Existentialism

3:30am:

I am being nudged by my son, Frederic. He is trying to wake me up. Being seven means waking your father in the middle of the night is nothing new.

“Daddy,” he says. “I’m having these thoughts, bad thoughts that people are going to break into the house.”

“You’re safe, buddy,” I whisper. My body feels numb. I’m in a limbo stage. “Rex will bark if someone tries to break in,” I reassure him. “Go back to bed.”

Frederic lies on the floor next to our bed. My kids have both been doing this for years. My wife, Cyndi, decided long ago if they needed to feel safe in the middle of the night, the kids could come into our bedroom, just not in our bed. Cyndi makes a makeshift bed for Frederic and our daughter, Lily every night. She places a comforter on the floor; one for each of them. Frederic gets the blue comforter with a collection of sporting equipment. Lily’s is yellow with flowers. They each get a pillow too.

Frederic shuffles on the floor for a few minutes. I can hear the thoughts in his head. When he is tired, he solves math problems. Multiplication, division, word problems he learned earlier in the day. He thinks about the point values of his favorite or recently acquired Pokemon cards. As he moves from side to side, his brain is at full speed. Neither one of us is going back to sleep anytime soon.

3:45am:

“Dad, I don’t get the meaning of life.”

“The what?” I sit up. I bend down, find Frederic’s head, and gently rub it.

“What is the meaning of life, Dad? I just don’t get what it is I am supposed to do.”

“Ah, buddy,” I said, “the meaning of life is different for everybody. It really is.”

It was the first thing that came to my sleepy mind. Instinctively, I wanted to run to my computer and scour the Internet for the answer. I pictured myself on Ask.com, to have a website answer my son’s question. It would have been much easier.


I am not sorry that I had children. Cyndi and I spent almost four years trying to get pregnant. While we had plenty of time to think about what it meant to be parents, I never did. I daydreamed about all of the good stuff. Watching the birth, holding and feeding my child, first steps, first words—those kinds of things. I never thought about the consequences of becoming a parent. I didn’t think about making sure he would always feel safe. I didn’t think about the day he would possibly have to bury me, as I did with my father. I didn’t think about taking him to the emergency room at midnight because of a suspected twisted testicle. Or having my son evaluated and diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome. I didn’t think about having to explain the meaning of life at four in the morning.

“Dad, what’s the meaning of life?”

I took a deep breath. I wanted this to be as much of a moment between us as it could be—so early in the morning, and both of us so clearly of unsound mind.

But life—my life anyway—is never that simple.

I looked over at Frederic, in the dark of night, and said, “You’re seven, dude, you’ve got a lot of time to figure life out.”

“I just want it to be a good one,” he said.