Hi folks – I’m writing a book on how to be a better dad. Here is the first chapter. Check it out and let me know what you think.
THE BEGINNING
It was another bright, sunny, clear morning.
Like every other bright, sunny, clear weekday morning in Eagle Rock, California.
I was your typical mild-mannered stay-at-home dad working as a technical sales consultant for a high-tech remote sensing company based in Colorado.
My life was cake.
Like every other weekday morning, I was moving through my daily routine. I would wake up early and make a pot of coffee. Then I would bring my wife a cup and wake our two small children. I would get them dressed and make everybody breakfast.
When they were ready, I would help the whole crew down to the car and strap the kids into their car seats. My wife would usually drop the kids off at daycare on her way to work, and I would pick them up in the afternoon.
I would kiss everybody goodbye and head back upstairs to start my day. I would usually make a second pot of coffee, flip on the TV and catch up on the news.
But today was different.
I filled the kettle and put it on the burning stove. Then I poured some beans into the grinder as an image appeared on the muted television.
Something was wrong. What was usually Matt Lauer and the Today show looked like the preview for a new superhero action movie. The lower half of Manhattan was engulfed in a huge post-apocalyptic cloud of toxic debris. I thought it must have been a commercial for the next Spider-Man flick.
I ground the beans and poured the dust into the maker. Then I walked across the room and grabbed the remote.
The scene hadn’t changed. It was just one live, long shot of Lower Manhattan. This wasn’t right. Some huge disaster must have happened in Lower Manhattan. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was big. I made a dash for the door and ran back downstairs to try and catch my wife before she took off. I wanted her to come back upstairs and look at the news, but it was too late. She was already on her way.
Panicked, I ran back upstairs to the television. It was still just that long, low, wide shot of the dust cloud over Manhattan. And there was something else wrong.
What? What is that? The Twin Towers are gone. There was nothing on the skyline where the twin towers should be. That can’t be real. That can’t be Manhattan.
I changed the channel, flipping over to another network, and un-muted the TV.
“Here is what we know so far. The first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 am Eastern Standard Time.”
I said to myself, “The first plane? There was more than one plane?”
“The second plane hit the WTC South Tower at 9:03 am. We are going to show a replay of the second plane hitting the building. Do we have that tape? This is a replay from our NBC affiliate in New York City.”
I watched an airplane fly into one of the Twin Towers, and huge flames exploded out from the other side of the building.
I felt sick.
“We’re hearing now that there seems to be smoke coming from the Pentagon. We have unconfirmed reports that this was the result of a plane crashing in the area. My colleague, who just came in … it appears that whatever it was, and perhaps it was a plane, if those are the initial reports, crashed into—at the heliport side of the Pentagon, which is just opposite of the Potomac River.”
I thought, Three Planes? This is an organized attack.
“At 9:59 am the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed followed by the North Tower at 10:28 am.”
I watched a replay of the first tower falling. I instinctively knew that tens of thousands of people worked at the World Trade Center.
I remember thinking to myself,
Where was Superman?
Where are the superheroes?
Where is the Navy or the Marines?
Where is the Army or the Airforce?
What the hell is going on?
How could they let this happen?
Where was Superman?
Then, suddenly, from somewhere inside our house there was a loud scream.
I nearly jumped out of my pants.
It was just my tea kettle.
It had come to boil.
I know that I won’t be alone in saying that that moment changed my life.
That was the singular most catastrophic thing that had ever happened to me.
In that moment my view of reality was fractured. The looking glass cracked. It took a while for each of the reflective pieces of reality to fall and an even longer time for me to discover a newer truth, a clearer reflection of reality. But that is when it all began.
At that moment I felt vulnerable and scared. I felt inadequate and unprotected.
At first, it was just a shock to my schema, my view of reality. It was like I woke up and realized that the world was a lot more complicated and a lot more violent than I had thought.
And then I felt scared for my kids. We had led a relatively happy and carefree life until that time. I hadn’t thought very much about the future or defense or what we would do if something went wrong because up to that point nothing had really ever gone wrong.
After a few days, I really started to freak out. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t really even lie in bed.
We had little savings, no life insurance, not very much money and no back-up plan.
Things were bad and seemed to be getting worse all the time.
I wondered what we would do if things really went south. What would happen to my family? What would happen to my kids? They are so young. Who would protect them? What would they do?
The events of 9/11 started me on a long journey. It was the impetus, the spark that got me going and made me re-evaluate my life. It made me begin to ask the deeper questions about life—why we are here, what our purpose is and what we are doing.
I spent the next couple years floundering around. It took me that long to process what had happened. It took me that long to readjust and broaden my world view. It took about two years to come to terms with this new reality and make a plan. But then, after a while, I settled down and got to work.
This book is about part of that journey, part of that quest.
From that quest, along that path, fighting my way through that toxic debris cloud, I found some of the answers that I had started looking for so many years ago.
One of those answers is about purpose, family, and fatherhood.
I’ve written this book in part to answer the questions: Where is Superman? Where are the superheroes? Where are the people that we need to step in in the moment of crisis and save the world?
This book is about how to be a dad—how to be a good dad and why the family is important.
I have realized that most dads just don’t know what they are doing. They don’t have the basics down. They don’t have the most basic common understanding of what it means to be a dad, why they are a father or what the purpose of the family is.
So I thought I would write some of this down to talk about the basics.
This book is about the how: how not to be just your mild-mannered, regular dad but how to reach the highest order of dad you can be. How you can be a Superdaddy.
What are the rules? What are the lessons? What are the tricks to raising superheroes?
Most chapters start with a story of where I was and what I was doing when I learned the lesson. Some of these lessons I learned under extreme duress in a painful circumstance. Some of these examples I tested on my own kids. I present my best lessons here so that you won’t have to slog through the muck and the pain; you won’t have to solve the problem yourself. You can just learn from my experience.
Some of the chapters give specific instructions and action steps that you can take today to make your parenting more successful. And some of these actions can give you real-life Superpowers.
Let’s get started.