memorial day

At the end of last month had been a Memorial Day like any other. Opening day for the great American outdoor party of Summer. Millions of Americans all across the continent were flocking to beaches, firing up barbecues, playing softball or frisbee, boating, swimming, and engaging in countless other outdoor leisure activities for the first time since Fall.

Now all their friends and relatives had begun the process of adjusting to the changes brought about by their divorce. They had finally let go of the trappings and dispensed with Norman Rockwell happiness. Now, especially since Memorial Day, he and his kids were all learning the fundamentals of a powerful honest integrity. Talking openly with his kids about the trials and struggles of his life had brought them to a level of friendship and power that none of them had ever known in their relationship before. He was careful to empower his kids with his disclosures and not to color what he said in ways that would provoke them to feel responsible for him, or guilty, or antagonistic toward those with whom he struggled at times.

His honesty had payed immediate dividends, with each of the kids opening up and reciprocating with disclosures about their own feelings and experiences that would not have been safe to share with dad only months before. With each of them, he found a growing bond of friendship that he had never expected. He found that old resentments and frustrations about the burdens of parenthood began to melt away.

This profound shift in his relationship to his kids had blossomed out of this Memorial Day—one which he did not spend with the kids at all. Rather, he was driving the coast between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay with his best friend. They had stopped for brunch and puttered in shops, but it was a day mostly devoted to talking. He shared with her from the frustrations and struggles he was experiencing as father to a broken family.

They had talked for hours while he drove, and in the talking, he began to grow a vision for the same kind of openness with his kids that he had learned with her. It seemed right and good to let them know something of who their dad really was. He had spent a lifetime fighting the good fight, holding up the standard of ethics and strength and protection around his family, and did so at the expense of his own internal integrity. He had based his fatherhood on preservation of what should be, rather than on honest engagement of what really is. Now he would bring his kids the best gift he had for them—himself. And he would entrust their care to his open dependence on the true virtue of honesty shared in love.

It was as if a great and mighty tree somewhere had crashed suddenly and without warning to the ground, unable to stand any longer on the flawed and failing foundation of hidden damage at its base. And while the crash was spectacular and frightening and dangerous, the result was that all of its hidden dangers were suddenly relieved. The creatures in and around the tree had not known in advance of its flawed and dangerous condition, but now that they understood the significance of its demise, they could get on with living with a truer, more reasoned sense of safety and purpose.