Add Some Extra Just For You

My wife and I decided early on that we wanted to make parenting choices that would instill a sense of warm, unconditional love in our children; we wanted to create an environment of support and encouragement and empowerment that would hopefully give our children the tools to be kind, loving, confident and, most importantly, happy individuals; we wanted to help them discover and nurture their own individual spirits, to have the courage to love who they are, and we vowed to evaluate all our choices against that criteria. We didn't want to raise obedient, well-mannered, respectful children, necessarily, unless we believed that being obedient, well-mannered and respectful were necessary steps toward becoming kind, loving, confident and happy. If rebellious, rowdy and loud is what it takes for my kids to be kind, loving, confident and happy, then so be it.

And boy have I gotten what I was asking for, or what I had coming to me, depending on how you look at it. My children are beautiful creatures, but my children are also...my children. We have two boys, 5 years old and 2 years old, respectively, and, like most children, they can be total and complete animals. Maybe not like most children, actually. In the movie "Dangerous Liasons," there's a great line about Valmont, the John Malkovich character: "What's true of most men, is doubly so of him." And I suppose you could say the same about both my kids: imagine your normal, rowdy, spirited, trouble-making toddler. Then double it, for each of them.

So I don't have obedient, respectful, well-mannered kids. They're not monsters, don't get me wrong, but they're also not very good company for the faint of heart. But that's all fine with me, I even kind of appreciate the anarchy to a certain extent. The real question is: are we actually giving them the tools to be kind, loving, confident and happy people? The answer, right now, is: fuck if I know.

I do know they give and receive huge doses of love. I know they exude joy, laughter, energy and intellectual curiousity. I know the feeling I get when I watch them sleeping or hear a belly laugh or get a hug is real, and I know it's reciprocated, in their own way.

But it turns out there's another hugely important factor at play beyond the values we consciously instill in them and the behavior we decide to allow or not allow or punish or praise, and that's the behavior we *model*, on a daily basis. And really, that is far and away the most important thing in the end. What kind of person will my child turn out be? What kind of choices will my child make? How comfortable will my child feel in his own skin?

Look in the mirror, bub, and you have your answer.

Yikes.

A friend of mine once told me that somebody once told him that the best way to be a good father to your child is to be a good husband to your child's mother. If I stop and think about that too much I find some problems, but, then again, stopping and thinking too much is in and of itself one of my biggest problems. So just go with it, for a moment, Of course it's true, on a certain level. And of course it follows that the best way to be a good husband is to be...a good man.

I've always wanted to be a good man, I think. But I've also always been lazy. It's a different thing to want to be a good man because you want to be a good husband and a good father. I can read all the parenting books in the world and espouse the most beautiful ideas about nurturing and unconditional love, I can feel all those things and even put them into practice but at the end of the day, what really matters is what my son sees me do, what my son sees me feel, how my son sees me live. And by that standard, I've got a lot to work on. If I want my children to be kind, loving, confident and happy, the most important thing i can do is to become kind, loving, confident and happy myself.

That's a tall order, for me. Am I a kind man? I think I can be generous, but that's not the same thing as kindness. I have an instinct for kindness, I think, for which I largely credit my own parents modelled behavior, but I pull back on it too often. Loving? Whoa. That's the hardest one, by fucking far, and probably the subject of a whole other post. Suffice it to say that one of my life goals is to truly learn how to give and receive love, and I'd like to think I'm on the journey to get there. Confident? Not quite. Not yet, not truly. I've got some important work to do in some key areas on that front. And...happy. I think that comes down to giving myself permission to experience joy in my daily life, and on that front some days are better than others.

When I think about things that way it changes some key decisions I've made about how to be a parent and what it means to really be present in my childrens lives. In some ways, I think, it means my wife and I both need to give ourselves a little more permission to have our own lives, to make ourselves fuller and richer people, with the faith that those experiences will turn us into better parents. I think we've both been circling this revelation recently, but haven't quite come to terms with it. And, you know, it fucking hard to find the time to read a newspaper article when you have two young children, let alone carve out a self-improvement plan. But we'll get there, I know we will.

I just don't want to fuck up my kids too badly. I want to give them the best chance I can. And there's a delicious kind of irony in the fact that I've been using my Role as Father to avoid dealing with my own fucked up shit, when deep down I've always known the only way to really play The Role of Father is to deal with my own fucked up shit.

Back to the old drawing board.


(The title of this post in take from one of my favorite poems, "This Be the Verse," by Phillip Larkin, the text of which I now present to you in it's entirety:)

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
 They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
 And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
 By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
 And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
 It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
 And don't have any kids yourself.