If this is how I ramble now, imagine what I’ll be like in 36 more years
Posted on March 8, 2010 - Filed Under And your point is?, Adult swim
I happened to see this commercial the other day. It got me to thinking. Just watch and then I’ll get to my blibber-blather.
I imagine every loving father would like to be in the position to say this father’s words one day. Some won’t ever get the chance. Children make choices all the time which preclude them from having this woman’s kind of life—one in which she is happy and in love. Some never seem to thrive or find their way and others take a more dramatic path like drug addiction. (By the way, I am certainly not suggesting that getting married is necessary to have a fulfilling life. There are plenty of people who are wonderfully happy on their own.)
Anyway, my point is, I really want to be able someday to say the things this man says to his daughter. And if for some reason I never get the chance, I really hope it’s not because of some bad choices Maggie makes. In other words, we all know folks who ruined their own lives before they ever really got started, whether it’s because they dropped out of high school and never ended up making more than minimum wage or do some other stupid thing. Now before you go getting all naive on me, do you really think that parents who raise their children well but whose kids end up turning tricks for crack (translation: performing sexual favors for strangers in exchange for drugs) ever thought that would happen? I can pretty much promise you they did not. No one ever thinks that the thing we spend so much time and effort investing in—indeed, sacrificing every thing we are for—is going to turn out bad. That’s called hope and there’s an old saying I like to use in reference to hope: Hope in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first. (Negative, you say? Hey, at least I didn’t piss in everyone’s Corn Flakes as bad as Friedrich Nietzsche did when he said, “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.”) In other words, hope is something we like to cling to thinking it will somehow translate into everything being okay. The sad truth? You can hope your whole life and die unhappy because that for which you hoped never came to pass. Or, you can know you did your best and it’s now out of your hands. That’s really the crux of what I got to thinking about as a result of seeing this commercial.
You see, I already have tremendous hope for my kids. I fantasize about what they may do with their lives and the great people they may become. I dream about spending some of my retired-life days in the garage making wooden toys for grandkids. I long for the opportunity to share my hard-fought wisdom with them as they navigate their way into adulthood. But one thing I feel I must always stay aware of is the vicarious factor, or trying to live my life through them. Some folks think this is what parenting becomes, especially when children become adults. I, for example, was never able to play sports, so now I find myself very driven to get Maggie into soccer (starting this month) and even baseball (next month). That’s great and all, but I have to acknowledge that some of what motivates me is a deep-inside-the-brain desire to have what I never had. And that’s unfair to the kid(s) in question. Maggie’s life is her own; it is not my second chance, though it’s very easy to feel that way sometimes. One reason I have to try to stay away from that is that it puts undue pressure on her to become what I never did, making her life about me and not her.
So, what’s the punchline, the bottom line of all this rambling? I wanted to write this stuff down here as a reminder to me—hopefully forever—that Maggie’s and Wyatt’s lives are their own. They will make good choices and they will certainly make bad ones. At some point in the future (certainly not now—I am still a caretaking parent, after all), I have to let go. I have my own life to succeed or fail at. Parenting young ones is a season, one during which we neglect ourselves and rightly so. But there comes a time when we must reenter the tempest of our own existence, better and much wiser for the experience of having been parents, and see that our lives are ours and the kids’ lives are theirs. Their successes are theirs, not ours, and likewise their failures.
I know this has been long and I probably have peeled back the layers of some of my own naive notions. I had to get it out. And to think—it all came out of a stupid coffee commercial.
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