I'm Not Good at This
Parenting, specifically, but the concept can be applied broadly.
It’s traditional for a blogger or newsletter author to offer an overview of his or her qualifications, a snapshot of experiences which lend credibility to what he or she chooses to share in that medium.
Years of industry experience, say, or an impressive street cred born of a proverbial or literal hard knock life.
Perhaps a cache of degrees and honorifics which would consequently take up more space on the homepage than the post content itself.
For a newsletter like this, one that is partially an outlet for the challenges and joys of parenting, those credentials might include a particularly interesting locale in which to have raised kids (such as teaching sign language to sub-Saharan African mongooses (mongeese?)); a notably difficult road to parenthood (e.g. overcoming an irradiated vans deferens due to a career as a senior battery tester in a Temu Bluetooth speaker factory); or a quirky outlook on raising kids born into some special life circumstance (I’m thinking here of an astronaut who went on a mission to Mars before she knew she was pregnant, gave birth on the way, crash landed on a comet, and is now raising a child, alone, while circling the solar system, creating a well-followed blog in the process to document it all).
Common tales, all of them.
For me, here are my credentials in total: My wife and I have produced other humans.
We love these humans.
We are doing our best to make sure these humans make it until they can survive on their own outside of the nest, at which point we will immediately lock the nest doors.
Aside from some really good parental examples we’ve been blessed to learn from, that’s about it.
The rest really is - and I say this with no hyperbole - the grace of God.
As the more astute among you have likely noted, by using the term “we” I fully admit that I haven’t even done these things alone. I have a partner, who, let’s face it, has done the lion’s share of the heavy lifting. My wife is largely responsible for the fact that that wheels have not rolled right off of this bus.
If there is one trait that adds a check mark in the "Good Dad" column for me, it's that I'm present. But that doesn’t necessarily make me a “good” dad. Although politicians and religious figures might tell us that proximity is the most important thing - "Being Present", they say, "makes all of the difference" - sometimes being present makes it worse.
Because when the selfish dads show up, it would be better if they were somewhere else, at least for a while. (You’re welcome, bars and bowling alleys).
And herein then lies an irony in parenthood, at least in my experience, one that summarizes the insanity of what it means to be a parent: on a daily basis, I am tempted unto extreme selfishness, wanting to largely be alone, to be left to do my own thing.
And yet - AND YET! - I would die for my kids and my wife.
Nearly every waking moment of the day, there are things that I want to happen, things I want to achieve, things I want to experience, etc. Often (and let the reader understand here and read with grace), my kids get in the way.
Take a simple domestic example. I come home hangry from work and want to eat dinner, but my son is dangling by one arm from the gutter. So, dinner has to wait while I find the ladder, remember how to unfold it, curse under my breath because there isn’t a level spot upon which to set a ladder, and climb on the precariously grounded ladder to extract a human from atop my house, one who is smirking at me because I had to use a ladder to reach the roof. I, in turn, get frustrated at my son’s interrupting of my plans and his smirk and the fact that he is mostly naked and will likely say something I'll later regret, something along the lines of, “No seriously, what exactly IS wrong with you?!”.
I'm acting out of frustration in the moment, because MY needs are not being met. It’s the definition of selfish, i.e. to -ish in relation to oneself.
Yet, in the extreme, in circumstances such as severe sickness or threat, I would give my life for theirs. If my kids had a life-threatening illness or injury, e.g. if said son were to actually lose the battle with gravity while at roof-level, there is no limit to the number of hours I would work to pay for medical care or the time I would spend on my knees in prayer for his safe delivery.
Replace the term “life-threatening illness” with “grade school recital”, there would be no limit to the way I’d complain about the hours of my life being wasted by this event.
While I have certainly grown in areas over the years, I still battle the same selfish urges that cause my daughter to scream in frustration when we ask her to take her cereal bowl to the sink (“No one else is!”) or which cause all of my kids to say terrible things to each other (“If you go to school smelling like that, no one will ever like you and you’ll die alone”).
So, I find myself living a life where I at once can barely contain the frustration that my roof-dangling son is delaying me from dinner (which we must acknowledge here is one of several food eating opportunities I've had throughout the day - I am by no means starving, or likely even really “hungry”. I estimate that I have a fat reserve that could get me through AT LEAST one evening, if not 38), yet if it came down to it, would face death for him, without a second's hesitation.
The perspective shifts so quickly.
Why?
In short, I don’t know, except to point to the bald-faced reality of human nature, which at all times seeks to -ish on the self-, yet has a deep instinct to protect, at all costs, the humans that the self had a part in creating.
It really comes into focus when I consider that at one point not long ago, I was the boy hanging from the gutter (no that’s not right - I was the boy on the ground ready to run and get medical help for the friend hanging from the gutter), and I couldn’t wait to be a man. Now that I am said man, having to navigate, among other things, the universe of parenting, with all of its joys and worry and self-doubt, I can’t wait to be a man with a job at the bottom of the ocean (“Sorry honey, but you knew this when you married a deep-sea treasure diver. This is the life we chose!”)
(Just kidding! I hate the ocean.)
Life with my family is often a beautiful confirmation of why I was created; at other times, it makes me want to drive a construction site bulldozer 18 miles into the nearest forest, where I will live on berries that look more or less okay to eat and spend my days trying to atone for all of the forest I destroyed getting to my new home with my new bulldozer, praying it takes the authorities more than a day to find the large freshly-dozed forest path to my new home, at which point they will drag me back to my responsibilities.
(Again, kidding. I couldn’t even start a bulldozer.)
All of this to say, no matter what my own mother says, I am not good at this, so please read these posts and newsletters with caution.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to Google “how to re-attach gutter, bent, hanging, simple, with video.”
Thanks for reading! Wishing you a week free of needless trips to the middle of the forest or the bottom of the sea!
