On a recent evening, my son and I playfully engaged in some living room Wrestle Mania.  Murphy lunged off our coffee table at me and I dramatically dropped to the ground onto my stomach.  Then Murph squatted on my back and pulled at my forehead, applying a legendary wrestling move known as ‘The Camel Clutch’.  

Needless to say, my wife was flabbergasted.  During the day, Sarah provides our five-year-old son with a loving and nurturing home life. The atmosphere is bubbly as they enjoy arts-and-crafts projects where they make banjos out of pie tins and build vegetable gardens. But when Sarah goes to work at night, the wheels fall off the parenting bus.  During the nighttime Daddy Shift, I prefer more of a ram-shackle parenting style. When I’m home, Murphy gets to play hockey inside the house, eat breakfast for dinner, and pretend to be ‘The Iron Shiek’.

 “What…is… he… doing?”  Sarah asked, as our forty-pound son squatted on my spine and pulled my head back.  

“The Camel Clutch!”  I said, “Isn’t it awesome?”  

“Wow,” Sarah said amazed.  “That is one thing a mom wouldn’t ever think of teaching her child.”
Which is why dads are around: to teach their kids “The Camel Clutch” and other nonsensical things. Amazingly, our dubious contributions to parenting are recognized with an official holiday.

To be completely honest, I never really thought about being a dad before I became a dad.  Father’s Day was just a date in June when my mom would make brisket and my dad would sit at the head of the family table like a jovial king.  I’d usually buy Big Smitty (as I called him) a box of Charleston Chews (so he could stick’em in the freezer) and something golf-themed.  But then I became a dad.  Within seconds of holding my son for the first time, I realized that I was now responsible for someone else on this earth other than me.  Every day was to be Father’s Day for the rest of my life.

My wife and I expected a cute little pixie-of-a-child, blond-haired and blue-eyed, whose gentle cry would be laced with the smell of lavender.  But Sarah delivered a lunker.  Murphy was the biggest baby of the night at Methodist Hospital and weighed 9 pounds 11 ounces and was 23 inches long.  He had dark complexion and a massive head of hair.  Sarah basically gave birth to Ben Wallace.  

In true Irish form, where the joy and sorrow of life are intertwined like the strands of a rope, after having delivered the biggest and healthiest baby of the night, disaster struck by morning.  A doctor discovered that Murphy was born with a broken heart, a coarctation (or narrowing) of his aorta valve.  Within hours of his birth, a life support team arrived, took him directly out of my wife’s arms and whisked him away to Children’s Hospital.  Several days later, he was operated on and received a life-saving procedure.

After an excruciating recovery, Murphy developed colic.  Several times a day he let fly a shrill, animal-like scream that wouldn’t stop for hours.  I would often come home to find both Sarah and Murphy sobbing uncontrollably.  Sarah was soon hallowed out by sleep deprivation and the anxiety of caring for a medically fragile baby.  Naturally, she began to suffer from post partum depression.  The depression crept through her like a fog, shrouding her in sadness so thick she became translucent, nothing more than a whisper cradling our child.  

In our time of great unrest, I often thought of my own father.  Big Smitty is a gregarious man, full of blarney and unconditional love.  Growing up, the daily lessons from Big Smitty were sometimes simple (nothing beats a frozen candy bar), folksy (when you’re feeling low, play some Credence), encouraging (“Remember, Todd, dynamite comes in small packages”) and to-the-point (Go to church.  Call your mother.  Use Gold Bond Medicated Powder daily).  But above all, Big Smitty taught me that a father must be an anchor.  A dad must hold steady in both good times and bad.  When financial, emotional, and physical turmoil arises, he must protect his wife and kids at all costs. Following the example set out before me by my father, I began the very messy job of protecting my own family and digging them out of the rubble of our broken lives.  

Luckily, over time, our wounds healed.  Five years after my son’s heart surgery and wife’s depression, our lives are now golden.  Sarah is more beautiful to me than the day I married her.  Recently, Murphy received a clean bill of health.  If you are a regular reader of the Spazz Dad blog, you know that my life as a father is full of shenanigans.  And now you know why: I am reminded every day of how fragile this life is.  In the Spazz Dad household, that reminder is precisely a half-foot long and is in the shape of a surgical scar that runs across my son’s back.   

On that recent evening when Sarah witnessed Wrestle Mania, the Camel Clutch was just the beginning.  After dinner, Murphy and I rode bikes.  We played in the yard.  Near bedtime, we sat in the living room in beanbags, horking down on cheese puffs, and watching the NHL playoffs.  Sarah gave me an endearing look.

As if on cue, Murphy belched.

“That’s the sign the tank is full!” He said.  I roared with laughter.  When proper etiquette was restored, we dudes high-fived.  

“You are such a dad,” Sarah said, shaking her head.