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Sometime in my early 20s, I read a quote in Esquire Magazine that said:
“Raising teenagers is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.”
The quote was in a special issue all about fatherhood. The advice in it made me reflect on my own childhood. For the first time, it really registered just how incredibly challenging parenting is. Since then, whatever fears I had about becoming a parent have only grown in magnitude.
To be clear, my girlfriend and I do not have any immediate plans for children. It is still far enough away as a life event to seem foreign. Though as my contemporaries start to grow their families, it creeps closer, something to experience as both a witness and a participant.
While there are a million books and blogs on parenting advice, what I’ve heard from my friends over and over is you are never ready. You can think you are, you can want to be, but you are never really prepared for how your life will change.
For me, it is extremely freeing to know I will never be fully prepared. It makes my desire for children slightly less scary. And while that comforts me, my deeper worry is I won’t be where I need to be at every step of the journey, intellectually, emotionally, and especially financially.
Parenting appears to provide an infinite amount of opportunities to screw up. Anticipating all the ways I could potentially let my family down feels like mental quicksand. The worries appear unbidden on subtle prompts.
Walking past the elementary school in my neighborhood spurs a series of exhausting calculations.
Is a minivan their only car? Three kids jeez, what is their grocery bill like? How big is their apartment? Why is a five-year-old wearing such expensive sneakers?
Numbers tick off in my head, tabulating a mental bill I might one day have to pay. In those moments I contemplate closing my business, moving to another city, getting a different job or two and giving up whatever artistic pursuits I have to focus on saving money for all the inevitable expenses a child will bring.
Getting older is becoming a gradual accumulation of awareness, anxieties, and a hyper-awareness of those anxieties. I focus on financial needs because they are the easiest to quantify. Financial security by no means indicates parental proficiency, but it allows me a kind of numerical target. Nothing as clear exists for where I would like to be intellectually or emotionally. I just imagined, when I was younger, that I would be further along by now. And when I try to figure out where that “along” is supposed to be I can only come up with the relative position of… well, further than I am now.
That anxiety is gasoline on the trash can fires of my already myriad worries.
I worry about the tactical things: feeding my child, getting them to sleep and changing a diaper (which I have never even come close to attempting in my life). Those, however, seem to be learnable skills, and much more approachable than higher order needs, like giving my child the kind of opportunities I once had. Not just in terms of access but in terms of environment.
I worry about raising a child in an overly connected world I myself find to be overwhelming. I worry about being able to provide the space for boredom and exploration. I know it is impossible to protect a child from everything negative, but I fear not being able to give even a modicum of shelter from the constantly evolving negative inputs so accessible to everyone regardless of age or location.
I worry since I already feel a bit out of step with my own generation I will feel even more out of step with my child’s. I worry I won’t be able to help my little one navigate their own path successfully at any age.
I suppose the good news of having children is you don’t need to know how to raise every age of your child at once. You only deal with one year at a time. Friends tell me as soon as you finally understand what your child needs they change, and your knowledge becomes outdated, useless, a piece of consumer electronics barely worth the box it came in.
While I understand it is counterproductive to exert this much mental energy mulling over all of the things that I will not know how to do, it does not make ignoring such rumination any easier.
I have read on multiple occasions one of the best pieces of advice for fathers is this: Just show up. Be there for your children whenever they need you and even when they think they don’t. It sounds like wonderful advice because it eliminates the need to have all the answers.
I can be present if not proficient. It also helps me to realize there will be many things I figure out in the moment. Improvisation has played a positive role in my life so it stands to reason trusting in that muscle will be advantageous in the future.
I’ve been listening to a series of audiobooks about romantic relationships lately. Not because there is anything wrong; quite the opposite. Because I am happy in my relationship I want to make sure I don’t take it for granted. I want to be informed and prepared for the challenges the future will bring.
I guess it’s kind of a hedge against ignorance for me. Trying to prevent conflict through education. I have done the same thing in several areas of my life with middling results.
My girlfriend was teasing me recently that if we have kids I will read every book about parenting. And she’s right, I will. But it’s because we are different. She is more confident she will figure things out in the natural course of life. I am less so and want to do all I can to learn now, to be prepared.
While my fears of becoming a parent are in no way unique, I hope my awareness of those fears, will prevent me from making too many mistakes.
Prepared or not, I will show up.
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