There’s a strange season I’m standing in right now.
One son is eleven and firing questions at me like bottle rockets. Sex, war, scary movies, girls. All the signals that childhood is ending in slow motion. The other is twenty, sitting quietly with the idea of moving into his first apartment. One wants to understand the world. The other is preparing to step fully into it.
Julian talks about middle school soccer tryouts as if they’re a doorway to a bigger version of himself. And while he’s asking these heavier questions, he still carries Swappy around the house, a stuffed doll that evolves with him. Swappy used to be Jack from Nightmare Before Christmas, then something else, and now he’s a French crocodile with a wristwatch and an anchor tattoo.
I think Julian uses Swappy to organize the world in his mind.
A way to imagine things.
A way to soothe things.
A private language he hasn’t outgrown, and maybe shouldn’t.
Meanwhile, Lorenzo mentions SF State. He insists he’s not going, but I can hear the possibility under the words. He’s trying on the idea of leaving. Testing adulthood. Imagining who he might be in the next room, in another city, or in another life.
Both boys are standing at thresholds. One at eleven. One at twenty.
And I’m standing in the hallway between them, trying to be the father each one needs.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my own father more than I admit.
We’re essentially estranged. He doesn’t call, and I don’t call. The reasons behind it will probably stay buried. But I respect him. He came from adversity. He showed up to the normal parts of life. Sports. Riding his bike to work. Saving money. Focusing on his health. He built discipline and stability the way other men build fences.
I’m not built like that.
My life has been more improvisation than blueprint.
Maybe that’s why I worry, more often than I admit, that I won’t be able to sustain what my boys need. That if I become financially useless, the distance between us might grow the same way it did between me and my father.
It’s not logical. But fear rarely is.
When I picture the next decade, Julian at twenty-one and Lorenzo at thirty, I know exactly what I hope for.
For Lorenzo, I hope he finds success, whatever shape it takes. But even if he doesn’t, I want him to see me as a safe place to land. A mental home base he can return to without explanation or embarrassment.
For Julian, I hope that at twenty-one he looks back and realizes I was the grounding force behind him. Not the guardrail, just the foundation he learned to trust.
And someday, when the house is finally quiet, I know what I’ll miss most.
The noise.
Lorenzo laughing uncontrollably during co-op video games, the kind of laughter that fills a hallway. Julian drifting past me with Swappy, whatever version Swappy becomes next, lost in thought, building inner worlds to steady the outer one.
Those small, ordinary sounds of a house that’s alive.
Maybe that’s why I fold their clothes the way I do.
Quietly. Carefully. Like a small promise. I’m here. I see you. I’m trying. Even when I’m afraid. Even when I’m working through the distance I grew up with. Even when I’m just trying to be a better father.
One day the house will settle.
And I hope they still come back, not because they need something, but because home still feels like home.
