Being a Father FIRST, CHEF SECOND
In reference to their familial relations, someone once said to me “It’s us against the future.” This person clearly has a limited understanding of leaving legacy or taking care of future generations…or they just didn’t care. To me, the future is my daughter and I’m certainly not trying to set up a competition of resources with my own kid.
To that end, I’ve had to make some decisions about my priorities, my ability, my energy, and my time. Being the late bloomer that I am, I’ve found my chef career and relatively new father status coming into full bloom as I turned FIFTY freakin’ years old. Not exactly a spring chicken, so already I have a disadvantage of time and energy. It takes a lot for me to accomplish what was once much easier for me, and I’ve had to make some changes to my lifestlye to try to be healthier and more physically able with my job and child.
But there’s no question about where my priorities are: my daughter ranks above all. She didn’t ask to be brought into this world, and it’s my wife’s and my responsibility to take care of her spiritual, physical, and emotional well being.
This period of my life has been the most challenging but of course the most rewarding. My wife and I are always tired and always overwhelmed. But the main reward is I have felt a love I’ve never felt before: an unconditional one for my daughter. And this love, and the drive for a need to protect and provide, has sparked a fire of anxiety which I’ve harnessed for creativity in a way I never have. The restaurant is better for it, and what is coming out of the kitchen now is lightyears ahead of what we were doing at Farm Spirit or early Astera.
I took a break from writing a blog the past two weeks while I dealt with some incredibly sad family news that made me think hard about my role as a father and provider. I’m trying to heal up now and shake it off to be as present as I can with my wife, my daughter, and my coworkers.
Heavy
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It is not the weight you carry
but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled—
roses in the wind,
The sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
-Mary Oliver
