In the shadow of fatherhood

When i was younger I hated my father. The kind of hate born of love. I suspect that had I been a physically stronger person; eaten properly and worked out, I probably would have attacked him. Although my brother was stronger and he never did so perhaps I wouldn’t have. As a parent now I sometimes feel the shadow of my father creeping over me. When i feel anger, frustration, or rage I can feel my father’s presence. I’m terrified of repeating history. I don’t want to be my father. Those feelings rising up there are my own though, not my fathers. They belong to me. How I decide to act on them is who I am. I am not my father. I wonder if he felt the same way. By all accounts his father was a true terror. Did my father have such doubts? Did he fear that he would be just like his dad when he was raising us kids? As a child I often told him he was just like his dad. That was my vengeance. I wonder now if that hurt him more than I could have imagined.

It is the duty of the next generation to improve on the parenting on the previous. Wouldn’t it be nice to get it right? To raise my children in such a way that they look back and think ‘I want to raise my children the way I was.’

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2件のコメント

  1. Wow, good on for being ballsy and putting that out there. So many angry men are a diluted down version of the angry man that raised them. We’ll probably get close to perfect parnetning but will always need to adapt to the times, impossible to do in advance without a time machine or prescience! I was pretty angry with my Mum growing up, and I know it was becuase not only was her childhood conservative, but she did not update far enough into the new world she was parenting in when I came around, so she was doing a good job but outdated and there was huge friction

    1. Conservatism is our biggest hurdle as an advancing society. A conservative can never update. What’s worse though is that conservatives hold the rest of society hostage with their fears. It drags society so that the evolution that would occur is postponed until the time that the evolution is considered conservative. We are perpetually several generations behind ourselves.

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