I know how to build a company. I do not know how to build the world my son has to live in.
I wake up at 3:47. Almost every morning.
I am on my right side, facing the wall and the bathroom. Doug is asleep behind me. My son is between us, on his back, turned sideways, a foot in my ribs, mouth a little open.
He still dreams. I do the math.
When he sleeps he gets this little smirk. I like to think he is somewhere good in there. Driving his cars. The fire trucks he loves. I do not know where he goes. I just know I want him to keep whatever puts that smirk there.
By then he has taken the whole middle of the bed. We have our corners. He has the rest.
We are not there yet. Him sleeping through the night on his own. Us letting him cry long enough to learn it. We are not there yet.
So he is here. We barely sleep. That’s the deal right now.
He takes up all the space. I want him to take up that much space out there too. Like nobody ever told him to shrink.
And then at 3:47, the fear.
Will my son be okay.
It is never just one thing.
There is the money. There is always the money. Whether there is enough. Whether it keeps coming. Whether I am still the one who makes sure it does. But money I can count. Money is not what has me awake at 3:47.
It is the other thing. The one I can’t count.
It took us years to get him here. The doctors, the search, the woman kind enough to carry him. We wanted him so badly we pulled him into the world on purpose. At 3:47, the wanting turns into a question. Whether it was for him, or for us. He was not there to be asked.
We are in our forties. If everything goes right, there are decades of him we will never see. That is the math.
My mother had it harder than me. Harder than I will ever know. I am not the first man to lie awake scared for his child, and I won’t be the last, and most of them had less than I have. I know that.
But she could tell me how the world worked. She knew where the walls were. She had hit most of them first. She could say, this is how you move, this is what to watch for, and it would still be true by the time I got there. It even got a little better. Good enough to hand down.
I can’t do that for him.
I think about the work I would point him toward. It might not be there. I think about what I would teach him, the things that worked for me. Some of what took me ten years to learn, a machine does now before lunch. Some of it, no machine can touch. I can no longer tell which is which. The rules change while we sleep. The meanness my mother taught me to watch for says its name out loud now.
I keep reaching for what to hand him, and my hand keeps closing on nothing.
The ones I would have leaned on are gone. The one I would have called first, I cannot call.
So I lie there with his foot in my ribs and I say it plain. It is not that the world is hard. I know hard. It is that the people before me could hand their kid something that still worked by the time they grew up. I can’t do that for him. His world is not built yet. And I have to get him ready for it anyway.
For ten years, the fear had somewhere to go.
That is what building was, mostly. Something scared me, I turned it into work. Money got tight, I made a plan. Something broke, I got on the phone. Every fear became a list. Every list became a morning. I was good at it.
The company sold. The drive did not. It went looking for the next thing to protect, the way it always has.
It found him.
He is not a company. I know that. The drive does not. It circles him all night, looking for something to fix, some plan that would hold, and it comes back with nothing.
All that engine. Nowhere to put it.
Somewhere in the dark, the song finds me. Regina Belle. “If I Could.”
My mother played it on weekends, cleaning or cooking, while my brother and I did our chores. She would go quiet when it came on. Something close to sad. I was a kid. I thought it was just a song she liked.
I know now what she was listening to. She had me at fifteen. My brother eleven months later. She came back for us at twenty-two and spent the rest of her life not quite believing she could do it. Even in her last months she would say it. You boys raised yourselves.
It was not true. It was never true. She believed it anyway.
She did her worrying standing up, at a stove, on a Saturday, with a song playing.
And we turned out okay. She knew that. I never got her to believe she was the reason.
Then I look at my son.
The smirk he sleeps with is hers. Her smile, on his face, in the dark. The curls are hers. Show him a photo of her as a teenager, a girl already my mother, and he says, Mama. Nobody taught him that.
My hand keeps closing on nothing.
Some things get through anyway.
He wakes up making little dinosaur noises. All nose, half growl, half song, going before his eyes are even open. It spills out of him and fills the whole room.
Sometimes it is not even six yet. We try to get him back down. He is up.
His whole world fits in a little box. The fire truck, the tow truck, the ambulance, the helicopter, a dozen small cars that pull back and go. He carries that box around the house like a man with somewhere to be. The dresser. His chair in our room. The dining room. Back up to his room. He dumps them out, turns the lid into a ramp, and talks to them, really talks to them, like they are old friends and he is catching them up.
He terrorizes the dog. Gets down on the floor and lets loose this shrieking gut laugh that has no bottom to it.
His hardest problem right now is that the potty interrupts the playing.
Then breakfast, the running around, the giggling, and a big hug at the door, and he is off to school, and I am off to my office.
That is his morning. Cars, the dog, a story he is telling.
For right now, that is exactly what it is supposed to be.
I know all of this from the dark.
He breathes. The house settles.
In a few hours he will wake up the way he always does. Making those noises before his eyes are even open, the little half-growl, half-song, the sound that fills the whole room and lands on me and means the day has started.
He does not know yet.
I do.
Here is the part I would say to someone still in it.
Builders turn fear into work. It is the thing we know how to do. Something scares us, we build against it. A system, a plan, a light in the yard.
I put up the lights because I wanted to see what was coming.
They lit the whole yard. They didn’t touch the thing I was afraid of.
That is what the building is for. Not to keep you safe. To show you where the dark starts anyway.
I still put up lights. I still replace the ones that burn out.
Still in the middle.
