.

I’d never said that out loud before, but for whatever reason, that’s what I’ve been feeling a lot recently.

I have five kids: two girls and three boys.

My two little girls are tiny and cute. I have one blonde and one redhead. They have little “fountain ponytails” on top of their heads. They giggle a lot and love it when I chase them, pick them up, give them an airplane ride, or let them climb up on my back when I’m on all fours so they can have a horsey ride.

“Giddyap!” They say in their squeaky, high-pitched voices as I run around like a bucking bronco, trying to throw them off my back. (Well, not really: I’m careful not to hurt them; I just make it seem like I’m going to throw them off my back.)

My three little boys are even smaller: they’re short, little guys who love to walk around bare-chested while carrying their blankies and sucking their thumbs. Their voices are even higher pitched than the girls at times, and they like to dress up like “policemen,” “rock stars,” or pirates.

Or that one time, while only wearing diapers and a tee shirt, they even put on their sunglasses and hats and told my wife and I that they were all three at the same time: “We’re rockstar policemen pirates!”

Except none of that is true anymore.

It was once, but somehow, as time passed, these five tiny little people with bedhead hair, dollies, bare chests, and soggy diapers who love to be held and pushed in strollers have all grown up, and I never really saw it coming.

I technically “saw” it coming the same way every parent does: I watched them every single day of their lives since they were born. I was there for all five births and assisted in catching three of the four who were born at home with the help of a midwife.

Day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year, I have been here with them.

I have loved them, protected them, held them, kissed their cheeks at night, read them bedtime stories, let them fall asleep on my chest, held their hands as we hiked through the mountains, took them to urgent care when they couldn’t breathe, prayed for them, fed them, bought them ice cream, picked them up from school, coached them in baseball, and took them on road trips.

And somehow, all of a sudden, they aren’t little anymore. None of them are.

The day my wife and I waited for for many years—when they could all dress and feed themselves—has long since passed. And when it did, it happened so fast I didn’t even realize it.

My oldest daughter is a legal adult now and can move out at any time if she wants to. She is absolutely not prepared for that, but seems to think she is. I don’t know when and how it will happen, but it’s likely to happen soon and all I’m trying to focus on is: “How can I make sure she’ll want to stay in relationship with me after she leaves?”

My second oldest daughter is about to start her last year of high school. She’s already been to a “prom” once, where she got all dolled up with special nails, a special haircut, and a brand-new, expensive dress, and she’s going to go one more time this coming school year.

Also, both girls drive now.

My oldest son is entering high school. He’s recently started playing the guitar. And by that, I mean he’s started playing my guitar. It’s almost unnerving to hear someone else play my own guitar in my own house and know that it sounds like me but isn’t me. I’m afraid he’s going to soon pass me in his skill level, and he only picked it up a few months ago, while I’ve been playing guitar for 22 years. Is he going to replace me?

My middle son is almost as tall as me. Will he outgrow me? At 5’ 10”, I am not especially tall—I’m on the smaller end of the scale for American men—but I’m still the tallest of all my siblings and almost all of my in-laws. Is my 14-year-old son about to pass me by?

My youngest son, the baby of the family, asks me so many deep, profound questions about life, the universe, and being and existence—questions that require more intelligence than most adults that I know have to even ask much less answer.

So here I am now, with five mostly functional and autonomous kids who really don’t need my help anymore and just need my support more than anything else, most often in the form of financial support.

…and this is all making me so sad.

Where did my kids go? What happened to the little children I used to have?

Today, fatherhood is different than it used to be. Now, I’m more of an advocate and mentor than a disciplinarian or rule-maker. We don’t even really have lists of “family rules” anymore because everybody knows what’s expected of them. They don’t always do it, of course (actually, they don’t, more often than not), but they know what they’re responsible for.

When the kids were younger, my wife and I had somewhat distinct roles as far as taking care of the kids. Most nights, before bed, especially with the boys, I would help them get in pajamas, brush their teeth for them, teach them how to floss, then brush their hair, and help them wash their hands.

Once or twice a week, I’d help them shower or bathe, then clip their nails and clean out their ears with Q-tips.

But I really don’t do any of this now.

My job as a father used to consist of basic life necessities: making sure they ate food and had clean clothes on, carrying them to and from the car, and helping them clean their bodies. I worried about them staying safe and did what I could to make sure they wouldn’t die from sickness or starvation.

My job these days consists of encouraging them when they’re doing right, warning them when they’re doing wrong, persuading them to make good choices, driving them places, and getting them to stop eating junk.

Also, I still worry about them staying safe, and I do what I can to make sure they don’t die, though these days, the biggest threat is mostly due to peer pressure, teenage carelessness, or stupidity.

It’s all so strange: all five of my kids are still here, and I’m still here. I’ve never not been here.

They’re all still alive, and they all still live with me. Yet it feels like they’re gone. The kids who live in my house now are different than the kids I raised.

And that is just so profoundly sad.

On this Father’s Day, I’m stuck on the quote (often misattributed to Doctor Seuss):

“Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.”

That almost sounds trite and cliche, but my goodness, am I ever feeling that right now.

Over the weekend, I saw a collection of videos where eight billionaires were interviewed and asked about what they would do differently in their lives if they could do it over.

All eight of them, not surprisingly, said some form of the following:

• “I would spend more time with my family.”

• “I wouldn’t have spent so much time away from my kids.”

• “I wish I hadn’t focused on work so much that my marriage failed.”

These admissions are sometimes hard to believe because it’s easy for them to say that now as they sit in their private jets with bazillions of dollars worth of real estate, sports cars, luxurious mansions, and a slew of eager employees who will do anything they ask 24/7.

Would they really spend more time with their family if they had to do it all over again? Of course not. They would do exactly what they did the first time around: it’s in their nature.

But it is helpful to hear that there are fathers out there who at least claim to regret the time they missed from their children’s childhood.

Sometimes I feel bad about this too: going through life as a very poor young man without a college degree who got married very early and was immediately saddled with the burden of a lot of children right away, I definitely spent more time at the office than I would have liked.

But that’s what I had to do to keep us moving forward as a family through multiple recessions, getting laid off from three separate companies, fighting foreclosure and a looming bankruptcy, and all the while slowly chipping away at a college degree that took me forever to finish.

But whenever I feel bad about the time I missed of my children’s formative years, all I have to do is look back on my photo collection. Starting on the day my wife and I got married, we have kept a photographic record of just about every child’s most important moments and life stages.

It’s all documented on film: their births, first steps, teething, walking, first days of school, sports games, trips to Silver Dollar City and Disneyland, road trips across the country, family holidays like Christmas at their great-grandparents’ house, and much more.

If you were to look at our photo collection, you’ll notice two things:

1. We have a TON of pictures and videos: more than 73,000 of them. I just counted.

2. I am in very few of them.

Without context, one might see this and think, “Wow, that’s great that there are so many pictures of the family. But where was Ron?”

Yet I don’t regret this.

I’m not in most of our family’s photos and videos because I took almost every single one of them.

I didn’t miss their childhood: I was there for almost all of it. But I still can’t look through those photos and videos without crying.

It’s such a profound mystery: we’re all the same seven people as before, but also, we aren’t. None of us are the same. I’m a different father now than the man I was 5, 10, and 15 years ago, but I’m still the same man.

I just look a bit different. And so so they.

And my kids aren’t gone. They’re all still here. I just have to squint really hard to see them.