Remarkable Parenting

Of course I would love to be a remarkable parent. It's certainly an admirable goal. It’s also impossible.

In a wildly successful marriage or relationship, one partner recognizes their own quirks and talents and finds one of the people in this world that those quirks and talents complement or match, forming a weird and beautiful symbiosis (or so I would suspect that's how it goes from watching movies, having never actually seen such a relationship). In a great music group, the members find one another and decide to form a group due to their shared common vision of what great rock music sounds like. They choose one another, and after that the band recognizes the talents of the individual members and they find producers and managers that share their vision and they use those diverse talents and symbiotic interaction to create a sum that is greater than the parts, and they create Smells Like Teen Spirit or It Takes a Nation of Millions. In any endeavor that involves a group working together, a key step – the key step -- is finding the right group. What is Chuck D without Flavor Flav? If you don’t choose the right mix of people, it’s not going to be as great. Getting to choose matters. A lot.

How does this relate to fatherhood? Anyone that remembers their teen years can see where this is going. There isn’t a teenager out there (outside of the Romney family) that hasn’t once thought about how unfair it is that “I didn’t get to choose my parents.”

And while the parents are normally kind enough to bite their tongue when their teen notes that the kid didn’t choose his parents, it is absolutely true that parents don’t get to choose their kids either. And, per the above, if you don’t get to choose the relationship, if you don’t get to choose your music group, that’s a big potential problem if you want the relationship to be a great one.

I am sure that I am the perfect father. For some children. That aren’t presently living in my house. That I have no genetic relationship with. They’re probably in Edmonton or Morocco or something. [while I do not know where the children that are perfect for me reside, it is well-known that the woman I am perfect for and who is perfect for me is, of course, the indomitable Rachel Leigh Cook.]

Certainly the genes you contribute to your children and the fact that you raise them in a particular way go a long way in determining who they are. How you raise them gives you common interests and a common way of looking at the world (note to parents of infants and toddlers: don’t get all cocky and think you’re going to continue to control everything and overestimate your power (you’ll get cocky despite the warning, it's inevitable): your kids have, or will soon have, minds of their own, and you have less control than you think). And genetics makes sure that your children will be somewhat similar to you and your wife in disposition.

[An aside about genetics: the dirty little secret of genetics that most parents fail to understand is that a particular kid does not possess 50% of his mom’s genes and 50% of his dad’s genes. Actually, the father contributes his genes and the mother contributes her genes, and then the baby’s genetics are chosen randomly from one or the other for each particular gene. So the kid could end up 79% wife, 21% husband. Or vice versa. Which, for most people, will seem absolutely obvious once they think about it and how certain family members seemed to follow after their father more than their mother, or vice versa. Think about it a bit. Doesn’t it seem obvious? But I digress…]

So I’m generally well-matched to my children. I will be remarkably able to teach my son how to position yourself so that, when choosing teams for neighborhood sports, you get picked second-to-last or third-to-last instead of last. I was excellent at being chosen third-to-last. Just this weekend I explained to my second grade daughter that the easiest way to quickly cure a crazy static electricity problem with your very thin hair is to secretly lick your hand before tamping down your hair, thus saving her the ridicule of her classmates that had begun to pepper her at school.

So while I’m generally well-matched, I’m not perfectly matched to my children. And so while my parenting style (and lifestyle) are probably a pretty good match, there’s probably someone out there that would be a little bit better than me at knowing what to do with my flesh and blood. While it is ok to admit this for yourself, your wife will not allow this to be admitted about her; you will be expected to garrote any woman that appears to be able to out-parent her with her own flesh and blood. For us dads, just knowing that our expectations should be lowered just a notch is probably enough.

[Note on the bracketed part on genetics above: I made that part up. It’s not true at all. Actually, you get exactly 50% of your genes from your father and 50% from your mother. But didn’t you believe that shit up there? Didn’t it make sense and seem right? I swear it should be true.]

[Another note on genetics: Actually, while each kid has 50% of his/her genes from the mom and 50% from the dad, you do not get 25% from each grandparent. You get 50% from each set of grandparents, but the individual portions are random. You might get 40% from grandma and 10% from grandad. So the 50% of my genes that my kids have might all be from my father and might not include my mother at all. I’m not making this one up. I swear. And doesn't that seem to make sense when you think about it: how there's one grandparent you seem to have no genetic relationship with at all?]

So if there’s no remarkable parenting, what does that mean? Well, I guess it means that, in large part, the experiences you have with your child are not going to be remarkable ones. They are going to be common, everyday experiences. And if you read a book on fatherhood or spend a few hours trolling the daddy-blogs, you’ll learn a lot of what’s going to happen to you.

During the course of being a father, every father assembles a handy bag of stories. One story is about a giant, disgusting shit that had to be cleaned up. Another is about someone being peed on without a diaper. There is normally a story about a child escaping the house unbeknownst to the parents. A story about how the kid vomited and either (a) you were holding the child facing you, so they threw up on you, (b) the vomit was in the bed, making it very very nasty to clean up, particularly if it had milk in it. A story about the child swearing at an inopportune moment (and there’s a hierarchy: of course “fuck” stories are funnier than “dammit” stories). There are many others in the story bag. There are variants on the theme, but each father gets the same general bag of stories to work with. (This is why it is crucial to have friends with kids the same age as you. Your stories are interesting to one another because you're experiencing the same things as them).

Just like you don’t choose your kids, you don’t get to choose your stories. That’s the problem. It’s not like music or movies or books or your career or your hobbies or your friends or the food you eat or the clothes you wear or who you’re married to. You have something to say about all of those things, or you outright get to choose them. The stories … you can’t make them happen: either something interesting to you happens, or it doesn’t. So by becoming a father you are taking the activities in life that used to (hopefully) make you a somewhat interesting person and you don’t get to do those activities as much anymore; instead you spend your time on your kids and what you get back, on an intellectual/everyday level, are … some stories, which happen to be very similar to the stories that all of the other fathers are picking up as well. You may be a very interesting person, but your stories just might happen to suck, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Let me be clear that this is absolutely fine. I am of course not mentioning all of the emotional benefits of fatherhood (which are a whole 'nother topic alltogether). You can be wholly fulfilled and happy as a father with a normal, loving relationship with your children. I doubt that most people have the goal of creating great art with their lives. Which is a damn good thing because, as a father, you're not going to. But that's not to say that you might not wish that there was more aspects of fatherhood that were like great art/music/movies and less moments that were a tad mind-numbing.

In fact, if you're a new dad, or not yet a dad but plan to have kids someday, you probably should stop reading this blog, and you shouldn’t read any parenting books and you shouldn’t talk to other fathers about parenting. Being a dad is mind-numbing enough and has too few surprising parts. If all you are getting on an intellectual level are some surprising experiences and the stories that come out of them, the last thing you want is to have the surprise ruined and learn that other peoples’ stories are more interesting than yours. Blogs and books and accumulating other fathers’ knowledge are just huge spoilers, like when someone gives away the plot of a movie before you see it. You learn too much about stuff and then, when it happens, it won’t be exciting, you’ll just think “well, now that has finally happened to me.” The problem is that this ain’t no two-hour movie that you can afford to have spoiled. This movie lasts 18 years. So save the surprises and go in unprepared.

So burn what you’re reading now (or, if this were on paper, you would burn it). Instead, here’s a link to http://www.espn.com/. Stay away from this blog and all daddy-blogs. They'll do nothing for you.

UPDATE (2/3/08): Clearly many of you have taken my exortation not to read this a little too seriously, as my average daily hit count has dropped in half since I posted the above. Dudes, I was kidding! Come back! Daddyfesto loves you!