My son, Oliver, came into this world on January 3, 1997, oblivious to schedules and deadlines. He arrived two weeks early, pushed only by his innate desire to stretch out, grow, and experience life (and his mother’s strenuous labor). Anxious expectation filled the hospital delivery room. Oliver’s mother, Jordis, was determined to “do well.” As she later told a friend, “it’s not every day that you get to be God’s co-worker in producing a miracle.”
For me Oliver’s birth day was more like watching a car accident involving the person you hold most dear. I massaged my wife’s hands and shoulders and did my best to be helpful, supportive, and loving, but reality was spinning entirely outside my control. We were surrounded by medical equipment that in all my previous experience had been associated with illness. This time the suffering was life affirming, but I had little context for appreciating that fact.
When the head began to slowly emerge, then a shoulder, an arm, and a red and white amphibian-like body slipped out into the doctor’s waiting hands, I was stunned, jubilant, relieved, numb. My inner world was in a jumble. I wish I could say that it was a religious experience for me, as Jordis described, but it was not. I felt powerless, limited, and mortal in a way that I had only experienced a couple of times before -- during major surgery in my own childhood and several years later while standing next to my father’s death bed. As my son drew his first breath, I joined a line of men stretching back to the dim past, each of us carrying on our shoulders the hope, grief, and weighty expectations of fatherhood. What on earth have I gotten myself into? What do I know about fathering? How will I bring this new life to maturity?
Before my son’s birth I had ambivalent feelings about becoming a father. I am not proud of this, but that’s the way it was. Like many men of my generation I treasured personal freedom, the ability to go where I wanted and do what I pleased. Becoming a parent seemed an end to freedom, a limitation of choice. I didn’t know then that the most vital experiences in life are more precious than choice.
Jordis and I were both in our mid-30s when we married. We had busy and demanding jobs and a comfortable lifestyle. After two years of trying to become pregnant without success, we gave up. My wife mailed off an enrollment application to Vermont College to finish a long-deferred degree. I made plans to advance a writing career. We talked of paying off the home mortgage, early retirement, and eventually traveling the country as free spirits. That month she became pregnant.
The reality of becoming a father, suddenly immediate, was both exciting and terrifying. The first tri-mester I was withdrawn, often brooding about my lost youth, financial worries, and a decline in doting attention from my wife. I felt isolated and frightened. Something in me was dying, a boyish naivete, a youthful desire to keep all options open. With two notable exceptions, I found little comfort or support forthcoming from male friends. Several of them smirked, made jokes, and suggested that I had just been handed an eighteen-year sentence of servitude. By contrast, my wife benefitted from a deepening of friendships with women that seemed to come naturally with the shared experience of motherhood. She was showered with gifts and attention.
During the second tri-mester I continued to struggle with understanding my new role as a father while simultaneously feeling guilt and shame over my self-absorbed behavior. Gradually I stopped worrying so much about me and instead became anxious about Jordis. I started waking up regularly at 2 a.m. to fret about her general health, weight gain, diet, exercise, and stress at her job.
Friends, family and co-workers agreed that they had seldom seen a woman more radiant in pregnancy than Jordis. Her morning sickness was minimal, her skin and hair glowed, she wore a spontaneous and constant smile as if she knew the secret of life. I was struggling to absorb psychologically what she experienced in every molecule of her body -- the transition to parenthood.
I think that’s why she let me take the lead in naming our baby.
We assembled long lists of names, some simple, honest and forthright, others brimming with the promise of future achievement. For a time I considered naming our child after one of my jazz idols: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, or Thelonious Monk. But I also found myself thinking increasingly of my own father, Ollie Ruhl, who died in 1976, a victim of liver cancer. His death left a hole in my life that I thought could never be filled. What did I know?
We settled on the name Oliver Thelonious Ruhl, joking that if he became a Supreme Court justice people could call him Oliver, while if he ended up playing the piano, working construction or even flipping burgers at McDonald’s he could be known as Ollie T. At least in childhood we would call him Ollie, after my father. I visited my father’s grave, and his spirit seemed to approve.
The first thing most of us experience is our parents, and so they leave an indelible impression on us. Our deepest ideas and beliefs about fatherhood inevitably spring from the men responsible for bringing us into this world. How do I begin to describe my own father?
Ollie took his morning coffee with milk and a little sugar. He never liked the smell or taste of whiskey but drank a beer many nights to relax. His hands were strong and calloused from pulling heavy wire and bending conduit as an electrician, but to my knowledge those hands never struck anyone, including me. Many men complain of distant, absent, or abusive fathers, but Ollie always had time to play ball with me even after 10- to 12-hour work days. Tears would inexplicably well up in my father’s eyes when the national anthem was played before baseball games. Ollie was generally patient and always protective of his family, and I count myself lucky that such a man served as my first role model. I loved and respected him.
He wasn’t perfect, of course. He accepted jobs in dangerous situations, resulting in debilitating accidents that threw our family into tailspins and may have ultimately shortened his own life. One year he worked in a uranium mine where he was exposed to radiation. Another time he was scalded from the waist down when an illegally enclosed factory boiler exploded and he couldn’t escape the scalding water; he suffered third-degree burns that ruined the circulation in his legs, and a transfusion in the hospital with tainted blood led to hepatitis that damaged his liver. As a boy I wondered why he accepted work that other men turned down. Was it really economic necessity or rather some inner need to prove his manhood? What drove my father?
He was born on a farm in Nebraska in 1924, the youngest of 10 children. By the time Ollie arrived on the scene his mother suffered from “nerves” and much of his care was delegated to the oldest sibling, 12-year-old Marie. I never really knew Ollie’s father, Aloysius. It’s told that he was born in a sod house on the prairie. Relatives say he was a hard worker, friendly, happy-go-lucky. He must have had a tender, gentle side that he passed along to my dad.
Like many healthy young farm boys, Ollie was drafted to fight in World War Two. Aloysius told him that the family farm would be there for him when he returned. But after surviving infantry assignments in the Philippines and Japan, my father returned home to announce that he wanted to become an electrician. He loved taking things apart and putting them back together again, so you could say that in moving into town and applying his G.I. benefits to learn a trade he was following his passion. I’m proud of that.
My mother, Charlotte, worked as a waitress in the local cafe. Ollie was too shy to ask her out, but a friend set things up and it wasn’t long before Ollie and Charlotte were married. It took eight years for them to have a child, their first and last. Ollie was very excited to have a boy, someone to share his interests in baseball, fishing, and all things mechanical.
In some respects, I must have been quite a disappointment to my father, though he never once said so. A childhood battle with polio prevented me from becoming an athlete, and I never shared his natural mechanical abilities. I do know, however, that he was proud on the day I became the first in the family to graduate from college, and that he was grateful I could earn a living doing something that didn’t require breaking a sweat or getting my hands dirty.
I had no idea that within a year he would be gone, two decades too soon to see my son and his namesake. Many times since Oliver was born I have struggled to remember the sound of my father’s voice and to imagine things he might have told me about fatherhood.
Throughout the first two years of my son’s life I yearned for opportunities to talk with other men about my experiences, but most of my former buddies (all childless) seemed to disappear. I had two long-distance friendships that endured. Interestingly, both these men were fathers of young children. It now seemed as if the world was split into two camps: people with kids and people without them.
Gradually I began to realize how much my BC (before child) life had been preoccupied with work. Like so many of the people surrounding me, I had been busy, self-involved, chasing deadlines and career goals that each year seemed more arbitrary and less meaningful. Fatherhood slowed every thing down. It made me question the pace of modern life and reevaluate my priorities.
Jordis and I agreed to cut back on work and tighten our household budget to allow more time with Oliver. The goal was for both of us to work part time so that we could share parenting responsibilities. The first year was filled with sleepless nights and disrupted schedules. Often we were just trying to get through the day. Then we would collapse into bed, sleep restlessly, get up, and do it again. However, about the time of Oliver’s first birthday something changed dramatically. He was developing rapidly, becoming less dependent and more fun to be with, but the biggest change was in me -- I had fallen in love with this messy, squirming little creature.
One morning on a walk to the park my toddling son insisted that we take a detour to sit amid a pile of pine cones under a lofty evergreen tree. It was a cold day, and I had only allowed thirty minutes for our walk, so at first I tugged his arm and did my best to keep him moving. “Pine cone,” he said insistently. Reluctantly, I bowed down to fit under the lowest branches of the tree and went to join him. Together we sat on a crunchy, uneven surface of dried needles and tiny pine cones. It was half dark and the branches created a lace-like canopy over us. It reminded me of one of the forts that I loved to build in my own childhood -- we could see out but we were hidden from passersby. The earthy smell of pine pitch was in the air, and it was very quiet. I looked at Oliver, who had a radiant smile on his face. The moment was pure and filled with love. Two years after my son’s birth, I too now felt as if I had been God’s co-worker in producing a miracle.
Oliver recently turned 11. He continues to be my teacher, and is the joy of my life.
