A Message For Dads

Read this, please. It is from Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography Born to Run. I will wait…

Long ago, I’d promised myself that I would never lose my children in the way my father had lost me. It would’ve been a devastating personal failure, one for which I would have no excuse, and I would not have been able to forgive myself…

…Once they were here, Patti and I knew our children would be our first priority. All of our tours would be booked around school schedules, children’s events, birthdays, and because of Patti’s insistence, planning, and dedication, we made it work. I worked hard not to be an absentee dad, but in my business that’s not always possible and Patti picked up the slack. She also guided me when she thought I was falling short. For years, I’d keep musician’s hours, a midnight rambler: I’d rarely get to bed before four a.m. and often sleep to noon or beyond. In the early days, when the children were up at night, I found it easy to do my part in taking care of them. After dawn, Patti was on duty. Once they got older, the night shift became unnecessary, and the burden tilted unfairly toward the morning hours.

Finally, one day she came to me as I lay in bed around noon and simply said, “You’re gonna miss it.”

“Miss what?”

She said, “The kids, the morning, it’s the best time, it’s when they need you the most. They’re different in the morning than at any other time of day and if you don’t get up to see it, well then…you’re gonna miss it.”

The next morning, mumbling grumbling, stolid faced, I rolled out of bed at seven a.m. and found my way downstairs. “What do I do?”

She looked at me and said, “Make the pancakes.”

Make the pancakes? I’d never made anything but music my entire life. I…I…I…don’t know how!

“Learn.”

That evening, I queried the gentlemen who was cooking for us at the time for his recipe for pancakes and I posted it on the side of the refrigerator. After some early cementlike results, I dialed it in, expanded my menu and am now proud to say that should the whole music thing go south, I will be able to hold down a job between the hours of five and eleven a.m. at any diner in America. Feeding your children is a great act of intimacy and I received my rewards, the sounds of forks clattering on breakfast plates, toast popping out of the toaster, and the silent approval of morning ritual. If I hadn’t gotten up, I would’ve missed it.

No mother who is the primary wage earner sleeps through breakfast every day and gets a pass for it. Bruce Springsteen did — until his wife stopped letting him.

He listened. She was right: kids need us differently in the morning than at any other hour, and if you're not there, you don't get it back.

I've never played a song for 80,000 screaming fans. But I've made breakfast for my kids and felt the same thing — applause, gratitude, the room being all connected. The food was never the point. It was the excuse to be in the room for the conversation.