It’s been a long time since I posted. I have too many thoughts.
My son is now ten months and a week old and I almost don’t remember my life before his being in it.
Tonight, when alone, my wife and I watched Arrival (2016) and I am now reflecting on the fallibility of memory. I realised that, when he is frustrated and crying at a drawer for not opening, or trying to chew my slipper, that he is doing something that I did and everyone ever did.
I realised that when I see him exploring the world, his tiny, fascinating mannerisms are an echo of who he will be in years and decades to come. That the man I know in the future will reflect these early behaviours as I now reflect my own when I was his age.
The great tragedy of this is that we can only see it one way.
The good we could do if we could trace the echoes forward through time without having to go there first. What harms could we undo, what anxieties, fears, hatreds could we avert? Either way it’s irrelevant. All we can do is our best here and now, with the future in mind.
As such I am happy to report that my mental health is improving. I have started working harder and with more focus than I have in years and the muscle is getting strong again.
But it is a muscle, the ability to focus, to do what you need to do.
I still struggle with my anxiety: I fear the damage I might do to my son and everyone else in my life when my ENTP bluntness erupts in frustration. I fear that my struggle to handle my own weight will mean he is left prematurely without a father. I fear that my taking more than three decades to understand that my life might best be served guiding other impulsive, erratic young men through their own turbulent youths means I will be unable to leave him an inheritance, mental, financial or moral that will allow him to move forward in the world with confidence.
I suppose this smacks of me reflecting and imposing my own current state on who he might one day be.
My father is still alive, somehow. I am a father.
My wife is from a broken home. Her father left her mother and young brother within weeks of my wife’s conception. He took a token role in her life until she was six or seven years old and hasn’t spoken to him since before her teens.
I am from an emotionally broken home. My parents’ marriage is a post-modern charade of arguments and separate bedrooms and “staying together for the kids”. I don’t know which of us had it worse, honestly.
Her life was one of grinding poverty, being mostly raised by her maternal grandparents while her mother worked two or three jobs to try to clear the debt left to her by her wayward, adulterous, criminal ex-husband.
Mine was one of tears, screaming arguments and damnation. Of being told that my fahter is a bad man for a hundred reasons and none – reasons that I’ve mostly learned were manipulations – and being exused from anything I didn’t want to do in order to score points with one or the other.
That will not be my son’s life, but I am aware that we must not go too far the other way.
I will do my best to allow him to lead his own life, with the knowledge that we will both be behind him, able to catch and comfort him until he is ready to truly strike out alone.
He will understand responsibility, though he probably won’t appreciate being taught it or understand even that he is learning it at the time.
I will do all I can to help him to be strong when he needs to be, to be kind when he can and to let it all out in a safe way whenever it’s right to do so.
My son is the greatest thing I have ever done.
I’ve wanted children my whole life, my either having my own or adopting was never not going to happen for me. I am fortunate and in awe of my wife for bringing him into the world. But something I never accounted for is the scale of time. One imagines the start of a life, one remembers the vast stretches of frustrated youth, desperate for the days of ‘when I’m grown-up’, but one does not connect the two together. I always knew I would be a father somehow, but I never imagined how long a process it would be.
It’s strange, time.
I remember him being handed to me, seeing his tiny, outraged face as the world hit him. He is so different now, but I see the changes in motion snapshots, like time is melting and distorting, changing him and me at the same time. There are stages, leaps that provide… chapters to his development, but reflecting now, I find myself missing the past ones. But you can only experience a chapter for the first time once. You can re-read the chapter, but you know where it’s going. The first time you read it, it’s a journey that is indefinite but thereafter, you know where it’s going – for at least as far as you’ve gone so far.
I guess that’s a reasonably useful analogy. Failing that, I guess a meme will have to suffice:
So the now is the ink in the nib, or it is my fingers and hands that I sometimes don’t recognise as being the same hands I had as a younger man. The future is the ink in the reservoir, or it’s the hands and fingers I will have and may or may not recognise.
But my boy, my little wonder. How I love him.
Of everything I’ve forgotten over the years, his thousand faces and one are – I hope – engraved in my scatter-brained memory forever.
Regarding Marriage, Babies and Future Things 