Tapestries

I’m going to be 61 this year. Looking back, there’s not a lot to brag about, but not much to be ashamed of either.

If I had to come up with a tombstone inscription, it might be:

Not a Hall of Famer, but a solid and dependable contributor (somewhere between Rico Petrocelli and Dwight Evans). 

As I head into my later years, I can say without hesitation that fatherhood has been the most consequential and vital endeavor in my relatively ordinary life.

On fatherhood, I’m by no means an expert. I failed many times, too many to count. But I learned a lot and improved over time (I think). 

One thing I learned is that our children are not us. 

Sure, they come into the world with DNA from both parents, but they’re not carbon copies of mom and dad. Instead, they’re pre-packaged with a distinctive thread of familial traits and characteristics going back generations, to be woven over time by master weavers’ Nature and Nurture into unique and complex tapestries. 

Those tapestries are colored and tamped by life’s sights, sounds, and touchpoints. From an early morning speckled splash of sunlight on the nursery ceiling – to the stony silence of a disengaged parent – to the warm embrace of a loving grandparent – every experience sets off a spark of emotion, which forms a memory to be stored and drawn upon continuously and subconsciously throughout their lives. 

Just “being” in the world exposes our kids to arbitrary cruelness and spectacular wonder (along with a healthy dose of the mundane). 

How they react to the cruel, wonderous, and mundane can’t be predicted. Their reactions depend on a sprawling range of environmental and sociological conditions and an unknown dose of biological and genetic factors. From the stability of the family unit to a kink in the banding pattern of a chromosome – it all gets factored into how kids develop and who they become.

Maybe there’s a proclivity for sadness, anxiety, or an innate gentle disposition. Maybe a child is born with an unbridled competitive spirit or an affinity for music or math. Perhaps there’s a dash of gender dysphoria. Whatever the case, the traits and characteristics kids are born with get stretched onto life’s loom, along with spools of environmental and sociological factors, out of which come these beautifully unique and flawed tapestries.

In life, there are no uniform patterns.

So, what’s our role as parents? How do we affect these tapestries that are our children?

As I see it, our primary role is to help our kids understand and accept their distinctive ” self ” to reach their fullest potential. 

This is easier said than done because even with the best intentions, our parenting skills are naturally dulled or diminished by the bias of our own experiences and expectations – I know mine were. 

I think many parenting failures are grounded in a shared belief; because our kids are borne from us, we have some innate understanding of them.

But we don’t.

And if we’re unwilling to recognize and accept that many of our preconceptions are wrong — or if we’re so hemmed in by our own experiences and expectations that we can’t break from them, we are liable to screw things up royally.

Parenting is a dynamic and fluid process.

Acknowledging we don’t genuinely know our children can open the door to getting to know them, which can lead to a more authentic understanding of them and help us parent more empathetically and effectively. 

Of course, for any of this to happen, parents must be present, loving, accepting, and willing to engage. When kids have someone in their life who is present, loving, accepting, and willing to engage – they’re more likely to open up and share. 

Recently I’ve been watching footage from parents of transgender kids testifying before committees on pending legislation restricting gender-affirming care for children. In almost all cases, there’s a point in their testimony where they recall the moment when they realized their child was different. That moment was often characterized by confusion and worry (this was not the tapestry they imagined!). What touched me as I listened to these parents was what they did after the confusion and worry settled. 

These parents listened to their children, talked to medical experts, and became advocates for their children. They overcame their biases (many of which were woven into their tapestries by their parents, churches, or communities) to see their children for who they are.  

These fathers and mothers learned that even though their own tapestries were of a particular color or pattern, their children’s tapestries differed. They understood that trying to prevent the child from being their authentic self was detrimental to their emotional well-being and that the best thing they could do for their child was to be present, loving, accepting, and engaged.