I haven’t released it completely, of course. Far away, into a lake, where there’s probably all kinds of goose poop. The act of throwing a rock into a lake felt in some small way like releasing the Fear of Failure. I didn’t even tell the other guys that day. This is the first time I told anyone what I’d written on it. So I wrote Failure with a brown Sharpie on the flat side of the stone and I threw it into a lake. (Or maybe I’m just not trying hard enough to read minds. That is a fear that maybe more men than just me experience, though I can’t say for sure, since I can’t read minds. It is about being discovered to be a fraud. It is about something far bigger: It is about being exposed. It isn’t even about disappointing others. Which means that failure no longer is about disappointing myself. I will come through, again and again, without fail, because I am the rock on which this family stands. I have portrayed myself to my family and to the world as someone who will succeed through sheer force of will. Because as a father, you have built yourself into something different entirely. But now, as a father, failure is a whole new kind of predator. When I was single, if I failed, who cares? I would suffer a setback, maybe embarrassment, maybe disappoint myself and others. But something changes for men when we get married. When I was young and single, I rarely thought about failure. No – I wrote that because the truth is that I am slightly terrified of failure. That I, Conor, would never fail again! Victory, now and forevermore!! I didn’t write Failure because I was going to metaphorically toss Failure away from me forever. The thing that I wrote on my stone was this: Failure. When I did it, we actually wrote something on the stone itself. We had learned this from some friends who run a ministry up here in Connecticut. I won’t say what Liz’s and Finn’s things were, because that’s theirs to tell or not tell, but I’ll give you an example from when I did it myself, back when I was doing this retreat with some guys. They would name a thing that they wanted to get rid of, thoughts and fears they wanted out of their lives, and then hurl the stone into the lake.

(Which is probably why I was distracted and picking up goose poop instead of stones.) Or rather, I heard them pause, each with a stone in hand, look at each other, each say something, and then throw.

I heard Finn and Liz talking as they threw. I didn’t feel like picking poison berries with my daughter (though I did say “Try not to eat those poison berries!” so I feel like I did my job there). Lucy was next to them, picking what I assume were poison berries. I was only picking up that goose poop in the first place because Liz and Finn were tossing stones into the lake. If you were, then I promise you, you’d be very interested in what goose poop looks like. And you’re probably asking “Who cares what goose poop looks like?” But you’re only asking that because you weren’t the one skipping stones with your son and you weren’t the one who picked up goose poop with your bare hands. If you don’t know what goose poop looks like, lemme tell you something – it looks a whole lot like a mossy little rock.

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