On Not Having It All Figured Out

It’s 5:45 a.m. and I am at a gift kiosk in Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, standing in front of a row of Matryoshka dolls that are all priced in rubles. I have no internet access in Russia, and I’ve never had to convert currency from rubles before, so I am slowly and methodically pricing each of the dolls backwards to see which of them is the least over-the-top but still a suitable gift for my four-year-old daughter. My anxious, constantly-rushing soul is freaking out over the amount of time I am taking on this exercise; but I remind myself that my layover is more than five hours long—so the more time I take up selecting a doll for Matilda, the better. I finally choose a yellow doll with three layers, pay the lady judging me for choosing the simplest one, and retreat to sit at my gate, where a dozen Orthodox Jewish men are chanting their morning prayers into a pink sunrise…

This is the latest in a long list of souvenirs I have bought for my daughter on an international business trip. There is a huge map of the world in her bedroom and every time I leave, I point to where in the world I am flying, and she asks me what I will bring back for her. The map is three feet wide. Matilda thinks the world is three feet wide. She frequently asks me if we can take the subway to the Carmel Highlands in California, and each time I explain to her the depth and vastness of the world, and the constraints of the NYC subway system, and then settle on a plaintive, “Maybe next month.” She thinks I’m the coolest person on the earth she studies.

When I was a kid, my dad traveled for work—a lot—for most of my childhood. I bragged to my friends, “My dad is in London today;” or, “My dad’s in Tokyo. He travels all the time,” picturing him, jetting off to cosmopolitan business destinations with intentions of big money deals and souvenir shopping for me. From Tokyo, he brought me a perfectly realistic set of plastic sashimi that was (heartbreakingly) lost in one move or another. From London, a tiny t-shirt that said MIND THE GAP that I did not understand at all. In my mind, he spent all of his copious free time on these trips looking for just the right gift for me, his beloved daughter.

In reality, my dad was flying for hours, landing, going straight into meetings and business meals with jet lag, and allotted very little time for personal flights of fancy—just like I do now. On his first trip to Tokyo, he was to teach a computational programming language to local engineers. His visit was important enough to be covered by a journalist from a small paper, and somewhere I have a clipping from a Japanese newspaper with a picture of my dad in his tight fro and enormous wire-framed glasses posing next to an ancient computer, smiling the way you’d expect of a 31-year-old man on his very first trip to Asia in the mid-80s. It was an honor for him to be there. The youth in his eyes then is what gets me. Today, I’m older than he was in that picture. They flew him across the world to teach his expertise; but when I was a kid, that trip was only remarkable to me because he brought me plastic sushi.

I used to think my parents had it all together. Actually, in truth, I used to think that the way to have it “all together” was to get married and have children at age 30. For some reason my young mind settled on that as the transition, the door through which you passed into adulthood, where your time was then defined by having too much money and too much fun spending it. In retrospect, it was a sort of death I envisioned: death in the absence of growth, the absence of trials, the absence of insecurities.

This is common, I think, for children to perceive their parents as the penultimate adult models. We inch slowly toward their age every day and realize how little they knew and how unprepared they were and how naked we all remain in this world long past our birthday. Having realized that my parents are, in fact,not superheros at all (or at least not the way I originally perceived them to be), I look at my daughter and feel it’s impossible that she could see me as a model of adulthood, as someone who’s got it all “figured out”. In the one conscious hour that we are at home together every morning, she sees: