On Raising a Child/Raising Yourself
A side effect of growing up in a hot house environment, a home plagued with the scars of addiction, mental illness, physical and emotional abuse, financial insecurity, irresponsibility, bankruptcy and foreclosure (I know, cry me a river), is that you constantly think about how things could have been different.
Those could-have-been thoughts, whether wrapped up in anger, bitterness, regret, sadness, or apathy, never leave you. Whenever you stub your toe, have an awkward conversation, lose a job, or fail in a relationship - the bells of those could-have-beens clang in your head.
The Spartans left unhealthy newborns exposed to the elements. Believing them irreparably corrupted, the Athenians forbade any man who had been abused as a child from having full rights of citizenship. The thought was explicit: whether innate from birth or the outcome of circumstances - damaged goods were damaged goods.
We live in an incredibly isolated and rigid time. People are deracinated from any sense of history, they lack true coming of age challenges, and are allowed to choose from only a handful of insipid predetermined identities in life.
A few of the blessings of being raised in a hot house include you constantly self-examining your actions and motives (am I just damaged goods?, what is causing me to act/say/do this?), you seeking out challenges and frontiers to prove you have inherent worthiness, and you juxtaposing yourself against the great chain of being of humanity - attempting to decipher if your shortcomings are truly just an accident of your own existence, or something innate to man’s fallenness.
If you’re fortunate enough to come out of all of that and manage to be halfway well-adjusted, you experience a bit of the world and those could-have-beens of your life, turn into definite should-have-beens. And then you meet someone you love, begin to dream of a family, and they cement into will-be’s.
Our son was conceived in Crete, the birthplace of Zeus - and we half-jokingly would refer to him in utero as Baby Hercules. You construct great visions of the child you’ll raise - courageous and resilient, grounded in his convictions, but also holistically reflective and intellectually curious. And then one day my wife gave a loud grunt and push, there was a gush of fluid, and I caught my son in my own two hands.
The great 18th century general Carl von Clausewitz, who went tete-a-tete with Napoleon twice on the battlefield stated “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”
When caring day in and day out for a child, grand goals are lost in the fog of war, and you focus on the small but vital objectives like supporting his neck, making sure he can follow your finger with his eyes, how good of a latch he have to his mother’s breast.
Zeus tricked his wife Hera into nursing the newborn Hercules, but when the baby bit down on her nipple with his godlike strength she ripped him away from her and the milk spouted to the heavens and formed the Milky Way. Even the smallest of tasks can have cosmic implications. You never forget your main ambitions when raising a child but the millions of little galactic objectives soon take up most of your time.
One of the great challenges to epistemic philosophy is the issue of cause and effect within dynamic and chaotic systems. The poverty of historicism lays in the fact that just because A & B are added together, their sum does not necessarily equal C. The push of a great social movement can lead to the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. Our foreign policy for the past half decade has been overshadowed by the term blowback where (supposedly) good-natured actions cause the exact opposite outcome. Our intentions & actions, once put out into the world, escape us.
So given all this, how do you teach a newborn let alone a child or adolescent to persevere in the face of adversity, to overcome challenges, to think globally in the macrocosm but not over look the vital details in the micro? You can tell your son not to do something and that may cause them to actually do the exact opposite. If you forbid something, it becomes a coveted vice that they will take on thr first time you turn your head. And that’s if you even remember to do so while juggling the billion little tasks of life.
On some level I grew to revile my parents because it was a household of do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do. They always had excuses for why they weren’t better, no matter how foolish or trivial they sounded on the face. I began to look up to them as anti-role-models, archetypes of what not to be and how not to live.
I am not spiteful against my parents, despite the tone of this post. I am certainly hard-hearted towards them and the world in general. It is not a good or bad thing it just is.
As much as the warding off your feelings of damaged goods, to prove yourself, or to use your anti-role models as anti-guides may push you farther than you ever thought you can go in life, they come out of a negative space. You are running away from something.
When faced with raising a son, when you’re confronted with the task of molding him into the type of ideal man you want him to be, you come head on with these insurmountable obstacles. You spar and play chess with the right way to phrase your future dictums and mandates to the child so that they won’t revolt, but keep coming into dead ends and counter examples.
Finally you come to realize the best thing you can likely do is simply be the type of person you want them to become. Become their positive role model. You keep your word, take care of yourself, approach life with curiosity and an open mind, face your fears and your demons, and maintain an energy and lust for life that you hope is infectious. It doesn’t happen smoothly nor all at once, but you begin living out of a positive motivation. Ideally you become the person your son runs towards not from. Before you know it, in raising a child you learn how to raise yourself.