Noah was the cool kid in school. On “Bad hair day” he convinced his mom to give him a Mohawk haircut. I thought it was cute. His friends thought it was awesome. When the third or fourth classmate came in with the same style over the next week, the teacher sent a letter home asking us to trim it back since it was becoming a distraction. We complied.
Noah was always intrigued by the work I did. At the time I was working with the Department of Defense on a classified project, so I couldn’t really tell him much. But when he asked, I would tell him things like “It’s super secret. I can’t even tell Mom!” Which was true.
He would ask if I was building space ships or missiles or tanks or ships. I confess the bedtime stories I would tell – a mix of creative and entirely unreal stories and real stories from my own childhood – may have led to some confusion. But Noah had some ideas about what dad was really doing.
Then came the Spring Carnival Day at school. Lots of games and jump houses and other fun things all over the soccer field at the school. The boys were scattered. Then Noah grabs me by the hand and brings me over to his friend. He and his friend had been talking, and his friend’s dad was intrigued.
Noah said “Tell them, Dad! I was telling them about how you make missiles and they didn’t believe me.”
The truth is that I didn’t make missiles. Nor did I work with those branches at that point. But I had been engaged on a project that was loosely related, and Noah had somehow decided that’s what I do.
When we moved from Woodbridge, Virginia to Charlotte, North Carolina, it was a big shift for our family. In the DC area, no one talks about what they do. It was just easier to say I’m in technology or whatever. But down in Charlotte, there were no secrets to the culture. That said, I told the boys that we don’t talk about what dad does.
On occasion, I’d wrap up my day – working remotely or traveling to various government or contractor offices – and be super excited about our progress and advancements, but mostly unable to tell anyone what I was doing. I would occasionally twist some part of work into my bedtime stories for the boys – never giving the real deal but making it fun – and always telling them that it was secret. I’d tease them – “Now for this next part, can you guys keep a secret?” The cloak and dagger element to my stories kept the boys on the edge. Since I was no James Bond, I could savor being Que.
I had always told bedtime stories to the boys. In Charlotte, Noah and Eli shared a room so I would go in their room and sit in the floor to exhaust their minds with wild ideas. That is, until one night when Evan said he couldn’t hear what I was saying. Garrett added “Me either!” I guess I didn’t realize Garrett and Evan were listening along. So I shifted my story telling position to the floor outside the hall closet door. I’d start off each night asking if they want to hear a real story or a creative story. For some reason, the real stories often focused on my seemingly countless injuries I had experienced – especially as a kid. One night Noah asked how many injuries I had had. I hadn’t thought about that before, so we decided to just count the number of serious injuries to my arms and hands.
Broken bones, stitches, stuff like that. We counted seventeen, naming them off one at a time. The mechanical pencil stabbed through my right palm. The compound fracture of my finger on my left hand. The broken ulna and radius from the fall down the stars and the broken humerus from the big car accident. The list went on. I am entirely sure every one was serious, but I’m also sure there was some exaggeration to how I told the stories – it’s hard not to as the years pass on. We tend to forget some things and fill in the blanks with whatever.
I think my work, with its demands for compartmentalization, lended itself to some blank filling as well. So standing there at the school carnival with Noah – proud of his dad – and his friend, I didn’t say I work on rockets. I didn’t say I’m a rocket scientist. I just said the military industrial world is an exciting place and I enjoy my work. No lies. No exaggeration. But if I was working on that stuff at that point in time, I would have just denied it anyway. That’s what the work involves. And I’ve always been honored by my sons and their support of my work. I just wish it didn’t take me away from them for so much of their youth.