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Questions

Monday 27 October 2025

One of the most challenging things about being a parent of a teenager is that constant uncertainty that you’re getting the whole story. It’s not that you think they are lying to you. It’s not to say that it’s even a conscious effort to withhold information: they likely don’t even know themselves whether they’re telling the whole story. Being awash in hormones and emotions that are all new to them, young teens have only started trying to figure out who they really are, who they ultimately want to become, what they want to be, what they want to achieve. You’re never quite sure if everything is all right of the mannerisms, the silence, you suspect it’s not. And when they say, “No, I’m fine. I’m just tired,” you wonder if they’re fooling you, fooling yourselves, or fooling everyone.

“Are you all right?” That’s probably the most spoken word in the household with one or teens.

We try to replay our own teen years in our head in such situations, and realize that sometimes we wouldn’t want to talk. It was just that. Nothing was wrong. It was no depression or anger. We just didn’t feel like talking. But it’s so different when you’re on the other side. There must be a reason you don’t want to talk. There must be a reason for everything, because that is what parenting feels like sometimes: looking for reasons.

“I’m just tired,” comes the response. That was an excuse we used, t0o.

The thing is, we have no more answers now as adults that we did kids, and while all adolescent identity are instructed in a swirl of questions, it still feels like we as parents have more questions. Certainly more questions and answers.

It all just illustrates my childhood was usually the easiest part of any one’s life in the modern era. What questions has children were simple, when we trusted the adults in our lives about the answers they gave. Even later in life what do we realize that not all those answers were correct or healthy, we usually remain in blissful ignorance of all these doubts as children.

Stool Mountain

Tuesday 21 October 2025

Do you remember your first love and all the stress and joy that comes from the certain uncertainty that comes with it? Does she like me? Do I still like her? Is she flirting with him? Am I flirting with her? Are we going to make it last forever? Are we about to break up?

My first love, whom I met at band camp, was Tonya. She lived about two hours away, so our romance was a week together at camp (or less — we didn’t meet that first day) followed by a few months of letters and occasional phone calls. That all lasted three, maybe four months. By the time school started again, we were drifting apart — as if we were every really together.

That was forty years ago now. Tonya and I remained in loose, occasional contact until I was in high school, and we even saw each other a time or two (usually at church gatherings — she was raised in the same sect as I), but I haven’t seen her in over thirty years now, and I really have no clue about her life now. Nor, truth be told, do I really worry about it. Why would I?

But why am I thinking about her now? Because of the Boy and his girlfriend. “Have fun, enjoy this,” we tell him (and her parents probably tell her), “but don’t take it too seriously.” But how can you not take your first love seriously? It’s your first love, after all. Those enormous, overwhelming, awe-inspiring emotions surging through your thoughts continually make it impossible to do anything but take it seriously.

And we all did. We all went through that, “I know he’s the first boyfriend I’ve had, but he has to be the one fate meant for me!” certainty. “I know everyone else breaks up with their first girlfriend, but this is different.” It’s always different because it’s always real. It’s always deep. It’s always comfortable.

Until it isn’t. Until that uncertainty hits. And it always does. And it’s always countered with that certainty. Which is always tinged with that doubt. Which always has a sliver of assurance. That is lined with doubt powered with surety that has been dusted with misgivings.

In short, it’s great until it isn’t, and even when it isn’t, it’s perfectly imperfect.

The Boy is going through all the typical ups and downs of a first love, and we talk about all these things during our near-nightly walk. I encourage him, console him, laugh with him, and sometimes advise him. But mostly I just listen, letting the conversation wind where it will. Sometimes it ends up in band. Sometimes, soccer. Sometimes, something he discovered on the internet.

I try not to advise him too much because often people speak just because they want someone to hear them not necessarily to help them. But when asked, I do give a bit of advice. Yet how can I? Married for twenty years, I have long forgotten about the uncertainties of new relationships; an adult (legally speaking) for thirty-four years, I’ve long forgotten the details of my adolescent loves.

I remember that on-again/off-again uncertainty of it all, but I don’t remember how I dealt with it. I certainly didn’t talk to my dad about it because there was an understanding in our church that adolescent relationships were of little value and might actually hurt your spiritual growth. I honestly kept all my interests, loves, and infatuations from my parents until I was sixteen or seventeen, and it was no longer possible to hide them. Even those early loves, I’m sure they realized, but we never really talked about them.

That’s not to disparage my folks: I’m sure if I’d taken the initiative to discuss any of that with them, they would have talked to me about it. I just always got the sense from sermons and such that I just shouldn’t be having those feelings so young, and if I did have them, I was supposed to master them instead of letting them master me. Sort of purity culture on steroids.

So that’s likely one of the reasons I so treasure my walks with the Boy. That he trusts me to talk to me about these things is something to cherish.

Something else to cherish: a Tuesday-morning hike with your lovely wife of twenty years. Why Tuesday morning? Because I have fall break right now.

“I could take off one of those days, and we could go for a hike!” Kinga realized a month or so ago when we were looking at the calendar together. So that’s just what we did: a new trail up a mountain right beside one of the most-hiked trails in the area, Table Rock. Next to a table, one must have a chair or a stool or something. Enter the new trail: Stool Mountain Trail.

L Leaving

Sunday 3 August 2025

After having L as a daily aspect of our everyday reality — a blessing, a source of joy, an occasional annoyance, a cause for worry, a source of pride, and everything else children represent in their parents’ lives — she’s about to leave for college. We have a handful of days remaining until she’s gone for good. Of course, there will be visits (some longer, others shorter), but chances are, she won’t live with us much after she leaves for the University of Florida. She’ll come for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She’ll spend a good part of summers with us. But she’ll always be returning, first to the U of F, then to wherever she pursues her graduate degrees. Then she’ll be getting her first post-college/grad school job, and the summer visits will all but disappear. She might be involved with someone by then seriously enough that Thanksgiving and Christmas will no longer be guarantees, either.

In other words, it’s nearly the end of our roles as parents of a growing girl and the beginning of a new role: parents of an adult, of a woman who is out finding her way in the world, her existence completely separate from ours in so many ways. No longer dependent on us for anything, she’ll learn to navigate the complexities of adulthood on her own terms, with as much or as little input from us as she herself chooses.

I’ve never been good with endings. They’ve always tugged at my nostalgia and regret, making me wonder if anything will ever be as good as whatever it is that’s ending. Leaving Lipnica in 1999 was so tough on me that I ended up returning. Leaving Hughes left a lingering worry that perhaps whatever followed would be somehow inferior to what I was leaving despite the advantages. Every year as a kid, the end of our week-long, vacation-like Feast of Tabernacles, which was essentially a Christmas replacement, was overwhelming: next year could never be as incredible as this year. Most visits to Poland leave me feeling a little nostalgic when we leave: “did we make the right decision coming back to the States?” I wonder for the briefest of moments while I’m still enthralled with the magic of Poland, forgetting about its drawbacks and all the opportunities living in the States provided our kids.

Logically, this ending should be the hardest of all for me. Our little girl (who is no longer a little girl) is leaving. Yet I’m strangely calm about it. Perhaps it simply hasn’t registered fully. Maybe I’m in such blinding denial that it doubles back on itself and poses as calm. It would be difficult to deny it to myself, though, as the signs are everywhere: nearly-daily trips to this or that store are producing an ever-growing pile of boxes in one corner of her room. Brief exchanges often begin, “Do we have…” and end with expressions of gratitude or furiously typing an addition to this or that shopping list on her phone. She has a growing interest in things like bedsheets and dehumidifiers, her quest for a refrigerator is entering is a recurring conversational motif. “Being an adult means paying for things one really doesn’t want to pay for” has been my refrain of the last few weeks as she complains about how much this or that costs.

The evidence abounds: why am I so relatively relaxed about L heading out to make the world her own, thus ending an eighteen-year reality for our family? Part of it certainly comes from the simple fact that she’s spent the last three or four years gradually creating her own world with her own friends, her own interests, her own passions. Pulling away, in other words. Not tugging violently (usually, though that has happened, too) but simply shifting her time from family to her own world. And K and I, in turn, have slowly released that firm grip we had on her as she starts to turn away. So in truth, we haven’t been holding hands with her (to continue the metaphor) for some time but rather walking beside her as she puts more and more distance between us. Now she’s heading down her own road as we continue down ours. Roads that will be parallel in some sense, to be sure, but not the same road.

We’ve known this was coming, in other words, and in that sense, we’ve been preparing both ourselves and her for this moment. We’ve done what we could: now it’s time to let her be L fully.

Heading Out for a Walk

Wednesday 15 January 2025

The Boy and I headed out for a walk after dinner. We took the dog, we chatted about school, keyboards (as in computer keyboards — a recent interest of the Boy’s), district band tryouts (tomorrow evening), and random topics (as if that list weren’t random enough). It was another of those “how many more times do we do this?” moments. The Girl didn’t go with us because she had gone to her boyfriend’s house to watch a movie with him.

Everyone’s role slowly shifts.

Reminders

Wednesday 25 September 2024

The dump truck was a highlight of a birthday some years ago — his fifth? sixth? seventh? It was all he was dreaming of, and he loved it so.

Then he outgrew it, and K thought of using it for a planter. She had a potted plant in it, replaced every now and then, for a couple of years.

Now it sits by the side gate of our fence, neglected and forgotten until I walk into the yard, happen to glance back down.

Elderberries

Saturday 20 July 2024

We dedicated today to our elderberries. I clipped the clusters from the bush in the late morning, and K spent a lot of time pulling the small black pearls from their clusters as I worked and after I finished when I joined her.

And when I say we dedicated today to the elderberries, I mean the whole day. As I type (and work on my safety videos for school), K is finishing up, filling jars with fresh elderberry preserves.

We ended up with something like who-knows-how-many kilos of berries (was it four? five? I can’t recall) which will make who-knows-how-many pints of preserves.

The other task for the evening was helping the Boy get his room straightened up, a Sisyphean task if ever there be one. We ended up throwing out quite a bit of stuff, an act that initially stressed and frustrated the Boy a great deal.

Surrendering even the smallest trinket is difficult for someone as sentimental as E. I can understand that, though I hope eventually to grow out of it myself.

Camp Departure 2024

Sunday 7 July 2024

The Boy left for camp today. He’ll be gone until next Saturday. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Typical parental concerns: on the one hand, I love seeing him grow up, seeing him not only willing but excited about a week away from us. Not that he’s excited about being away from us, per se, but rather that he’s excited to be going to camp and the prospect of being away from us for a week doesn’t worry him or dampen that excitement.

On the other hand, I know how situations like that can stress him out. Or could stress him out. Perhaps he’s growing out of it, but I’m not: I’m still stressed about him being gone. Not about him being gone, but not being in the near vicinity to keep an eye on things.

“You can’t be there for them all the time. You have to let go.” That’s the common wisdom. The common parental expectation.

But that doesn’t always allay the worries…

Ramp

Wednesday 12 June 2024

The Boy decided he wanted to build a kicker ramp to practice jumping.

“Will you help me?”

“Of course, but that means I’ll help you — you’ll do it, I’ll just coach.”

So the Boy measured the wood,

cut the wood,

created the curve of the ramp, and

screwed most of it together.

When it came time to jump, he got a little nervous. “It’s a bit higher than it looked in the video.”

He’ll get it, though. I have no doubt.

Anniversary

Sunday 26 May 2024

It’s been five years now since Nana passed. E is the same age now that L was then, and now L is only a few short months from being a legal adult.

A common theme in my writing is the suddenness and recurrence of my realization o f just how much time has passed since a certain event, and using that realization to project into the future with the realization that it will come just as quickly as this moment has arrived. Almost thirty years ago, for example, I left for Poland for the first time; project those same nearly-thirty years into the future, and I’m almost eighty, the age Papa died two years after Nana, now three years ago. See? I just did it again: created a loop of time.

In those five years since Nana’s passing, the GIrl has grown almost an entire foot; the Boy has reached a point that we just barely have to look down while talking to him. In those dunce years since Nana’s passing, the Girl has become a volleyball star and broken then re-broken high school track and field records; the Boy has picked up guitar and trombone as well as becoming a confident soccer player.

In another five years, the Girl will be finishing up college, lining up graduate school (with her interests, she will likely end up getting a doctorate straight away), and firmly established in a life of her own, a life without (to some degree) K and me. In another five years, the Boy will be almost done with high school, thinking about college, and probably still playing trombone and Fortnite. I’ll be creeping ever-nearer my sixties; K will be in her fifties.

With all this in my head, we go to Polish mass in the afternoon, and while everyone is getting the pot luck afterward read, the Boy heads out to the playground and it’s clear how much he’s changed…

Changes Waiting

Monday 22 April 2024

Though it’s hard to comprehend how we’ve reached this moment so quickly, the Girl is just shy of six feet tall and wrapping up her junior year of high school, and the Boy has crossed the five-foot barrier and will soon be twelve. The changes coming are enormous: L will be making final decisions about college over the summer, and the Boy will soon have a full-blown, empty-leg, teenage boy appetite.

We got a hint of that this evening.

After eating a full meal, he came back downstairs hunting for food no more than five minutes later.

“I’m still hungry,” he declared. So he got a piece of yesterday’s leftover pizza out and warmed it up.

Clover smelled it, sensed a treat, and followed him into Papa’s room (it will always be “Papa’s room”), and sat down like the best behaved pup in the world.

Soccer in the Front Yard

Monday 11 March 2024

It’s been a while since we had any sports in the front yard. Lately, though, the Boy has been asking to head out to play soccer in the front yard a little. With the time change, this is likely to increase — at least I hope so.

It, too, will be gone before we know it.

Coming Home

Saturday 28 October 2023

The Girl was heading out to Target.

“I want to go, too!” the Boy exclaimed.

What was going to be the reaction? She’s often reticent to take him anywhere, but surprisingly she simply said, “Well, you can come with me.”

So our children went clothes shopping alone.

Practice

Monday 16 October 2023

August 13, 2020

When the Girl decided she wanted to play volleyball, when she tried out for the team as a sixth grader and didn’t make it, when she became really determined, she’d come ask me, “Padre” (She’d started calling me that by then) “can we go out to the front yard and practice volleyball?” I’d toss her balls, simulate spikes, help her practice running for balls — all the basic skills someone of my eager volleyball means could help with given our lack of a net.

At some point, she asked me for the last time to go help her practice. I didn’t realize it was the last time she would ask me, and to be honest, I don’t know if I even agreed to it. She might have asked, and I might have made some kind of excuse. Or maybe we went and practiced one last time.

She hasn’t asked me to do that in years now. She probably never will again. The last time, passed without knowing, fully past with complete knowledge.

So when the Boy asked if, instead of swimming tonight, we could practice basketball, I agreed. I didn’t really want to: I wanted to get some serious exercise in the pool. But he’s that age: how many more times will he ask? When will be the last time?

Legos

Saturday 24 June 2023

Where did this come from? The last time I remember doing this with him — I can’t even recall. Two years ago? More? Less?

Play Date

Friday 23 June 2023

L insists that the boys are too old now to have play dates.

“They just hangout!” she explains with exasperation.

“What about you? Do you have play dates?”

[L rolls her eyes…]

Elementary School Graduation

Tuesday 30 May 2023

Today, our Boy finished elementary school. “I mean, I have to go three more days after that,” he explained to me the other day, “but once I get that piece of paper, I’m basically done.”

Our daughter has two more years of high school; our son starts middle school next year…

New Beginnings

Tuesday 28 March 2023

The Boy is no longer a Cub Scout. That’s over — a whole phase of his life behind him. Tonight was his first meeting as a Boy Scout.

There was the requisite paperwork — which he filled out. “This is all you, little man,” I told him with a smile.

They started the meeting with introductions to the troop: “We’d like to invite our newest scouts to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about them.” E stepped forward, shyly as always, and said, “I’m E. I like soccer and guitar.” After introductions, the new scouts went out with some of the older boys to learn the ropes, so to speak.

So different than Cub Scouts. Boy-run, boy-planned, boy-approved. “We’re just there to make sure they do everything safely,” the scoutmaster told us when we first visited back in December.

We parents didn’t see the kids until they were done, wrapping everything up with their circle. In fact, tonight is likely the only night we’ll stay through the whole thing. “Most parents just drop them off and then pick them up later,” the assistant scoutmaster told us new parents.

“This is going to do the Boy so much good,” I told K.

Saturday Evening Downtown

Saturday 25 March 2023

We spent the evening downtown, the five of us — the two kids and the dog. It’s so rare that everyone’s schedules work out to let us do something like this. We’ll take every opportunity we have.

Our stroll eventually led us down to the river and the new Grand Bohemian hotel which is the latest highlight of the ever-developing downtown Greenville.

Eventually we made it down the the rocky area of the river just at the edge of the main downtown park, the place both of our kids loved to run about on the rocks as little kids.

“Those days are long gone” K and I constantly remind ourselves. And yet, every now and then, the stars align,

the kids are both fascinated with the same thing, and for a brief moment, we pop back a few years in the past.

Sunday Games

Sunday 29 January 2023

The Girl has slowly disappeared from this site though not for lack of interest on my part. She’s reticent to have photos taken; she is often not at home in the evenings, either at practice, the gym, the library, or just going to visit friends; the things we talk about don’t result in cute exchanges anymore but just honest sharing with each other — when she’s willing to share. She is, in short, a typical sixteen-year-old, and her withdrawal from this site mirrors a bit of a withdrawal from family life into her own, growing life.

So when she accepted an invitation this evening to come downstairs and play a board game with E and me, the temptation to take a picture was great, but I knew it would ruin the moment. K probably did, too, and didn’t even try a stealth shot. Instead, the three of us sat and played Sequence, chatting about nothing of any significance, just spending some time together. I played without a care, randomly placing my pieces with only the occasional intent — usually to block L’s pending sequence. She won anyway (she always wins board games), and though I would have played another, neither child was interested.

“Are they both just humoring me?” I thought as they walked away.

Pyzowka

Saturday 9 July 2022

I keep repeating myself: X is always a highlight of our time in Polska. When you come here only every few years, I guess everything becomes a highlight. Still, going to Pyzowka to visit K’s dearest friend D and her family has to count as a highlight no matter how you define it.

D is the type of friend you have that, no matter how much time has passed since your last visit, the years disappear in an instant and except for the topics of conversation, your relationship feels little different than it did when you were in high school together. These days, you might talk about the cost of your child applying to college versus the cost of your child going to college if you lived in the states. You might talk about friends that only one of you has seen in the last twenty years and how they’ve changed or not changed. You might talk about the cost of heating your house this year as opposed to last year. These are discussions your parents would have had years ago, but now you have them.

Before you know it, your children will be having them as well. But for now, your children are happy jumping on the trampoline and playing with a puppy. The cost of heating is as distant to them as it was to you when you were their age. They hear your discussions, but they don’t pay much attention to them.

Then again, neither did you.