You know what I’m talking about don’t you. You are just on call, like a damn percolator, difference is you got to refill yourself. So all mommy cares about and pours herself into day in and day out is the new little nugget sprung for your loins. All baba cares about is mommy and she will settle for nothing else so daddy is standing at the back end of the attention deficit disorder paycheck in hand and kind of, if we honest, excited to get back to the office where he is appreciated a bit more. Honest enough? You not alone.
Of course I’m not talking to guys who grew up in functional families with a perfect value system and loads of emotional security and affection. The one out of a million like that embrace the nature of life and insecurity to them is a foreign concept. Truth is the rest of us are broken in some way because our parents and their parents were broken and everyone was just doing the best they could with what they had so no blame, its life. More truth however is we don’t have to live as products of our lineage, we can carve out a new blue sky for us and our family units.
Why am I saying this, as men we find our worth in providing, achieving and carving the way forward for our family and with most us being insecure on some level we feel wretched when we don’t get the recognition we think we deserve. We need to though find what all men have sought for generations the strength to not need that affirmation as much as it’s due. Yes, obviously she has a responsibility to be aware of this! But we have to find our joy in giving and knowing that we are with every breath building a future grown up and therein find our hope.
So what happens during all this is that if we don’t realise that this is the way it is, perfectly natural we end up resenting our kids and wives. In this lies a great danger to our future as it sets in motion a lifetime of putting your true emotion in a dark place where it festers and affects the rest of your life. Slowly and surely the distance between us and them grows bigger and wider and with every new phase of parenting the dark room of rejection gets more cluttered.
Embrace the nature of it and look at rather at the miracle it is. I forget how much I have all the damn time.
Later.
Great piece. You are so right - finding the ability to get beyond the need for affirmation from others and instead learning to take our happiness from the efforts we place into nurturing and providing for our loved ones is perhaps the true art of manliness. The evolution of our relationships once parenthood strikes - man it can be a frightening thing! But everything in nature grows & changes and so do we. Glad to hear another fathers thoughts on his journey - percolator was a brilliant example by the way! Look forward to reading more.
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