FiveManns.net

The other day someone asked me, “How is fatherhood?”.  Here’s my reply.

It’s an in-your-face personal development training.  Oddly, people would pay thousands of dollars for a workshop that accomplished the same thing.  In this workshop, you would be handed something unbelievably precious to take care of with the goal of never getting angry or physical or abusive with it.  Then the thing would proceed to detect your weaknesses and torment you with the goal of getting you angry or physical or abusive.  If you don’t kill it, you graduate.  If you don’t maim it too badly, you graduate with honors.  If you never, ever get angry or physical or abusive, you are enlightened and get to start your own religion.  You would have to pay for the entire workshop up front; otherwise nobody would last beyond the first week.  It’s too hard of a workshop.  That’s why people pay thousands of dollars to sit in circles and listen to other people talk about enlightenment, after which they do some chanting and art work.  It’s a lot more fun and you get to sit down for a nice dinner.

We pay to have nanny-help a few days a week.  Nanny-help allows daddy to work with clients and earn money to cover the cost of food and nanny-help.  From the Workshop Fatherhood perspective, this is backwards.  I’m giving away the world’s most potent self development program for free.  People should pay us to hone their character against our three terrible-two’s toddlers.  Nine thousand dollars for a week-long initiation into patience, persistence and discipline.  No boring lectures.  No abstract philosophical nonsense.  No dogma.  Pure, unadulterated, experiential transformative healing.  You have to cook your own food, and it would be still be worth it.

The only problem with this idea is that in order to succeed you can’t kill the kids.  I’m not sure nine thousand dollars is enough motivation for someone to keep them alive. For that, you have to love the boys more than you hate the workshop.  Best if people do it on their own.

Back in BT (before triplets), fathers used to tell me, “You have noooo idea what you’re getting into.  You can’t.  Unless you’ve been there, you just don’t know.”  OK.  Sure.  I knew that was true.  You can never know what a person knows until you walk the proverbial mile in their shoes.  You have no idea what it’s like to spend a month climbing a glaciated mountain if you haven’t done it.  Only nine human beings on the planet are still alive who know what it’s like to walk on the moon.  So, we all agree on the irreplaceability of direct, experiential empathy but, somehow, fathers like to underscore this point.  Why is that?  What is it about fatherhood that inspires such a blood bond of membership?

Extraordinary ordinariness.

Walking on the moon is obviously extraordinary.  There’s nothing ordinary about it.  Its rarity, its unreachability, and until Kennedy choose to go to the moon in 1962, its virtual unimaginability communicates volumes about the experience without uttering a word.  Even if we can’t know what it’s like, we can know of its specialness.

Fatherhood, on the other hand, is ordinary to the point of problematic.  There are too many people on the planet;  thus it stands to reason there are too many fathers.  Common as weeds, we are.  Everywhere you look, there are fathers.  For a trip to the moon a rich man would pay millions.  For fatherhood … free for the asking.  As such, it is easy to underestimate fatherhood’s value and soul sparking capacity to mold and develop.  It’s a club whose inner sanctum is more precious than gold, but whose outer facade is deceivingly common and simple.

Years ago I wanted to rent a sea kayak in Maine just after the ice broke.  Rental shop after rental shop said the same thing:  “Nooooo … the water’s too cold for you to sea kayak.  You’re from California.  This is Maine.  You have noooo idea how cold the water is here.”  At the time I took their cautionary admonitions as a form of regional boasting, as if for a sun belt boater to survive the Maine waters in early spring would cheapen the depth of their winter hardened strength. And when fathers pulled me aside to warn me, “You have noooo idea what you’re getting into”, perhaps shaking their head in casual significance or tightening their voice for emphasis, I took it the same way.  It sounded like boasting.

But I’m in the club now.  I understand now they weren’t boasting, they were congratulating me.  They were telling me in the only way that, before I walked in their shoes, I could possibly appreciate the extraordinary gold inside the hard work of fatherhood.  Fatherhood from this perspective embodies the wisdom teaching ideal of living an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.  Mystics speak of enlightenment not as being beyond the ordinary, but rather a continuously refreshing experience of the ordinary.  So it would seem that fatherhood is the common man’s training into an enlightened life … sort of “enlightenment or else.”

Every now and then Mommy and Daddy break up the kids.  Mommy takes two.  Daddy takes one.  Oh, one is soooo easy.  Two hands, one kid.  Piece of cake.  You got kids?  You thinking about adopting triplet, two-year-old boys? You have noooo idea what you’re getting into.  You can’t.  Unless you’ve been there, you just don’t know.  But I’m probably just boasting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 2:44 am and is filed under Family, The Triplets, Year One. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.