A certain amount of anxiety piggybacks on a parent.

The first night after bringing a newborn home from the hospital involves an uneasy sleep interrupted by a compulsive need to check that the little one is still swaddled, sleeping, breathing. Child-proofing the house, locking cleaning agents and chemicals securely under the kitchen sink, and padding sharp corners of the coffee table get added to the mix later on. I imagine that school and teenage years also compound parental anxiety at exponential rates.

Thankfully, I’m not there yet. Lately, however, a new form of stress has reared its head: releasing my hounds into a social setting, giving them increased freedoms, and consequently expecting all forms of public spectacle and disturbance at the expense of my chagrin.

Now that Oliver is two and Liam four, I have a veritable hurricane in tow whenever we venture out into the realm of the living. With Oliver, it’s always go-time, scrambling over any obstacle and unleashing a toddler’s wrathful tantrum should I dare to quell his daring and give him a hand or a leg up. Liam, on the other hand, is a bona fide chatterbox. He’s always been rather social, but as his vocabulary and conversational vigor continue to flourish, he becomes increasingly inclined to stop a stranger, any stranger, on the street and strike up a friendly chat. All this is well and good, entertaining and fun, though there are times I must relinquish all control. And the boys seem to sense exactly when I am most powerless.

Exhibit A: This coming Sunday, we are officially joining our new church family here in South Bend. We’ve been attending for ten months now, and we figure we can successfully transfer our membership now that the congregation has seen numerous displays of Liam commandeering the children’s message to offer his longwinded two-minute ramblings take on anything from Star Wars to Christmas to the boredom of being dragged to a local art show. Put a mic in front of him and he’s off to the races. (Our encouragement to him has, I must confess, developed into unabashed bribery: all the Smarties in the world for a little restraint.)

Exhibit B: Next month is my younger brother’s wedding, and the boys have been tapped to be ring bearers. Nothing unexpected, really, and they look pretty dapper in their suits. The only complication, though, is that both Charis and I are in the wedding party as well—pinned to the wings at the front of the church as we will watch with a fair amount of dread as the boys attempt to make their way down the aisle without breaking into a full sprint, pushing each other over, or getting sidelined by the crowd giving them the attention of the room. This summer has, in fact, consisted largely of daily hand-holding exercises, proper pacing, and practice with Red Light, Green Light.

All this is to say, though, is that the real anxiety here comes from the necessary liberties that come from letting them make their entrance into the public world on their own. Their actions reflect, it seems, our parental successes and shortcomings thus far. Seeing them encounter the world at large while still protecting them from the worst of it is a balance of restraint on my part as much as it is on theirs. It’s a test less of their behavior than it is of my ability to let them figure things out on their own and be who they are to the full.

It’s a learning process, and I hope I’m graded on a curve. But as they make their way, I’m realizing how to unleash my hounds in order to let them enjoy the chase on their own terms.

Jacob Schepers

Jacob Schepers (Calvin ’12) is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (2014), a winner of the 2013 Outriders Poetry Project competition. His poetry has appeared in Verse, The Common, PANK, The Destroyer, and others. He lives in South Bend, IN, with his wife, Charis, and two sons, Liam and Oliver. He is both an MFA student and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame.