The height of my knowing myself occurred probably between the time I came home from the Peace Corps and when I started working in Paraguay. It was in this period that I felt the greatest self-possession, like nothing I did was a misstep, nothing I did was untrue. When I moved in this period, I moved with decision and certainty; I knew myself and I was busily engaged in this knowing, daily testing the parameters of who I was.
I worked; I wrote; I read; I traveled; I skateboarded; I had a huge appetite; when I went out on Friday or Saturday, I stayed out late. I felt beholden to no one. I was my own person, finding my own way and doing it comfortably. I didn’t have to compromise anything. In Paraguay, I realized, however, that I did, because I lacked a degree of professionality.
I still do things in a somewhat slipshod, less-than-professional way, I guess. But I’m in a position now where my methods work well enough, and I don’t think they are much questioned, balanced, as they are by my obvious passion for what I do.
Yet, I have never recovered from the blow to my self-possession. Today, I can’t even feign the kind of relaxed attitude I took toward life back then. Some of it was sacrificing parts of my personality to meet a more generic standard, but most of it is that I have kids now and no one responsible for children can be sure of anything, leastwise themselves. There is too much chance involved.
My kids are well-behaved—at least I think so—most of the time. But at five and seven they have developed their wills and they exert them strongly. Thus, their behavior is very often unpredictable.
One of them is reading on the couch, the other sits down next to her.
“Go away” she tells him flatly without looking up from her book.
“No” he responds, or, more likely, he doesn’t say anything, but makes no move to go. He must show that he doesn’t live by her command.
In in seconds, someone is screaming at the top of their lungs. Perhaps because a fight ensued, and they were hurt, or through being emotionally overdrawn by the situation, just not having the capacity to deal with being bothered any further.
As the parent—the responsible party-- it is up to me to diffuse such situations, and I am utterly inept at it! The kids are screaming, I try to make myself heard with rational next steps, no one is listening, so I raise my voice to angry-dad level and say curtly “stop!” which only serves to make everyone feel like they’ve violated some rule when all they’ve done is try to work out who is sitting where. Not really that big of a deal, but no dad’s yelling again.
We’re in the grocery store, and we’ve managed to make it past the toy aisle without any demands, or whining, but then they’re climbing all over the cart, constantly in danger of tipping it or making me crash into another shopper. I can’t resist trying to reason: “Hey guys, try not to climb around so much. We don’t want to run into anyone or fall over.” But though I repeat these words, they aren’t heeded, or can’t be heeded and, once again, we come to the point when all I have to use is “stop!” and everyone is upset again, the tensions are up and, rarely, do things suddenly come down from this level. The next thing to happen will likely catch the attention of everyone around us. The cart will tip, a carton of something will fall and break, or, simply, the screaming again.
I once made my way comfortably through the world because I knew what I wanted and I had a reasonable idea what would help me achieve it, now, what I want is largely not for me, but for my kids, and I have no idea how to achieve it. I blunder after them as they race toward adolescence, doing little more than picking up what they drop along the way and yelling “stop!” occasionally.
When I am at home, I feel ineffective and somewhat superfluous, when I am at work, I hope everything is going alright at home. I no longer have the means to be 100% anywhere; part of me is always where my kids are and this makes me less engaged generally.
If my wife and I have any time to ourselves, I have a hard time really being engaged in conversation unless we’re talking about the kids, but that is not a topic that can be resolved, we only talk about it to try to get a vague sense of understanding, like groping around an unfamiliar object in the dark.
I suppose some people anticipated having children long enough that they were able to go into the rearing of the children with their self-possession intact, but not me. I wasn’t around children much growing up, and, in my twenties, I never thought about having them. Even after we had kids, babies don’t prepare you for anything. They might not sleep, they may scream on airplanes, but everyone forgives you because it’s a baby. You smile and shrug and they smile back; babies make you feel more connected to the world. Most people like babies so, by extension, they seem to like you, the parent.
But once your kids are out of toddlerdom, the expectation is that they will follow the social norms they are only still learning. They don’t get the automatic forgiveness afforded to babies. You blunder after them, yelling “stop!” devested of all self-possession, a ragged, fatigued, and largely ineffectual person. Even a bit of a factotum because anyone can see that what you’re doing isn’t working but you keep doing it anyway, hoping, this time, things might be different. You are capable of feeling pity for those in the same situation as yourself, but, at the same time, relief that it is them and not you with the tantruming child at the farmer’s market.
Until one day you realize you’re not entirely sure who you are anymore. You’ve spent so much time correcting behavior, trying to minimize the temptation for other types of behavior, and foster burgeoning interests that, alone, you’re uncertain what to do with yourself. When you have time, if you don’t sleep, you wander around, but without the interest you once had because the sense of discovery, without kids to share it with, feels limited.
Life is a great bell curve. As a teenager, you struggle to understand who you are and feel in control of your life under your parents’ care and subject to their limitations. You gradually endeavor to make the right mistakes which you learn from, and you rise in estimation of your peers, and you find things that are fulfilling and aid in establishing something of a character.
In early adulthood, you float through life, comfortable with even the unexpected. It is just you and, without enough understanding, it’s not hard to navigate one person through the Sturm und Drang of life. You have a hard time conceiving how it could even be difficult for anyone.
With kids, you become like the model of the atom, a proton, surrounded by chaotic, spinning electrons. The proton is the only part you have learned to control. You go out into the world, the electrons spinning wildly around you, occasionally reaching out to steady them, to keep them from crashing into each other, or into someone else. You take up a lot more space as such, and even the sympathetic can’t help but to be somewhat annoyed when your electrons call someone a “poopybutt” because they are “on one” and trying to outdo each other in silliness.
Before our third child was born, my wife and I were sitting outside the supermarket, alone, chatting. We saw a struggling mother making her way to the door with three children in tow. One of them was having to be carried for some reason, the other, in the cart, was rocking it precariously, while the third, walking, suddenly demanded to have her shoes which were in the car. The mother, being rational, assessed her control of the situation which was dramatically decreasing as they neared the supermarket doors and made a decision. She turned around, went back to the van, and drove away. Nope. No groceries today.
In the moment, I though “shit, that doesn’t bode well for us.” I couldn’t imagine going all the way to the store, getting everyone in and out of the carseats, etc. only to turn around without accomplishing the errand. But there was a lesson there, one that I’m still struggling to learn. I don’t always get my way—even if my way is something as mundane as getting the groceries—sometimes, you need to turn around and go home, or do something else. It might be possible to recover a little of that self-possession if I stop trying so hard to exert it. Perhaps rather than make the proton overwhelm the electrons, the proton need only move in another direction, after all, the electrons will follow.
It is very difficult to imagine ever having the self-possession I enjoyed in my mid-twenties return, but I guess the point of life has never been to get to a comfortable position and stay there; you have to take on new challenges to grow and, adding a bunch of electrons to my proton is a pretty obvious way to grow. Still, it’s hard not to look back to the solitary “me” I once was and feel some amazement that, so far in the past, I had such a better idea of what I was doing. Surely there’s a scientific explanation for that, too. Maybe entropy, maybe nostalgia.
