So, father’s day. And my birthday coming up. Those two always go together. And it’s the week before Lily will go and stay with her mom through summer vacation. Not with me. For the first time, things are the other way around. She’ll come back after the vacation. Back to live with me. To keep living with me. It’s hard to fathom after so many years of struggles. And it’s weird that 9 months have already gone by so quickly, but given the amounts of changes and re-learning I underwent it does make sense.
SO much change.
I talked about many consequences that I faced in my social life after becoming a full-time-single-dad. But there is more to it, things that shook me harder than these flimsy interferences that I had expected, knowing my friends’ personalities quite well. I comprehended many things, and I wrote about a few, like the “It takes a village” figure of speech. In the last days, what resonated most with me is the following:
It doesn’t matter what you say, but what you are.
It’s so simple, and yet so hard. So many people around me are proud of teaching their children values – verbally. But then they turn around and do just the opposite, in secret or blatantly open, and it takes them by surprise that the children don’t turn out the way they had “taught” them.
Incoherence strips words of their weight.
It starts with small things. You don’t want them to speak while chewing? Stop doing it yourself, only then you can ask it of them. But it goes into all aspects, and especially values. You can preach all you want about them, your children will feel what you do, not what you say. They’re connected to you, they see the nuances, they – probably subconsciously – know when you’re being incoherent.
The work is on myself, not on her.
I thought I had many things figured out, as I did shovel quite a bit of incoherences out of my self for the last years. But I still encounter parts that need working on. Luckily, it’s mostly rough edges, as I can already see some of those reflected in Lily, meaning I might be too late, which makes me want to sand them down faster. Unfortunately, there’s no accelerator. Yet, I put in the effort.
It’s noticable.
It’s not only the effort to be coherent, but also the talks, the examples, the listening. It’s not one in particular, but the mass that influenced so much change in Lily during the last 9 months. Positive change, from my point of view. Her behavior has shifted a lot towards what I hope is the best possible for her to be a happy person and a solid and productive member of her future community.
I’m collateral damage.
And I learned so much, not just about her and me, but I comprehended many connections in our society. Yes, of course, the intellectual exchange with my best friend and the HIVE community helped a lot in that, too, but seeing, no, feeling her growing up next to me, seeing the effects of the little things, the rapid growth of a mind of its own, that is what let me to comprehend.
Is parenting a transdisciplinary instrument?
For me, it is. I wrote about the difference between understanding and comprehending, and in this case, the theoretical knowledge was a good base, though still superficial in comparison to the many relations I can perceive now. All the stuff I had read, been told, observed, suddenly has a deeper meaning, there's a truth to all of it. I connected the Ivory Tower with the community experience.
And it sucks.
Of course, that also comes with the tiny detail of seemingly realizing what’s going so terrible wrong in the world, the society, my community. It’s Plato’s cave all over again. But, and that is what I always derive from all the ugly – it motivates me to be different. To dig deeper into my self, learn more about my values, to find the incoherence left, analyze it, extinguish it one way or another. To become what I believe to be a better human, and with that:
Becoming a better father.
