Author: Jeremy

Damn You, Bandit Heeler

/ Jeremy / 2 Comments

I must confess that I deeply resent Bandit Heeler.

I greatly admire his warmth and creativity. I love the way he champions proactive, hyper-engaged fatherhood. And frankly, I aspire to be exactly like him in most ways.

But man do I resent his maddening perfection.

In case you’re not up to date with the most popular children’s show of the decade, Bandit Heeler is the canine patriarch of Bluey. He and his also-imaginative wife Chilli live in Australia with their 2 supremely imaginative young daughters. And after 150 freewheeling episodes, Bandit and Chilli have now officially broken the world record for Most Wildly, Inexhaustibly Creative Parenting.

And perhaps also the record for Most Resentment Induced by an Animated Character.

See, here’s the thing. When you’re a parent of a young child, sometimes you feel like an impostor. Sometimes you get overwhelmed. Sometimes you have no idea how to keep up with your child’s boundless imagination. Sometimes you don’t know how to play with your kids. Or you don’t remember how to play, period.

But Bandit Heeler never has that problem. He never feels like an impostor. He never gets overwhelmed. And he relentlessly keeps up with the wild, hyperenergetic imaginations of his two kids, Bluey and Bingo. He knows precisely how to play with them at all times.

He is, to put it simply, an absolute blast. A delightfully funny, warmly affectionate, wonder-filled dad with a million creative ideas to make the day a magical wonderland for his kids. Like a master of improv, he says “yes, and” to every freewheeling prompt his kids give him. Which leads to a hundred hysterically fun play scenarios that delight everyone involved.

But here’s the thing that I have to regularly remind myself of so that I don’t go off the rails with jealousy toward this radiant epitome of fatherhood.

Bandit Heeler has a whole team of screenwriters.

They feed him lines. Can you imagine being fed lines? How wonderful that would be? A group of extra-caffeinated people in a writer’s room, telling you exactly what to say to every goofy play prompt given to you by your kids with their goofy, untethered imagination? It would be a dream come true!

I can’t tell you how often I wish I had even one mildly talented screenwriter in my earpiece, telling me the most clever and creative way to respond to my kids when they want to play something imagination-based. Oh how helpful and confidence-boosting it would be to have that kind of assistance.

Parenting is one of the most exhausting human endeavors on Earth. It saps you of your best self, even while utterly demanding of you that very thing at all times. For only a small portion of each day do you have the luxury of radiating your best energy. The rest of it, you’re worn down by the act of parenting. Because you are in demand constantly.

(To be clear, this is especially true of stay-at-home parents. God bless them all in their noble, eviscerating endeavor. It’s the hardest job on earth, tied with being a teacher.)

Bandit Heeler’s mind and body, on the other hand, are inexhaustible. Which means he’s a different breed than the rest of us — even beyond the whole, you know, canine thing. By virtue of being animated and screenwritten, he can do and say all the things that we parents can only dream of having the energy and sheer cleverness to do and say.

Bandit is the golden ideal of fatherhood. He is what I aspire to be in my best, most lucid moments. And for that I admire him. Even while I’m chewed up with resentment of how he makes the rest of us regular, non-animated dads look so boring.

No matter how much I resent him, though, I’ll never stop watching the show. It’s a bona fide masterpiece of creative, aspirational writing.

Just like Bandit himself.

Early Eulogies & Spontaneous Soliloquies

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An unexpected moment from last weekend will linger warmly in my mind.

It was “nature day” with my kids, which I try to schedule every weekend. On a breezy and bright afternoon, The 3 of us were playing at a rock outcropping in the woods. Wait, let me rephrase that. The kids were playing at a rock outcropping in the woods, and my tired adult self (who can only dream of being as in-your-dreams imaginative as Bandit Heeler) was doing my tired, bedraggled best to keep up with their sweet little hyper-energetic conjured-up fantasies.

My 5-year-old daughter had the adorable idea to pretend that her 7-year-old brother’s birthday was tomorrow, and she and I should find gifts for him. So she pretended to buy a football, and I pretended to make a basketball book for him. Then we pretended to each write birthday cards for our beloved brother/son, all while we had told him to stay in his “room” (a designated part of the rock) and wait for his party.

After that, we called him over and he pretended to open his presents. “You’ll need to tell me what they are, because I won’t know,” my son helpfully explained. (Make-believe gifts are tricky like that!) He opened his pretend football and his pretend basketball book and smiled delightedly at each gift.

After that, he opened the pretend cards we had made for him. And my daughter suddenly had the idea that I should read his card aloud to him. A marvelous idea, as it turned out, because it gave me the opportunity to tell my son exactly what I think of him.

To be clear, I do this a lot. Usually just out of the blue. Occasionally I even wonder if I do it too much. Telling my kids repeatedly how much I love them, “to Neptune and back” and “forever, no matter what.” At this point, they’re beyond used to hearing it. But something about the opportunity presenting itself so organically, in the middle of playtime, just warmed my proud-dad heart.

So on a sunny day next to an oddly jagged and deep rock outcropping in the middle of the woods, I expressively read a make-believe birthday card to my son, gushing about what a sweet, silly, smart boy he is and how I love him and his sister more than anything on Earth and how the days when they were each born were the happiest 2 days of my entire life.

My son held his imaginary card while grinning sweetly. And I fervently hoped that all my love-soaked sentiments were absorbing deep into his little heart.

I hoped that in that moment, he felt like a one-in-a-million big deal.

Because man are my kids ever a one-in-a-million big deal.

Which makes me two-in-a-million lucky.

Thinking about it later, this tender moment reminded me of another one that I experienced recently. In some ways it was nearly identical, while also feeling quite different.

Last month, when my dad turned 78, we gave him his birthday cards, including the construction-paper ones our kids had scrawled for him. He loved reading them, of course, as the kids sweetly crawled on his lap and excitedly showed him their pictures and words.

When it comes to birthday cards (and Mother’s/Father’s Day cards), we Wingerts write a lot. I fill up at least one side of every card with paragraphs full of gushing affirmations and, when the card is for one of my parents, little recollections of my happy childhood. All the things that would make me swoon if my kids ever write them in a card for me once they grow up.

When my dad opened his birthday card, I impulsively offered to read my flowery inscription aloud to him. He seemed happy to let me do it. So I did.

It was an unexpected impulse. One of those inner pokes, where your heart firmly nudges you in the ribs. Kind of a loving shove. I’m so grateful that I responded to that shove, because here’s what resulted:

It felt like I was able to give my dad a living eulogy.

Like that legendary funeral scene in Waking Ned Devine, I’ve always thought people should have the privilege of hearing their own eulogy. That the most glowing praise a person ever hears should not come after they permanently lose the ability to hear it. As I read my rambling words of love to my dad, I could tell he felt touched and honored. He even squeezed my hand.

I don’t know how many years my dad has left. I hope and pray it’s a whole lot, but I’m not quite as confident as I used to be. I used to argue with him about politics, but I don’t anymore. Every year counts, and thus every moment counts.

I hope that my dad will always remember this particular moment. I hope he will always remember hearing straight from my mouth exactly what he means to me. (Hi Dad, since I know you’re reading this. I love you!)

My dad deserved to hear those words, aloud.

Just like my son deserved to hear how I feel about him, aloud.

Everyone deserves to know they’re loved, in as specific terms as possible. So by all means, tell everyone in great detail you love that you love them, and why you love them.

If they’re older, find a way to give them a living eulogy.

If they’re young, gush effusively about how much you love that they’re alive.

No expensive bauble purchased, no gaudy monument erected, no gift at all on this mortal plane, could burn brighter than giving someone those indelible words of love.

Nothing even holds a candle.

My One Wild & Precarious Hypocrisy

/ Jeremy / 1 Comment

I contain one particularly towering hypocrisy.

It chews around the edges of my brain. It nags me insistently on a day to day basis. And I have a feeling it’s only a matter of time before this hypocrisy comes back to haunt me.

There is a value that I take great pains to instill in our children, and then feel downright proud of having instilled. But it directly and flagrantly contradicts my actual values as an adult human.

It is an area where I have tried for years to be countercultural as a dad. But as an individual person, I don’t live even one degree counter to the culture.

I’m talking about screens.

Smartphones and iPads and laptops. Those glowing LCD rectangles that we stare at in order to learn things about life, and amuse ourselves to death.

When it comes to my kids, I have long taken great pride in raising them to be screen-resistant. They have never noodled around on an iPad, they have not once played a video game (and don’t even know what one is), and they are limited to 60-70 minutes of TV time a day, which includes the 30 minutes of nature documentaries and old football highlights and Tumble Leaf that we watch together as a family after dinner.

As you can see, I can’t even write an objective sentence about that without making it abundantly clear how I feel about it. My chest bursts with pride that our kids are imaginative and relatively impervious to screens. I pat myself on the back regularly in this respect. I feel good that even though screen reliance would make parenting notably easier at times, we haven’t chosen to go down that road yet.

But me, on the other hand? The actual guy who takes pride in instilling this Luddite, minimalist, nature-loving, simplicity-embracing, park-hopping, imagination-enhancing ethos? What do I do?

I stare at my iPhone until my eyes bleed, of course.

Every Sunday when my iPhone dispenses my “weekly report,” I am brought face to face with how much of my one wild and precious life I spend gazing at a small rectangular orb. For a moment at least. Then I quickly dismiss the report and try not to think too much about it. Self-examination is exhausting, after all. It feels better to go check my Twitter notifications.

I have evolved into a creature of social media, and the pandemic went a long way to cement that fact. Twitter and Facebook were my portals to the outside world while I was stuck inside, working from home for a year and a half. Phone attachment was a habit that developed during this quarantine, making me feel connected to the mass of humanity while I was profoundly disconnected from it. And I haven’t gotten around to shaking that bad habit in the ensuing years.

I’m embarrassed of this fact. I’m even hesitant to write it down, because I know my parents will read this. But I suppose a little self-inflicted public shame never hurt anyone.

At some point in the future, my kids will sniff out (and then call out) my screaming screen hypocrisy. In fact, there have been a handful of times when our son has said “Don’t look at your phone, Papa!” And each time, I was appropriately mortified.

Out of the mouths of babes, as they say.

These callouts haven’t happened for a while, but the countdown is on until this becomes a potential point of friction with my kids. When they finally notice that I am depriving them of a thing which I myself am considering eminently worthy of my time.

Which means I need to find a healthier balance now. Before they realize what they’re missing, I need to realize what I’m not missing.

After all, if impressionable kids should consume screen time in moderation, then surely the same is true of much bigger kids (who also happen to be impressionable).

Hypocrisy is not sustainable. And “do as I say, not as I do” is not a defensible parental maxim. We all must try to exhibit the behavior we want to elicit from our children.

So now the question is: How do I live without being affixed to my phone from moment to moment? How do I embrace more simplicity? Or to put it much more beautifully, as Mary Oliver once asked:

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Where the Magic Happens

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Magic is hard to come by as an adult.

That’s why it’s important to hang out with kids as much as possible.

Last weekend’s schedule included 6 magic hours with my kids, 3 at a nature center and 3 at a state park. And those 6 hours made the weekend — otherwise a bit of a mixed bag — a roaring overall success in my book.

I took off work early on Friday for the first little trip, and we drove an hour from home to see a new nature center I had heard good things about. My kids adore nature centers. But this one was… a bit underwhelming. There were barely any animal exhibits; mostly just a small gallery of wildlife paintings, and one butterfly exhibit. I didn’t breathe a word of my disappointment to the kids, but it was not exactly worth a 60-minute drive.

However, that’s where the magic began. I realized we would run out of indoor things to look at after 25 minutes, so we walked outside. In my experience, ever since they were babies, crossing that threshold always leads to good things.

We then proceeded to spend 2 ½ hours in the great outdoors, hiking and playing on a “natural” playground and doing a story walk and rock-hopping in a creek and playing at an amphitheater stage where the kids pretended to be football teams. (That’s kind of their thing at the moment.)

I can’t even quite piece together how we filled that much time with contented, creative play. The nature center had few bells and fewer whistles. In addition, I was feeling tired and wasn’t channeling my inner Bandit Heeler as much as I’m sometimes capable. But true to form, the kids did most of the creative legwork and I just try my best to keep up.

Then on Saturday we spent three hours at our favorite state park. We took a short hike to a cozy, boulder-strewn little inlet we like to call “Caspian Cove” and the kids immediately kicked into gear and conjured up 3 more magic hours of wildly creative play.

They used their goofy imaginations to enact all sorts of scenarios — many of which involved rescuing various Eagles players like Jason Kelce and Jalen Hurts from being lost, or stuck in the cracks of rocks. (Like I said, the kids are super into football lately.) I’m not sure why Jason Kelce got stuck as often as he did, but I’m thinking maybe he should reconsider his decision to retire if he’s going to get into this much mischief. As for Jalen Hurts? He should know better.

I am blown away by, and warmly envious of, my kids’ freewheeling creativity. Adulthood, in my experience, is an impediment to imagining worlds and envisioning wild scenarios. You tend to be hemmed in by what’s “realistic,” which immediately kills the vibe. Kids know instinctively that there are no boundaries to what you can imagine. And God bless them for knowing that fact.

So we played for 3 hours outside, except for the 25 minutes when we retreated to our car because it started raining. And wouldn’t you know it, they had a blast in the car too! It’s not even a big car. But they devised all sorts of little scenarios, like that we were driving to Glacier National Park. I found some paper and my daughter (with spelling help) wrote Jason Kelce a “postcard” from Glacier. Even after it stopped raining, they were happy to keep playing in the car.

At no point during any of the 6 hours over these 2 days did the kids breathe a single word of listlessness or boredom. At home, our 5-year-old will say “What can we doooo?” And yet I never hear those words come of either of their mouths when we’re outdoors.

3 hours in nature feels like 1 hour, while the opposite can be true at home. It’s like time speeds up (while also feeling wonderfully slow) when we’re out there in the real world. The world without walls. The world that doesn’t have a thousand toys lying around that somehow yield more discontentedness.

That’s the world I want my kids to grow up in.

That’s the world where the magic happens.

Gold Coins and Blue Collars

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Here is a first-world inequity that I find hard to shake.

My absolute favorite musicians on this planet have full-time, pay-the-bills, daily-grind jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with music. They can’t do what they love most for a living.

Imagine if the guys in Foo Fighters were full-time bartenders or woodworkers or photographers. Or if Taylor Swift spent 40-50 hours a week managing a Starbucks.

These are inarguably noble professions, but do you think T-Swift and D-Grohl would still have the ability to schedule lavish world tours and write a top-selling album every 2 years in this scenario?

The American music industry is not a meritocracy; it is a brandocracy. And if you don’t have an established mainstream brand, helped along by corporate influence and connection-peddling, then you are a working-class stiff and will thus have to work until you’re stiff.

Each of the hypothetical vocations listed a few paragraphs above is worked, non-hypothetically, by a member of my favorite band. That band (Caspian, of Massachusetts – may they rock on forever) was put on this earth to make music, but the stark realities of capitalism dictate that music has to be relegated to a side hustle for them.

This despite the notable fact that the band is beloved enough to co-headline not one but two music festivals this summer. They’re big enough to have 30,000 followers on Instagram. They’re influential enough to be considered pioneers in the post-rock genre.

And yet making albums and going on tour, when you’re not a mainstream household name working in a mainstream genre, isn’t profitable enough to pay the bills.

It doesn’t seem right, does it?

Caspian charges $30 for their tickets, based on supply and demand in the slightly-under-the-radar music market. Meanwhile, big-name mainstream artists now charge $300 without compunction. Our titans of musical commerce are coldly gouging us, their fans, and Ticketmaster’s glacial monopoly lets them get away with the heist.

It’s enough to make you want to burn Ticketmaster and Live Nation to the ground. (Only figurately, though, since arson is a serious crime.)

While the Bruce Springsteens and Ariana Grandes of the world are swimming in gold coins, Scrooge McDuck-style, the blue-collar bands of the world are rubbing copper pennies together, trying to make a spark to warm themselves up. But sadly for them, it’s like building a campfire in a downpour.

All of this is unjust, and unsustainable. The deep inequity of it cuts me to my core. Because the bands I love are not just a fun hobby to me – they are some of my hardscrabble heroes, and I would travel to the ends of the earth to support them. (Or at least to Boston, Detroit, and Indianapolis, based on my concert history.)

Some of my favorite bands only record an album every 4-5 years because they simply don’t have the time to write more music than that, or the money to record it. What kind of a world have we built where musicians can barely muster the time, funding, and bandwidth to make music? Where working artists have to scrape and claw against a brick wall of financial and logistical realities to make their art?

If this were The Hunger Games — and sometimes it feels like it — the odds would be ever not in their favor.

Why can’t we find a way to subsidize art? Why does capitalism throttle our attempts at beauty?

While I grapple with these unanswered (and unanswerable) questions, I will just have to keep buying tickets to see my favorite musicians. Nearly all of whom are grind-it-out bands, firmly ensconced in the proletariat.

I will drive 7 hours to attend $20 dive-bar shows. (See proof below from Columbus, Ohio.) I will buy their albums and gush about them on their social media pages. I will wear their T-shirts and do all the pro bono publicity I can.

And I will hope against hope that someday, the music makers of the world will be able to simply make music.

The Night That Didn’t Exist

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I attended an exhilarating concert last month, but it didn’t exhilarate me.

It was a head-banging rock show, but I didn’t headbang. I barely even rocked out.

I might as well have stayed home. My body was there, but my heart didn’t make the trip. My mind came along for the ride, but it was a miserable companion. A complete buzzkill.

I endure seasonal ebbs and flows, and the winter ebbs are the worst ebbs of all. So I should have known that buying a ticket for a concert on February 7, dead-center in the deadening doldrums of winter, was a roll of the dice.

And this time, I rolled a 1. Which really felt more like a devastating 0.

When I bought the ticket a few months earlier, I felt great. I was psyched to see two American bands I love, along with one highly touted German band that I knew faintly and was eager to discover.

But when I left for the show on a breezy February afternoon, my mind felt hollowed out. Driving to Baltimore, I was still faintly hopeful that the music that night would magically awaken my flattened mind and loosen up my tense, constricted body. There is an alchemy to music that can have this effect on me, even when I’m not quite feeling myself.

But there is alchemy, and there is biochemistry. The harsh dictates of the latter can make mincemeat out of the magical hopefulness of the former. Seasonal depression, at its worst, is a trump card that can cruelly extinguish even the pure spark of music.

There was no alchemy for me that night. None of the heart-swelling joy and head-banging liberation I typically experience at a rock show.

The bands were phenomenal, but somehow I felt an uncrossable chasm of distance between myself and them. I stood aloof at a respectable distance, brow tightly furrowed and fists lightly clenched. Usually I stand as close to the stage as possible, practically leaning over the speakers. I love to press myself into the music and drown myself joyously in an exhilarating ocean of sound.

I even left the concert 30 minutes early, depressed tail tucked between my legs, a fact that makes me cringe as a serial concert lover.

I felt a sense of demoralizing shame about the whole experience. Like I had let the bands down. Like I had let my fellow post-rock fans down who would have killed to be at that show.

But mostly, I felt like I had let myself down.

I posted something on social media before the show and then deleted it a few hours later, hoping not many people had seen it. I didn’t want anyone to ask me about my night. I always have 50 things to say about every show I attend. In this case, I had nothing interesting to say. For an extrovert like me, having nothing interesting to say is a fate worse than death.

As I drove home it felt as if the concert, or my memory of the concert, didn’t even exist. Two hours earlier, flat-footed and lost in the pulsating rock crowd, it felt as if I didn’t exist.

Here in March I feel much better, after a visit to my family doctor (partially prompted by the disorienting hollowness of that night) and a crucial modification of my meds.

Biochemistry is a harsh nemesis. Years ago I chafed against the idea that some of us might need medication. After bottoming out in 2021, I learned I was a wrong.

A night where I feel unmoved by a glorious rock show is proof positive that the chemistry of our bodies sometimes functions as a devilish combatant, warring against our better angels. And we must be willing to ask for help for the fight, both from our families and from our family doctors.

It’s a profound relief to feel better now. The early arrival of spring certainly doesn’t hurt. Witnessing the return of the verdant, warming world always lifts my spirits. Among many other resurgent emotional realities, I’m now back to finding immense solace and enjoyment in music.

I am deeply grateful for the mental bandwidth that allows me to breathe again, unconstricted by the anxious depressive funk that throttled my lungs and my heart this winter.

I am deeply grateful that unlike that black hole of a night in Baltimore, each day warmly exists.

And I am deeply grateful for each day that I exist.

Cradled Cats, Silver Spoons, & Moon Men

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I want my epitaph to read: There were no cats in his cradle.

Of course, this request relies on the good people of 2074 still being familiar with the 1974 song by Harry Chapin. But I guess they can always Google it from the graveyard if needed.

(Presumably the person in question is visiting my tombstone in this scenario, and for that I thank them warmly, and well in advance.)

I am a deeply flawed human and, as such, I am a deeply flawed dad. My mind is embattled just as often as it rests in a state of tranquility. And that mental health battle makes parenting even more challenging than it already is simply by virtue of being the hardest, bruising-est, most relentless, most emotionally weighted job on earth.

But one thing I take pride in doing, even when I don’t feel like myself: I show up.

That’s half the battle, right? Being next to your kids, right there in your skin, even when you’re crawling out of that skin with some kind of momentary anxiety or crippling insecurity or disquieting mental health glitch. Just being there, like Peter Sellers (to drop some more ’70s pop culture), inhabiting the same moment in time that your kids are inhabiting.

Showing up for the only thing that matters in life.

The moment.

Each one of them, a molecule of life itself.

I try to show up for as many of these moments as I can. And I do my best to conjure up memory-worthy ones. I try my hardest to do this — falteringly and with much failure, believe me — even when I am maddeningly devoid of creative spark. Even when I could not be less similar to Bandit Heeler (from Bluey) with his wild, freewheeling jags of ideal, creative fatherhood.

Seeing him do that, and then seeing my own flatter, less animated attempts at dynamic dadding, gives me a kind of impostor syndrome. I’m assuredly no Bandit Heeler.

But I like to believe, in my better moments, that I hold my own alright in the fatherhood realm. I try to take pride in that.

I especially take pride in taking my kids as many places as I can. I doubt anyone spends less money taking their kids to more places. I have found nearly every cheap or zero-admission space in central Pennsylvania. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve run out of options, but then I discover 4 more parks and a library in some town 45 minutes away that I forgot we hadn’t visited yet.

The world unfolds endlessly, even given a small radius.

I also try to play with my kids, but oh my gosh is that a hard thing to do when your energy is dragging and your confidence is sagging. I assume (or perhaps cynically hope, for the sake of solidarity) that every parent knows that feeling of having your child say “Play with me!” and your body cringes because you utterly lack the mental bandwidth to conjure up any imaginative worlds. Or for that matter, the physical stamina to physically get down on the floor and enact the playtime in question.

Of course, being a 44-year-old father of a kindergartener doesn’t help in that latter department. My wife and I really should have had the presence of mind to meet each other 5 years earlier and then not have 4 years of infertility struggles.

Hindsight, right?

So yes, parenting is eviscerating. But it is also exhilarating. It toggles wildly between those two polarities, sometimes achieving both at the same time (I call that “exhilavisceration”).

All that is required is that we show up for the experience. Because there won’t be a second chance at this thing. Our kids are all inexorably moving toward adulthood, and someday they won’t need us.

Someday my kids won’t need me. That thought haunts me. I know it shouldn’t, but it does.

Someday I will have lots of time to myself, to be alone with my thoughts, to catch up on my movie queue, to resume my reading habit, to take day-long hikes. And I’m pretty sure all I will feel at that point is an overwhelming ache to have these moments back.

These moments when my kids ask to play with me.

These moments when my kids let me read books to them.

These moments when my kids get excited to go on weekend adventures.

These moments, of course, will just turn into different kinds of moments when the kids are teenagers. Or even when they’re adults. The moments won’t disappear. They will evolve. But I will agonizingly miss the little-kid years.

Nonetheless, both now and in the future, all I have or will have are these moments.

Each grinding and glorious moment.

Every miserable one. Every marvelous one.

But if I manage to show up, then no cats will be in my cradle. And then my epitaph will warmly and accurately distill what it was like to live through this 2-decade chapter of my life. The part of my life when I helped raise small humans, to teach them and love them as best as I can.

The most magical moments of my mortal existence.

On Awakening

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“Sleeping is giving in,” sang a band I once loved.

And every single morning for the bulk of the winter, I gave in. Until the last possible minute that I could stay asleep, I stayed asleep. Even on nights when I abruptly woke up at 4:30 feeling anxious and clenched up, I stubbornly pressed my face into the sheets, tossing and turning restlessly until 7:15.

Despite the fact that waking up early and writing infuses me with more purpose than anything in life (besides fatherhood), my body flatly refused. I simply did not want to be conscious.

Seasonal depression is the mortal enemy of awakeness.

It makes you crave the oblivion of sleep.

But hope springs eternal. And spring eternally brings hope.

Every morning for the past week, I resisted. Which is to say, my body allowed me wake up between 5:45 and 6:15, and I was quite happy that it gave me permission to do so. Happy and deeply relieved to not be giving in. Waking up bright and early brightens my spirits.

When I am feeling down, I can sleep for 9 ½ hours and still not feel rested. But when I am feeling myself, I can sleep for 6 ½ hours and feel perfectly fine. My serotonin supply is funny like that.

(Not ha-ha funny, mind you.)

Right now I am halfway between being down and being up, and headed on a slowly upward trajectory. It’s been a long and flat and clenched-up and eviscerating winter, as it always is for me, but spring weather has returned. And with it comes the warm, verdant hope of finding my way back to feeling myself.

To wake up with the sun is to align with the natural rhythms of the world. And when I am myself, I can do that without a struggle (or even a choice). Which then gives me at least one full hour to myself in a quiet house before the demands of the day, and of my children, crowd my headspace. An hour to listen to music, and to express myself, and to pet my 2 cats, and to drink a cup of coffee, and to settle into my skin.

I need this time. I crave this time. My mind and soul hated not having this time for much of the last 2 months. (All while my body obstinately boycotted the very possibility of availing myself of this time.)

But now I have it back. And I will do my best to use it well.

“Sleeping is giving in.” Which means that waking up is resistance.

I am grateful I once again have the bandwidth to resist.

The cover of a superb album called Left Alone, by Of the Vine… purely for vibes

Lions & Tigers & Jaguars, Oh My

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Our kids are suddenly obsessed with football.

Wait, let me rephrase that.

Our kids are suddenly obsessed with large-feline-based football teams.

We raised them with a healthy dose of Eagles and Broncos games playing in the background. We proselytized hard for them to join us in loving both teams. But humans, even those of the smaller variety, possess free will. And our kids freely choose to support the Lions and Bengals. Along with, to a slightly less enthusiastic degree, the Jaguars and Panthers. (They love all God’s big cats, but the bigger the better.)

If their interest in football had started a year ago, our son’s previous obsession with birds would have dictated an allegiance to the Cardinals, Falcons, Ravens, Seahawks, and the hometown Eagles. Or if discovering football had coincided with his much-earlier farm animal fixation, maybe the Colts or Rams would have been his preferred team.

But timing is everything. And because their football discovery overlapped with their big-cat phase, we are now a family of Eagles, Broncos, Lions, and Bengals fans. At least until the kids start a sea-animal phase and decide the Dolphins are cool. Or maybe, given the kids’ names, they’ll opt for colors! Then they can root for the Browns, as well as the Reds in baseball.

(But I hope they don’t decide they like pirates, both because I don’t care for the Raiders or Buccaneers and also I don’t want them to start marauding, pillaging, or wearing an eye patch for non-functional reasons.)

It’s been fascinating to see their newfound fascination. They’re not yet intrigued by the actual sport of football. Instead, their interest is in team names, win-loss records, and game scores. They shout out “Lions!” or “Panthers!” every time they see or hear those words, or spot either team symbol. They love looking at displays of team logos, reading lists of team mascots, and scouring the NFL standings. They are very familiar, for instance, with the fact that the Panthers had an extremely bad season (“Only 2 wins!”) and that the Ravens had an extremely good one (“13 wins to 4 losses!”). They know who made the playoffs and who just barely missed that threshold.

It thrills them to see the scores at the bottom of the TV screen, and they helpfully give us regular updates during football games we’re watching. For instance, they shouted “It’s 0 and 13!” when the Eagles went down early by 2 touchdowns against the Buccaneers in a playoff game. Good to know!

After the kids went to sleep at halftime of that game (when it was 16-9) and then woke up the next day, I told them the lopsided final score (which was 32-9). They each said with wide eyes: “The Eagles got nothing in the 2nd half!” Which offered me an endearing lesson in humor and humility. So thank you for that, my dear children.

The day before that, we were hunkered down for a few hours at the mall, escaping a jagged-windy-frigid day. And I decided to take them to Dave & Buster’s to watch some playoff football since we don’t have cable. We rarely go to restaurants, a residual effect of Covid, so it’s an exciting novelty for them.

It was easily the loudest place we have been together in ages but my son, who used to refuse to be in high-volume places, was unfazed by the pandemonium. (Hooray for progress!)

I showed them the massive wall of televisions, to their great amazement, and they started noticing game scores. It brings me joy to see the joy they find in comparing the numbers and watching them change in real time. I was a box-score nerd as a kid, and maybe my kids will appreciate sports statistics too.

Then the host seated us in a high-top table, which the kids thought was fun… until my son tumbled off their chair, flat on the floor. (Don’t worry, he was okay!) Which led the manager, with liability concerns gleaming in his eye, to diplomatically reassign us to a booth. Which was probably for the best.

Clearly the Wingert family’s restaurant game needs some work.

So I ordered some fries and we watched a quarter and a half of the Packers/Cowboys game. The kids, with no knowledge of either team beyond their record, got a kick out of watching the score change early and often. They said things like “The Packers have 27 points already!” and “The Cowboys still have zero!” (Sincere apologies to any Cowboys-fan friends who are reading this. It was a rough weekend for you and me both. May we find solidarity in our respective football miseries.)

So now my kids have a taste of the hectic-sports-bar experience, with sippy straw plastic water cups and my fully caffeinated iced tea as our beverages of choice.

What can I say? We’re a pretty wild bunch.

And thus begins the chapter of my parenting life where the kids join my wife and me in our love of professional football. For years I wasn’t sure if either of them would end up being my football buddy, which would have been fine. But now, they suddenly both are! It has been a delightful romp so far, and will likely continue that way… until they get older and I have to explain concussions, and sports gambling, and player suspensions for drugs or misconduct, and the fact that the whole empire is built on advertising.

For now, I’m savoring the early, simple part of being a football family. As a 9-year-old in 1989, I was the only one in my household who developed an interest in sports-watching. I discovered the Eagles in the era of Randall Cunningham and Reggie White, and I passed along that Sunday game-watching allegiance to most of my fellow Wingerts.

Now, 35 years later, my wife and I are passing it along to our kids. So here you go, my little lion cub and my even littler tiger cub. I present to you the sport that has given me as much euphoric joy as it has given me agonizing heartbreak. (You’re welcome?)

But please, just enjoy your simple mascots-and-scores version of the sport for as long as you can. And I promise I will never go back to being the moody, grumpy football fan I used to be before you were born. Life is far too short for any of that self-imposed gloominess based on wins and losses in a silly game.

I promise that we will always have fun with this thing. And if you completely lose interest in football by next year, I promise that’s totally fine as well. Whatever you enjoy is fine by me.

As long as I get to enjoy it with you 2 next to me at the table.

Beware the Ides of January

/ Jeremy / Leave a comment

There’s good news and there’s bad news for my early 2024 headspace.

The good news — good enough to still shock me 2 months later — is that I’ve been off Lexapro since early November. 67 days to be exact, not that anyone’s eagerly counting or anything. I continue to feel entirely myself, with no withdrawal symptoms and no darkness. Nothing but lucidity and light.

Call it serendipity, call it providence, call it hard proof of someone’s hardcore anti-pharma theory (not mine, to be clear). Heck, you can even call it sheer dumb happy luck if you feel like it (although I won’t). All I know is I’m endlessly grateful to be more emotionally functional and consistently lucid than I’ve been since before the Covid era.

But the bad news is… it’s January now. And the January/February stretch has proven to be a nasty gauntlet for me in recent years. My seasonal swings brutalize me each year, and winter is often the most brutal swing. The lack of sunlight, the lack of red letters on the calendar, the lack of ability to take the kids outside after work (until February), and the general lack of color all contribute to a downbeat doldrum mindset.

For now, I feel pretty good. And I know what tools I have in the seasonal affective compartment of my mental health toolkit. Using the light therapy lamp my wife bought me a year ago, for one. Listening to stirring music and watching emotionally engaging films. Getting outside as much as possible, even when it’s cold and overcast. Taking my kids to every imaginable place of wonder — indoor or outdoor, free or cheap — every chance I get. Drinking enough water. Getting enough sleep.

But the last few days have been a little iffy. My mind has faded a little, my fingers aren’t typing as cleanly, and my lucidity has marginally dropped. I’m hoping it’s only the craziness of classes starting again at the law school where I work, but the timing worries me. January is a perennial beast.

My ups and downs are well documented (because I have, well, documented them) and it’s a bit difficult for me to believe this winter won’t ultimately prove to be like the last 3 or 4. My seasonal cycles have been like clockwork. January to March, DOWN. April to June, UP. July to September, DOWN. October to December, UP. Frustratingly, my mind works in 3-month increments. I’m functional enough during the down times, but I’d sure like to be more than functional, more than 6 months a year.

Who knows, though? Maybe the clock will work differently this time. I mean, some of this is in my control, right? I would certainly like to believe it is. I would like to think that carefully utilizing the aforementioned toolkit could re-route me into a more lucid (or at least a steadier) winter headspace.

Perhaps the last paragraph is Pollyanna-esque wishful thinking. Why would this winter be different? I genuinely don’t know yet. I just know that I plan to keep waking up early and writing about it. Waking up early and getting my mind right before the day begins. Waking up early and doing the thing.

The moment I stop doing the thing, all the things, is the moment I start to fade. And I refuse to fade. Or at least I am resolved to refuse to fade.

As Jets to Brazil once wrote (and sang): “I know, I can write my way out of this.”

And so I write, hoping to stave this off. Writing is my alchemy. Writing is my potion.

Time will tell whether I can continue concocting that magic elixir this winter.

Time always tells.