Tag: parenting

  • HI. Not sure how to phrase this question, but, how has having daughters changed your life? How has the experience of raising them changed you?

    Hey…Aslm. 🙂

    Having daughters has been quite a blessing and a struggle. My circumstances have caused a significant strain in my relationship with both of them, but that’s not due to any fault on their part. I’m forced to take my life more seriously since having them, and being inherently responsible (painfully so at times), it has made me considerably more introspective about life as well. 

    Everything I do is with them in mind. What will they think of me when I’m no longer around, or when they’re going through life’s challenges? Will they appreciate what little guidance I’ve tried to give them, or will they despise me for not having prepared them well enough for what lies ahead?

    I wonder if I’ll be around to guide them through the hurdles of their painful teenage years, or through the early struggles of married life. Even if such guidance is simply to allow them to see my mistakes more clearly so that they don’t make the same ones. 

    Having them has changed me significantly. But I constantly feel as if I’m not doing enough for them. I guess that will be the sentiment expressed by most parents. I sometimes look around at other men and wonder if maybe they would have been better served by them. I guess I’m as insecure as any parent that has children.

    But undoubtedly, I see both of them as a blessing and I pray that they don’t grow up feeling cursed or seeing themselves as burdens to society. My greatest fear is that they won’t be protected, guided, supported and respected as much as I would want them to be. 

  • A Brain Dump

    Looking across the table at my daughter leaves me wondering if she’ll ever grasp the extent of the struggles and sacrifices that I and many others have gone through just so that she may have a normal life. She already takes so much for granted which goes against so many principles that I always thought were established laws of nature, so much so that I foolishly assumed that she would automatically adopt them as her own.

    I’ve been cautioned before about not being able to change the genes of a person, but being the pragmatic idealist that I am, words like that do nothing more than spur me on to prove that idealism still has a place in this world. I’m not so sure any more. There was a time when I was unshakeable in my views about what principles could or could not be compromised in life, but these days it seems as if nothing is sacred any longer. Reciprocation is a luxury while selfish individual rights supersede everything else. 

    This must sound extremely selfish since a parent’s role by default is supposed to be a selfless one. I don’t think selflessness exists. It’s a nice idea, and makes for really wholesome use in the embellishment of people’s efforts, but at the root of it all, of everything we do, lies a single common thread that contains just two words. Gratitude and affirmation. There is only so much any individual will do for the sake of the greater good, before we expect that greater good to return the favour. 

    There is no balance any more. The echoes no longer just remind but now they taunt as well. Echoes of what this world is and for what it was created. I once heard a wise man say that this world was created for respite, not justice. I hate how true that statement is. For this reason the good will always be trampled upon while the usurpers will continue to flourish – in this world only.

    Looking at my daughter tonight made me realise how insignificant we can be in the face of the most significant challenge in our lives. How oblivious others can be about the sacrifices we make on their behalf, while they live as if the world owes them everything leaves me staring vacantly at the future. 

  • Question: An abusive father

    Grew up with a father who hated me from day1. Beat me black&blue everyday. Mother stood up for me. He tried to kill her once with knife to throat. But he was so loving to my lil sis. At the same time mother was stronger, more dominant than him. Ive always hated him so the divorce when I was 8 made me happy. Divorce took 3 yrs 2 go through. He wanted money from mother. He still harassed us so we moved twice. Years later mother started treating me the way father did physically&emotionally. Every minute of day scream and hits and mean words. Id wake up with butterflies in belly everyday scared of whats going to happen. would sit on park swing for hours after school to avoid going home. but both mother and father were always loving and nice to my lil sis. i love her shes an angel so i understand. aunty and uncles horrible to me too. not lil sis though. so i always said i must be cursed. years later everyone blames me for divorce&family breakdown. deep down it really hurts. What good…

    As harrowing as an experience as that is, it has a few blessings in it that are not immediately evident. And I say this with every sensitivity that such an experience deserves, because I can relate to some of it. What you may not realise is that you’ve been afforded an insight into the insecurities of adults that most people barely even realise exists. This results in many, like your parents for example, not knowing how to deal with these insecurities when it arises.

    As a parent myself, I can assure you that it’s easy to project my shortcomings on my daughter. It’s easy to believe that it would all be so much better if only she would listen, if only she would behave, if only she would comply, if only… But when I sit back and reflect on what’s really happening, I realise that it’s simply me feeling incompetent as a parent because I’m failing to connect with a seven year old in a manner that she can relate to.

    A fear of insignificance, incompetence or likeability is at the core of every single person’s anger. And don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. I learnt that from the man that influenced by his lazy father in that arm chair, and I’ve found it to be true every single time I got angry ever since. Some of the good that came out of your situation is that the divorce happened, and that is good because it would be unimaginably worse if both parents became angry at the same time and you had to bear the brunt of both sides simultaneously.

    The important lesson in all this is that you need to understand that they’re projecting their insecurities on you. Taking ownership for our shortcomings requires us to accept that we’re flawed or weak or incompetent. So most people refuse to accept that they’re less than perfect, so they blame others or environmental factors for everything that goes wrong in their lives.

    The moment you accept that your parent’s actions were a reflection of their insecurities and in no way is rooted in you being who you are or who you were, you’ll save yourself from the trap of acting out the way they do when you reach their age. The only way to break the cycle is to recognise it. So this is your opportunity to extract yourself from that cycle, and to see it for what it is. And by breaking that cycle, you would be giving birth to a new and more wholesome cycle of life that you’ve always yearned for. Chances are, your parents probably also yearn for the same, but they’re too distracted by their anger and insecurities to realise it. So perhaps in you breaking the cycle, you’ll force them to start reflecting rather than constantly projecting.

    Final thought on this is that as humans, we’re prone to memory by association. They may see your presence as an association to a time in their lives when they weren’t proud of themselves. So it once again makes it easy for them to deflect attention away from themselves and instead project it on you so that they don’t have to deal with the reality of their shortcomings. Apologies for the length of this response, but I hope it helped to provide an alternate perspective on something that is difficult to see any good in.

  • Question: Absent father figure

    Daddy issues from age 0-present, does that count? Basically I would be such a better person if I had a different more accepting and encouraging father figure. I can’t say those experiences are past me, we still see each other every day and there’s still pain and anger I get out of our relationship. Shoot?

    Daddy or parental issues are always traumatisingly interesting. Someone once told me that their father was their greatest influence in their life. But they were influenced by him because he just sat and read the newspaper in his favourite arm chair every single day, and that made them wish never to be like him. If they weren’t exposed to that lethargic state in a parental figure, they probably would never have been disgusted by it, and would probably never have developed the drive or ambition to be better than that.

    In your case, if your father is not very supportive or encouraging, and you’ve still managed to achieve significant milestones in your life, then consider that that is a testament to your ability to succeed independent of such support or assistance. It strengthens you in ways that will only become evident and deeply appreciated much later in life. It also gives you a very real view of how you would need to focus your relationship on your own kids, should you have them someday. 🙂

  • A few random thoughts

    The ‘anything goes’ mentality is far more extremist than those that stand by moderation. It requires an extremist to allow anything to pass as acceptable without restraint, whereas it requires conscious thought, conviction, and balance to apply one’s mind to moderation. Yet the duplicity of society would incline you to believe that those that seek moderation are extremists, whilst the liberals are the free thinkers. Free thinking is often a phrase brandished about by those that seek affirmation and acceptance rather than those that are willing to stand for what they believe in without fear of ridicule or earning the ire of those they admire. 

    What’s worse is when this same thinking of supposed extremism is passed down to each following generation, resulting in ever more wayward teenagers with misguided passions. At some point, a generation dropped the baton. What should have been passed down as ageless wisdom was abandoned in the name of liberalism and social freedom, and none of the subsequent generations have been willing to stop the rot. For this reason, we find ourselves amongst teenage sages and pubescent gurus, neither of which have had sufficient life experiences to become the authorities they pretend to be on life, love, and philosophy. Such misguidance cannot be blamed on the students, but rather on the absence of teachers. 

    In the absence of role models and leaders, the youth are left to fend for themselves under the delusion of guidance from adults who are often too self-absorbed to realise that they are failing in their duty to raise adults, not children. Adults are often so insecure about their own worth, that they’re more focused on earning the social acceptance of their children by trying to be ‘cool’ parents, while the kids are distracted by their ‘cool-ness’ only to realise that they are ill prepared for life. 

    The inevitable result is the proliferation of labels that abdicate responsibility for our state of mind, and result in people living out the expectations of society based on the label attached to the specific permutation of their insecurity, rather than just realising that it is nothing more than an insecurity due to lack of knowledge or guidance that leaves us with so many troubled souls. Before we try to label the mindset of others that act out their insecurities in cryptic ways, we should make a simple but sincere effort to understand the source of insecurity that pretends to be bipolar, borderline, or any other contemporary term used to appease the conscience of absent parents. 

  • When you have a son you worry about 1 penis, when you have a daughter you worry about them all.

    Raven’s Wings