I’ve Learned So Much From Being a Dad, Now Give Me My Freedom Back Please

“But oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go” - The Beatles from “You Never Give Me Your Money”

I remember how obsessed my dad was with this lyric during my adolescence, especially in his busiest years professionally. He did a magnificent job of communicating the spirit of the lyrics to me but I couldn’t live inside of them. I don’t know if mid 20s McCartney could live inside them the way my dad did. But for my dad, probably late 40s at the time it was the distillation of a freedom he knew he had, but he could only remember it, could only taste it, when the Beatles were on. My dad put me on to this lyric before I had had the small freedoms of adult life. The impromptu visit to a bookstore for no reason, the purchase of an ice cream cone on an early November Wednesday at 1:30, the free ninety-nine double feature with your fellow deadbeat musician friends. As far as lived experience as a teenager I knew plenty about “nowhere to go” I just didn’t know anything about magic yet. But that magic came. The sprawling potential of almost any hang in your twenties. I spent a handful of years where it was immaterial to me what day of the week it was. I was a musician who worked at a group home. Equally likely to work Saturday and party on a Monday. I only tracked the days in order to show up at work and to know how busy the spots I was going to go to would be. I slept wherever. I slept at Martin’s house all the time. I slept on a friend’s couch. The fun would restart under slightly different parameters the next day. If I had a girlfriend I would spend two or three nights a week at her house most of the time and she’d do the same at mine. I was a leisurely nomad. I had that magic feeling so much that it stopped feeling magic. Even as life got more scheduled, it maintained something related to this freedom. I traveled with Dessa in my early thirties. It was a relatively responsible touring crew of people thirty and over (plus Ander). I traveled the country with a blue exercise band and a hotspot to work on payroll for Trivia Mafia. But did I smoke weed in the parking lot of gas stations on rainy weekday mornings when it wasn’t payroll week? (obviously I did). That magic feeling, nowhere to go. Except for like, we have to go to Columbus. But that’s hours from now.

When kids come into the equation it’s so different. I know you know this, even if you don’t have kids, but it’s like a good blues song I want to sing and you want to hear. A clock the size of a large pizza hovers to the left of my head at all times. It’s like a halo but it sits at an angle like a floppy sun-hat that a sexy lady from the nineteen-forties would wear. A ledger sits on a messy desk next to the clock. Every moment is clocked. Every moment costs money. You’re on vacation, but there’s still bedtime. You’re away from the kids at a dinner, there’s still the babysitter. I am never not scheduled. We are never not scheduled. When I meet a friend I know when that meeting will end. I never have to go refill my meter. I know how long it will all take. I know how long it can take. It can not take longer, the clock is hovering. I’ve met parents who still do mushrooms sometimes. How? When? And don’t say microdosing, just don’t say that, ever.

Being a father has made me a more patient, realistic, dedicated and caring person. Being a father has been the great gift of my life to help me smell the roses and love the roses and tend to the roses. Being a father has greatly improved me. But. . .I’m good. Thank you. Now I’d like to have a two hour lunch again. I’d like to have my first meal of the day at 1pm. I’d like to listen to a record and read everything I can about the record and then watch a forty minute documentary on YouTube about the record, and then masturbate, and then ride my bike, and then get a breve, and then take a dump and read an entire New Yorker article on the can, the process taking so long I’m afraid ye old sphincter is going to fall into the commode and then I’d like walk the dog. That magic feeling, nowhere to go and a sphincter brushing the toilet water while I read Louis Menand’s takes on academic freedom.

My capacity to enjoy this freedom will be so differently shaped by the time I get it back that I won’t use it for the same things. Or will I not use it at all. I know I’ll get it back in fits and starts. And I’ll get some of it back when the kids can make themselves a grilled cheese and can cross Randolph. But the clock hovers. And maybe once the clock hovers you can’t turn it off even when you want to. I think that’s what my dad was saying. You can’t know that freedom if you ever knew that obligation. People who at some point had kids wake up early like they still have kids. Even when the kids are way out of the house. The clock hovers. The clock stares at you. The desk with the ledger might change. There’s no babysitter, there’s no draining of money simply for the existence of your leisure time. But I can’t see this clock leaving. And I don’t think my dad could see the clock leaving either. The magic feeling you had is different than the magic feeling you’ll one day get back. It’s not just that times have changed. Time has changed. And at this moment, there’s no magic and there’s tons of places to go.