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Yesterday was my daughter’s 7th birthday and the day before that was my 5 year old son’s adoption day.
A family completed we were, the day my son officially became a part of our family. (Thank you to Judge Amy Johnson, our attorney Kaye Mcleod, and our social worker Michelle Oglesby – all from Arkansas, the state my son was born in, a state we will forever be connected to now. This post is in partial honor of all these amazing women.)
Amidst all the joy, celebration, and relief of the past couple of days…a feeling really stood out for me personally:
I am extremely imperfect as a parent. (Yes, I’m making this about me. Did you not read the title of the post my dear friend?)
I think I’m always in the process of becoming a good parent, but just falling short. I take shortcuts, often don’t know what I’m doing, and half-ass it many a time.
(Hell, the laptop is more of a co-parent than I’d like to admit…probably better at it too from time to time.)
And yet, I feel perfectly confident in continuing to do it. Perhaps a bit too confident. Choicelessness in nurturing, no matter how bad a job one does, is ultimately very liberating.
Monumental blunders notwithstanding, parenting doesn’t feel unnatural. Indeed, it feels like for the first time in my life, I have something in my life to get out of bed for that’s beyond the self and my suffering significant other whom I’m probably more co-dependent on than I’d care to admit.
It feels good to be needed. After all these many years of reveling in that feeling, it’s important to admit it, now more than ever.
Never have I had more love, more purpose, or indeed more meaning, in my life.
Never have I also had more structure, repetition, timeliness, and propping semblances of arbitrary order (that I’m honestly only able to rationalize half the time).
Most soberingly though, never have I ever felt more like a hypocrite. I know I’m a parent for very, very selfish reasons.
I became a fan of Irvin Yalom a few years back when I read his brilliant 1980 treatise, Existential Psychotherapy. It helped immeasurably in my own explorations around thanatology.
It was reassuring to me that an acute internalization of one’s brutal finitude helped immeasurably in intentional living
“Death and life are interdependent: though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.”
Yalom’s word provided comfort in the fact that I was not batshit insane for my lifelong obsession with death.
It shone a spotlight on how we as humans seek immortality, despite very clearly being mortal beings…whether that be through artistic creation, amassing wealth and power, or having children.
It’s intrinsic to who we are.
But while reveling in what parenting provides me, I feel like the only way I can half-ass it less and be more present, is by reminding myself of the inherent selfishness in the endeavor.
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“It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
***
This post is in partial honor of Dr. Irvin Yalom, still kicking it to this day at the age of 91! Thank you kindly, good sir.
(Below image courtesy Wikimedia User: Masangina – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36268159)
Books referred:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21032.Existential_Psychotherapy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21031.When_Nietzsche_Wept
love liberation struggle 