Hold My Hand

If you were to ask any of my children what colloquial truisms they recall their father uttering as they passed from toddler to young adult, they may each provide a different oft-repeated phrase. Differences caused by the forming of memories over a lengthy passage of time, 32 years to be exact, living in three different states—Texas, Alaska, Georgia and back to Texas—and the wordiness of their patriarchal leader; me.

As I sit at my desk calling up 32 years of fatherhood...

32 years...it started in 1986 with Jennifer and Elizabeth, the following year James came on board. For eight years it was just the three, then in 1995 Sara Rose came into my life. God wasn’t quite finished yet, five more years and with the turn of the century Joseph Tyler was born in 2000, eighteen years ago. Added all up, that is 32 years of playing the role of Dad.

Now back to the truisms, the one I recall having said more times that I could ever count... “Hold my hand.”

Hold my hand as you learn to walk. Hold my hand as we cross the street. Hold my hand as walk through the doors on the way to your first day of school. Hold my hand as we carefully walk onto to the frozen surface of Arc lake or climb the snowy hills of Kenai. Hold my hand as navigate through the crowds at the county fair or in the busy shopping mall decorated with holiday cheers. Hold my hand.

The last three decades have been like a mighty roller coaster. We have trudged slowly upward, climbing ever so higher not being able to see where the journey may take us. Upon reaching the top we held hands and our collective breath and looking out we were finally able to see where the journey would go. At breakneck speeds we traveled together over the hills and through the loops of life sometimes laughing, sometimes screaming, sometimes crying, sometimes closing our eyes and hoping.

Always holding hands.

An hour ago, my 32-year journey came to the end of the ride. My youngest, my last, Joseph Tyler, entered the halls of higher education at Texas State University. His new journey begins as my old one ends. For the first time in a very long time I am alone. My house is quiet.

Someone asked me yesterday what I would do now. I have spent the better part of my life, more than half, being the dad, the gatekeeper, the provider. The hand holder. I didn’t have an answer to their question. If I could do it all again, if I could get off the roller coaster and run back into the line waiting anxiously for the climbing and falling, for the crawling and the speeding, for the crying and the laughing...

I’m too old for that...but if I could, knowing it would be with my children I would do all it all again.

Today as I drove away from the campus of Texas State without my last born I realized for the first time in my life that you, my children were not holding my hand, I was holding yours. You were leading me on an incredible journey, one I shall never forget.

Hold my hand.

Love, Dad