Odds are I'm going to be a
father to a little
boy come the end of this year. This is
grist for my horrible mill of
imagination which nightly ships bags and bags of
paranoid flour to my dreams. Responsibility for a human life? Yikes. I have a hard enough time keeping the
cat fed. The thing that worries me the most at night is a simple reality that has
plagued me for much of my own life.
Some things are just beyond your control.
It's the
random nature of life that scares me most. It's doubly true when it comes to children. I remember quite
vividly thinking I had all the answers even when I knew oh so little. But then, consider the
flip side of the coin: those
henpecked children we all met that couldn't even
blink without second guessing themselves. What's a potential
parent to do? Consider the example of your own life in a new light, though the eyes of your
parents.
When I was maybe
six, we lived in a
neighborhood that was a block over from a
trailer park, far out of the nearest town. We would range far and wide from our homes, playing in the
bush around our houses, late into the evening. The neighborhood was always filled with parents calling far and wide for their children to come home. As children do, we wandered far beyond where we could
hear. My mother would get about four or five good yells in before the panic would
creep into her voice. One fall afternoon, I was a
ninja. The other "good" ninjas where hunting me, so I hid under a huge
pile of leaves and brandished my wood stick
katana while lying perfectly still. I let my mother call and call for me while lying
prostrate, buried out of sight,
hushing my own breath. When she found me, I burst from the leaves with a great
Peek-a-boo intention in my heart, but I saw her absolutely awash in
tears.
I can understand why I ended up washing dishes for a week. She must have been
terrified.
It was not long after that my
heart broke for the first time. Two sisters,
Leeanne and
Carmen, lived on the street
kitty-corner to ours. Their
father, like mine, was a
tradesman, and he followed work to make his money. The local economy was in a
slump, and the girls announced that soon, they would be moving away. To a town called
Ajax, hours and hours south. I remember the word vividly, and I remember my
fingers interlaced on the opposite side of their green chain link fence. Days later, the familiar house was empty, the girls far away. To my world view, it was as if they had
died. I recall a conversation with my dad I had while kicking the
kick stand on my bike off and on, sitting on my bike with
nowhere to go. The
vagaries of money and finances and economic downturns and putting food on the table were beyond me. He told me that sometimes, things
happen that are out of our hands, and that you can let them push you around all your life or you can stand up and take control. It was about this time that I fell off my bike onto the
concrete patio. I remember him saying "See?" and helping me up. I recall being confused about it for a long time.
I think
I get it now.
The real
spooky bit to consider are the times I can remember in my life where I was completely
alone, left to my own devices and judgment. When the only things that kept me from
oblivion were
luck and
innocence. I regularly tempted Fate when I played out at my great uncle's farm/
junkyard, using
thresher bars as balance beams, rubbing my
fingernails and rocks and
rusted nails on a huge spinning
millstone rocking in a rotten wood frame, far up in the sandy hills lost to everyone. It was in those hills that I used to collect
mosquito larvae from a stagnant pond. They danced in old glass
Coca-Cola bottles, clear and green, wriggling their little buggy lives away in front of my eyes. I remember the
grave concern I had in my heart for them, how gently I carried the crate full of
swamp water down those steep hills, how I sat out on the
front porch for hours just watching them live and die in front of me. Mostly I felt a bit
helpless,
impotent in my mothering abilities, without any way to influence the short lives my captive
insect babies. I asked my mother "How can I help them?"
She said "Sometimes you just can't, honey. I'm sure they'll do just fine."