I said something the other day to my wife, something to the effect that I didn't think that human beings truly began an emotional education until they became parents.
I mean if you think about it, almost all emotions that we go through up to that point are totally selfish--desire greed, jealousy, joy--all centered around winning, losing, and placating that image of ourselves in our mind which we think of as so indestructible but which is as flimsy and insubstantial as the social well wishes of a politician or a pezzonovante of the church (pick a church, any church).
But when you become an engaged parent, meaning a parent who is both happy and directly involved in the raising of your child; then you have undertaken what will likely become an enormous emotional transformation.
And it's fugging hard!
Let me give you an example. The other day, I'm getting ready to go to work, going out the door actually. And since I take my son to daycare in the morning, I'm doing everything I can to get him ready and once he is, I ask him to sit on the couch and wait for me to collect all my shit.
I go to the fridge to get some water, pour it, shut the door and the next thing I know, I get thumped in the head, hard, twice. We keep cook books up on top of the refrigerator on a shelf I've had for probably twenty years. The jostling of the refrigerator door unloosened them and down they came along with all the little magnets and about fifteen other books which fell around me like little curses from the sky.
I am now officially three minutes past the deadline I have to leave the house by in order to make it to work on time.
The shelf fell and cracked.
That was it. I picked the shelf up over my head and smashed it to the ground. It shattered into about eight pieces. I started picking up books and chucking them on top of the refrigerator like hail mary passes on fourth down. I was a level three sea storm, smashing and destroying, venting and fuming.
All the while, my son is sitting calm as can be, playing with his cars on the couch, totally oblivious to his father exploding in rage in the kitchen and abusing cookbooks which were only obeying the law of gravity.
The three year old was in the kitchen screaming and the old man was on the couch playing in quiet meditation.
And this was the thought that drew me out of my delirium of rage...and I started laughing. The irony of the moment put everything into perfect focus and all the rage dissipated like Mel Gibson's Oscar chances this year.
There are so many things that we learn as human beings when we interact, guide, and get lead by our children as they grow into adults who will in turn learn the subtler and more important emotional lessons from their own children. And in many ways, there are like little mirrors for us to judge the effectiveness or harmfulness of our behaviors on others.
And they can serve as litmus tests for the choices we make. Often I think,
How would I explain this to my son if he were to ask me why I took this action?
Human beings are born with the gift of choice and how we approach that gift makes all the difference when the sum comes out at the end of the equation.
All that aside, it's still a dumb idea to put cookbooks on top of the damn refrigerator.
LINK DUMP:
...by leaving my home to go to college. It was my second freshman year, having left the University of Cincinnati a year earlier in a maelstrom quarter life crisis which ended with me breaking ties with my fraternity brothers, dropping out of school and undergoing a spiritual conversion on the level of tectonic plate shifts in the earth.
I said something the other day to my wife, something to the effect that I didn't think that human beings truly began an emotional education until they became parents.