THE DAD ZONE

Bobbing in an undertow of emotion

(March 16, 2005, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) 

By Stephen Caldwell

    When you’re standing at just the right distance from the shore, there are times when you hardly notice the rising water level as the tide rolls in.

    Then, as you look up at a fancy kite in the sky or gaze at kids building castles on the beach, a wave slips up from behind you like a blitzing linebacker on the blind side of a quarterback.

    Down you go, your head and body fully under the water and your breath momentarily stolen.

    You come up in time to see another wave approaching and, if you’re fortunate, you bob just high enough to keep your face above it.

    You knew the waves were there, but you wonder where that last one came from and why you didn’t see it coming.

Such a wave hit me not long ago. In time, it hits most parents. It has hit me several times before. It’s a rising tide of emotion that slips in so naturally that we don’t always recognize it until that moment when it knocks us to the ground. It hit me a few years ago after our oldest daughter moved to Little Rock for nursing school. It hit me last fall while my son was in England. And it hit me again a few weeks ago. Another daughter and her husband left in early January for Africa, and they won’t return to Arkansas until sometime in June.

    I started "missing" them as soon as they walked through airport security in Tulsa and disappeared in a sea of travelers flowing along the terminal. (What an awful name for a place that sends off sojourners who have every intention of returning.)

    I could no more go a day without thinking about them than I could stand in the ocean and not get wet.

    When we separate from the ones we love, we miss them steadily, consistently, like waves rolling in toward the shore.

    Then, while we’re reading a book or watching a basketball game or driving down the road, a larger wave slips up on us and knocks us to the ocean floor, washing over us with a sense of longing that borders on grief. It takes our breath away.

    When this wave hit, I picked myself up and recognized how high the water level had risen. I not only missed my daughter on this day, I felt pained by her absence. I was choked up by my inability to see her, hear her and touch her. Memory just wasn’t good enough.

    There’s a mystical sense to it, at least for me. I wonder about the timing. Why today and not yesterday or tomorrow or last week? I wonder about the circumstances. Is something happening with them, or me, an undertow of adversity that has pulled these emotions up for just this time? I wonder about the significance. Should I let the feeling pass, or do I need to take some action — write some note, pray some prayer?

    These waves don’t come with a message in a bottle.

    Sometimes I wonder if they’ll always come.

    Our daughter in Little Rock has been there nearly three years, long enough to finish school and start a job. Long enough for her father to adjust, to get over it. Yet, every few months, if she hasn’t come here or I haven’t gone there, another wave strikes.

    It seems the natural order of things. Real heartbreak would be if the waves stopped.

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