Showing posts with label fathers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fathers. Show all posts

Thursday 23 June 2011

Chores and Underlings: What Works

 

Surrender works so well in so many areas of parenting (and life) –it is when we stop struggling with reality that we find ease and peace.

One note for clarification: surrender is not sacrifice. Sacrifice is for martyrs, not people who seek happiness, effectiveness, joy, peace, connection or love. Martyrs may get admiration . . . maybe. But what they will get is resentment, avoidance, criticism (which is ironic, because they seek to avoid it) and derision.

Regarding chores, there are several aspects of surrender necessary to create a peaceful and healthy home:

Surrender to the reality of time constraints

You can do it all, just not all at once. Priorities need to be evaluated so you’re not wasting your life –or trying to waste anyone else’s—on things you don’t genuinely value

Surrender to the necessity of the task

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water

There will be no time in your life when feeding and cleaning does not need to be done, however much modern conveniences ease the work. Accept that it must be done, without end.

Surrender to the real equality

All people need feeding and cleaning: of all the base, common and menial drudgery, none can be less exalted than ‘voiding bladder and bowel.’ We all get to do that with part of our days – 5 cent/hour garbage pickers in Brazil and $30,000/minute superstar athletes, and everyone in between. You can value this real aspect of life or revile it, but no one else is far enough beneath you to have to do it for you.

It is deeply disrespectful of humans to hold the opinion that the work is beneath you but not them.

Surrender to the power of mindless repetition –and hard work

All the effort spent (and technology invented) just to avoid the peace and ease of simple, repetitive work…

The dedication modern folk give to avoiding some of the easiest and most instantly-gratifying work available is amazing. A cleaned plate is clean: visibly, obviously and it is ‘finished.’ So much work is never done, has no clear product or is so complex and involves so many people that our part in it is (or feels) both invisible and impersonal. A clean plate is clean. A planted garden is planted. A cooked meal is completed.

Surrender to the fleeting nature of life

Yes, the meal will be eaten and the plate will once again need cleaning, but such is the nature of life. What is it that, once done, need never be redone or will never be undone? A singer walks off the stage and the song has ended. It can be re-sung, of course, but that performance is over. Even a recording of the thing is not the thing –it was live with a live audience and now it is a recording of both. Why is that less distressing than the laundry that needs re-washing?

Find the joys in doing, not in only having done. Life is a process, not a product.

Surrender to the chaos

Unless you seek to live alone forever, chaos will always be your roommate. Other people are ‘other’ –they see things differently, they react because they have a different perspective. The desire to live in peaceful harmony forever precludes living with other humans at any age.

Even if you did not understand the deal you were signing up for, the decision to have children comes with the built-in guarantee of a life filled with chaos. Will you fight it like it’s an unwanted intruder, or accept it as the inevitability it is, like static or dust?

Surrender, finally, to your own personal preferences

Do what you will, as you will.

It is only within this freedom and self-respect that you can find worth in your work –and free others to see the worth in the work you do, and perhaps even find value in doing it themselves.

The secret of children happily cooperating in their own homes is an atmosphere of joy, worthiness and respect which cannot be found in an atmosphere of dictatorial superiority.

A parent who finds himself sneering at the idea of washing a floor cannot be surprised by a child’s distaste for the task. Equally, a man happily engaged in nurturing his family through meal preparations may well find cooperative bodies eager to share the room and help.

Joy, enthusiasm and a sense of an important job well done are all attractive, and contagious. When you feel resistance from your kids, check to see how you really feel about the work. . . and if you believe it is necessary to do at all.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

Pushing Kids Away, or how to create lonely empty-nesters

What with her sweet new baby (right), and all, my sister and I had been talking a lot about attachment... and by natural extension, attachment disorders, and how easily you can find examples in the wild.


She asked, rhetorically, 'why is it that the parents who spent the kid's whole childhood pushing the child away, arranging daycare and babysitters and ordering the child outdoors, or at least into distant rooms, are also the parents who complain endlessly that their adult children don't have time for them and never call or write?'


Cue the smirk.


push kids away, adults only, parent's peace and quiet, cat's cradle, me-time, nurturing kids, attachment disordersIs that not the apparent goal of every parent who celebrates 

~ the first day of school


~ the first day back to school after any break or long weekend


~ or who laments the cost of boarding school 


~ or who threatens that social services or the police will come and take the kids away and give mum a 'break' 


Is it not clearly their goal to keep the children as far away as possible, for as long as possible? 




Does it strike anyone but me that it's a tragedy that so many 'normal' parents are working diligently toward goals they do not wish to achieve?


They accomplish this through the very simple process of mindlessly doing what all the rest of the 'normal' parents seem to be doing.


me-time, attachment disorders, cat's cradle, Harry Chapin, nurturingFollowing the advice all the 'normal' parenting experts, those warning parents to comply lest they fall prey the evils of permissiveness, cause arrested development or, horror of all horrors, 'losing themselves.'  

And daily, moment by moment, walking further from the goals they do wish to achieve.



Even way back in the dark ages (1974), when Sandy Chapin wrote the poem, which became the lyrics to Harry Chapin's Cats Cradle, at least one person recognized the path taken when the son's need for his father is dismissed for decades only to be supplanted by the father's need for the son.


Richard Carlson, author of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, had a brilliant insight as a father, regarding the insidious idea of 'me-time': why would I actively avoid spending time with the people I love most in the world?


How is spending time with the people we love anything but me-time? 


attachment, cat's cradle, Harry Chapin, dads, fathers, nurturing, me-time

And, because I'm in a noticing kind of frame of mind, I just noticed that this whole 'me-time' necessity has been created entirely by the current generation of parents and parenting experts who are bleating on about how this generation of youngsters have the most outrageous sense of entitlement ever... hmmm...



attachment, cat's cradle, Harry Chapin, me-time, nurturing, dads, fathers
Spend a week pushing a child away because you have more important things to do, and you'll have some work to catch up on when you're free --to re-connect and reassure and just be together to establish a relationship with this child who has now had 168 hours of development without your presence. 


attachment, dads, cat's cradle, Harry Chapin, nurturing, me-time
Spend a month 'too busy' and you find yourself facing a changed child who is no longer someone you can predict accurately, and whose cues and communication have changed from the last time you met. 


attachment, cat's cradle, Harry Chapin, dads, fathers, nurturing, me-time

Spend a year away from a child and you will encounter a different person. Spend a child's childhood away and you will be facing a stranger, who you might remember used to like a particular colour or didn't used to want to eat a specific food, but who now you do not know at all.






attachment, dads, nurturing, cat's cradle, Harry Chapin, me-time
From the small child's point of view, the week is a serious problem, the month is traumatic, a year is everything he can remember and his whole childhood: even if he feels a bit guilty about his natural resistance to approaching his parents, his natural resistance is based entirely in a lifetime of rejection.


Barbara Coloroso so deftly recommends: spend time with your children while they're still young and want to.

Wednesday 26 March 2008

Dads & Life


Hmm... sounds like a fine thing to ramble about.


Parenting v., childrearing, see also mothering; fathering.

Funny, isn't it, how fathering means the same thing as breeding, pretty much, whereas mothering means the same as rearing. We’ve left dads out for too long, particularly in the West. Dads are important parents.

I have a soft spot in my heart for dads, here in our society. It’s akin to the soft spot I have for men, growing up where (for some reason) the way you stand declares your sexuality, and being ‘sissy’ is the worst possible insult a boy can receive. There’s a lot wrong with that... but it’s about dads, today.

I like my dad, as a person and as his ‘role’ in my life. I admire much of his character, and he is one of the most generous people I have ever known. There was that weird period when he was going from Exalted Human to A Person in my head, when he became a whole person, from infancy to old age, within and outside the realm of our small family. My head expanded that day, and I saw a wholeness in him. What had been stereotype became whole, complex human.


a little bit of gardening by bareknuckleyellow
I like dads, and I think they have a hard row to hoe these days. There is a lot expected of them, and they expect a lot of themselves. They hide from some of these expectations (usually behind other expectations as powerful!) I understand their avoidance. 

It isn’t fun to feel incompetent at something important. It is hard to acknowledge our ignorance.

There are a lot of professionals and people who will excuse dads from adapting to the reality of the role particularly when the child is damaged or ill, because men take it personally, a strike against their manliness. I don’t excuse dads from their role, however easy it might be for them to escape under the ‘the mom knows better than me’ or ‘I am busy supporting the family, I can’t do both’ clauses. 


I don’t excuse dads from their role because of how much it damages them to be excused.
The damage is caused by excusing themselves, and me excusing them too just makes it worse. It is almost peer pressure for them to keep excusing themselves when they know better, and wish to be stronger.

When there is trouble or strife in childrearing, too often dad feels incompetent and impotent and the pressure to escape feels tremendous. 

Escaping into work is virtuous, important, probably vital, in fact. 

Escaping into childhood (go play with the boys at the bar, out fishing, paintball... whatever) is popular.

The Escape by Max Meir Mroz
Both are difficult for sane adults to justify, even to themselves... which pushes them to escape their lives even further... and on and on the cycle goes, feeling unbreakable.

Sadly, what these escapes does to men is destroy their sense of themselves as competent and courageous, both at once. For many men, feeling competent is 9/10s of who they think they are, and I haven’t met a man yet who doesn’t want to be courageous, even if he’s never managed it. Being ‘yellow’ is up there with being ‘sissy.’ And escaping from dealing with reality is both.

Funny, now in this situation, it’s the mom who gets to be courageous and strong by default (with a few exceptions), when being called feminine is the worst insult to a man.

Bonds so strong by Sau Hee
I don’t know what the magic words or thoughts or beliefs are, for dads who find the courage and strength to hang in, be there, and deal with the reality of the situation. I’d sure like to know what those men think they are. I suspect they might be something like ‘I just had to’ or ‘I had no choice.’ I’d like to know how to install it in the rest of them, so they can feel better about their fathering... and themselves.