Take Your Father to Work Day

 

One afternoon ten years ago we were living in London and on my way back from a lunch meeting I found myself near my daughter's school. I thought it was my opportunity to catch my kid in action, to see her life up close, but from a distance. I knocked on the school's front door they escorted me to a hallway outside her classroom where I watched her, just for a moment in her natural habitat. 

Maybe it was her age, or mine, but I had been lamenting all the experiences, all this life, she was having that I was no longer privy to.

Once the kids start school we see them briefly in the morning before the action of their day and then in the exhausted after. Once they go off to college we only get holidays and weekends. Post-college it's whenever they can fit us in.

Peering through that glass slice of her sixth grade classroom door I watched them raise their hands, speak out of turn, make mistakes, laugh. Until one of the students spotted me, the pointing began, the gig was up. My daughter march to the door, her face the color of fresh tomatoes.

"What are you dooooingggg?"

She was 12, I was 45. 

Cluelessly I thought we would make a memory. In the midst of a regular day there would be that time I showed up to her class and made it special.

But later than evening I learned what I had done. Talking with her older brother and sister she explained the day from her vantage: 

"Everyone saw this guy looking in the window...and it was dad!!" she said.

My other daughter confirmed, "He's so weird."

"They all asked if it was my dad," she said. 

"And what did you say?" my son asked.

"I told them no."

So this is the backdrop of our interactions, this is the lens through which I calculate how to connect with our third child who doesn't like surprises and is private about the things she wants kept quiet.

Last week I found myself in her city, it was my birthday, we are now 56 and 22. I thought enough time had passed. 

No I didn't surprise her at work, Instead I asked if she wouldn't mind if I joined her on her commute. Door-to-door or whatever, through the New York City subway systems and into Queens, just to be a fly on the wall for one of her days.

To my surprise, she texted me back, "sure."

My birthday morning is usually a time for leisure, but this day was hectic. I wanted to be at the subway before her, I needed coffee, my phone failed to charge overnight.

I kept looking down the subway steps...did I miss her, did she forget?

And then like a movie star she made her entrance onto the sidewalk where I looked like either a paparazzo or a pervert. But I was just an adoring dad.

 

She was smiling, and now so was I.

Down into the bowels.

A crowded sweaty subway.

Through to Grand Central, then over ground.

.

And then a 20-minute walk through the neighborhoods until we reached the building. 

"Thanks," I said, ready to leave.

"Do you want to see the office?" she asked.

"I don't want to embarrass you I just wanted to see part of your day."

"Nobody is here yet, so you can come up," she said without irony.

I was reminded of a time last year when I bumped into my other daughter at a New York City WeWork. Her boss asked if I wanted to come see the rest of their space. My daughter intervened..."It's not take your father to work day."

So when I got the green light I pressed the accelerator, I climbed the stairs to a bustling office and then to a small well-lit space with a series of desks. She sat down, logged on and began to work. She told me how to let myself out. I left the office with wings on my feet, perhaps that's why I boarded the wrong subway and ended up in Forest Hills before switching trains.

I figured it out and long hauled it back to Soho where the rest of my birthday commenced. 

I remember when they were babies wondering if I would view them differently when they grew up. I'd never experienced someone's entire arc. Would I remember their babyface, their voice, their cry? But you forget. An old picture or video reminds you, but it's like seeing another person. That's not them any more.

You cannot remember the baby when you see the adult. I cannot hear the laugh of that child in this full-grown human. And it will happen again, the photos from today will fade and she will shed this life for another, and so will I.

Michael Gerson wrote in his famous essay on children heading off to college, that parenthood is ultimately a lesson in humility: "The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else's story. And it is enough."

I don't need more than this anymore. It's her life. I can't show up and watch her through a sliver of window anymore. So when she let's me in, the rest of the world can go away.