Episode 9: The Genuine Parent

I recently got my first tattoo.
Nothing major, nothing huge, not insignificant.
Something on my shoulder, black and white tattoo.
I grew up in a household that really frowned on tattoos.
Oddly frowned on tattoos.
Not for any, you know, it wasn't like some sort of religious thing or whatever.
I think my parents just were very, I don't know, they just seemed to be against it.
So, more recently, it was just sort of something that I had been thinking about doing.
Found a cool design, decided to go for it.
My wife has some tattoos on her arm, but they look pretty cool.
Figured I'd go for it, why not?
I was thinking about this, though, in context of, you know, showing it to my children.
Because, to me, it's obviously, it's nothing to hide or anything.
If I was trying to hide a tattoo, I wouldn't have put it right on my shoulder.
But it just got me thinking about what we do and don't share with our kids.
And how that could impact relationships, their relationship with us, their relationships with their people, anything of the sort.
My dad died a couple years ago.
He had been struggling with cancer for a couple years.
Fine, did him in.
And, well, let me back up.
Growing up, my dad and I didn't necessarily get along all that well.
We had quite a lot of fights, pretty often.
He was a good bit older than other fathers of my friends.
And so, I always kind of felt like there might be a generational thing, component to that.
He always came off as strict by, you know, the standards, at least, that I wanted as a kid.
And as we got, as I got older, you know, it became less and less of an issue.
And I think we ultimately came to terms and, you know, had quite a nice, at least pleasant relationship.
Probably starting by the time I was in college and then going on for, you know, the next 20 years or so.
So, when he died, it's not like I felt that we were, had been in a bad place or anything.
In fact, it had all been very pleasant for a long time.
However, I started hearing stories about my dad.
I started hearing a lot of kind of interesting things.
You know, he, he, there was this story about him jumping off of some bridge with his brother to jump into either a river or a lake underneath that kept popping up.
There were some stories about him and, not necessarily reckless life choices, but, but, you know, he, he went, he did many things throughout his life.
He, he, he really went, he did some military stuff.
He did academic stuff.
He moved around a lot.
He clearly was a restless person, at least at certain points in his life.
Very intellectual guy.
He, he, he, his career was, was a college professor in philosophy and theology.
So, very intellectual person.
He had always come off to me as, again, very strict and straight-laced and conservative.
I don't mean that in a political sense, but just in terms of his overall way of interacting with the world always came off as, as kind of a, a reserved and kind of.
I don't know, conservative is really the best word I can think of, I don't know, conservative is really the best word I can think of.
Again, he just told me in a, in a political sense.
One of the things, after hearing a lot of these stories about my dad, one of the things that occurred to me is that I didn't really know my dad.
Not really.
I mean, I knew him as a parent.
I knew him as the father that he had put forth all those years.
But there were all these years where I was doing what, what my parents largely considered to be reckless things or, or, you know, you know, I could easily see myself being the person jumping off bridges into lakes or taking long road trips across the desert with cars that break down or whatever.
Like that, all of those things sound like things that I would do.
I'm not saying that I have done all of those things, but those definitely sound like the sorts of things that I would do.
And it just, it occurred to me at some point that it would have, maybe we would have gotten along better if I had known who he really was under the hood.
Another thing that, that was on this train of thought, one of the things that kind of crystallized it for me.
I had, again, a few years back, I bought one of the new Ford Broncos with a soft top.
That can go back to take the doors off, you know, kind of like a Jeep.
And my mom is scared to death.
My mom's still alive.
She's scared to death of this, of driving in this when I have the doors off and the roof back and all that kind of stuff.
But she keeps saying, oh, your dad would have loved this.
Your dad would have loved this.
And, and her keep, her saying that was so incongruent with the dad that I thought about.
I just, I couldn't picture for a moment that my dad would have liked a convertible SUV or driving with no doors or anything of the sort.
That, that's, that's a very foreign thought to me.
But the more I listened to family members who obviously knew him longer than I did, the more I realized that there was this whole, not just this whole other side to him, but that the core of who he was, was not this parental figure who I had always known him as.
And this gets me thinking a lot about my relationship with my children and what I, and striking the balance, I suppose, between showing your genuine self to, well, let me rephrase it.
To what extent are you supposed to show your genuine self versus to what extent are you supposed to hide those things or at least moderate them in a way that maybe, where, where are you no longer being your genuine self?
And what is the impact that that could have with them?
I've always felt that I've been pretty genuine with, with my kids.
I, they are aware of my interests, at least, you know, many of them, uh, my hobbies, the things that I do and don't like.
I don't really hold any of those things back.
I make my opinions known about things, particularly topics that might be important to the development of, of a kid.
So I don't feel like I'm hiding anything, but I wonder, but, but there's still this whole other piece where you also have to be the parent and I'm not running around and telling them about, you know,
maybe some of the questionable choices I made in college or some of the things I did, you know, after college that maybe weren't not things that you would want necessarily your kids to know about.
But the question is why and, and might they get to the end of their life or I'm sorry, might, might, might I get to the end of my life and they find themselves reflecting whether or not they actually knew who I was.
All that time.
So I was looking around a little bit, um, just poking around, trying to see if there was any interesting information on this topic out there.
I kept bumping into a few things.
One of the things I kept bumping into was really mostly talking about, uh, emotional vulnerability and that being a big topic and a big difference in how parents,
how parents are these days compared to maybe how they were, you know, 40, 50, 60 years ago, especially fathers.
That wasn't really what I was shooting to dive into.
I kind of understand that topic.
I'm not going to say I'm an expert on it or anything, but that's, that's not something that's all that surprising or different or new in my viewpoint.
What I was trying to figure out more was this, this, how, how, to what extent should you be your genuine self?
I did find some interesting things about it.
The thing that I think, I think I found that was the most interesting was that, um, and, and the, and the, the research does seem to show that you should do this, but do it with some moderation, you know, use common sense.
It doesn't amount to much more than that, but interestingly, evidently when they, when kids get into their teenage years, that's a good time to really, um, open up a bit as a person.
Um, and show a little more of who you are.
And apparently this has a lot to do with teenagers, apparently, according to research, and I have to look in this a little bit more, but apparently they are really good at being lie detectors or bullshit detectors.
They're, they're very good at knowing when someone is not being genuine with them, not being authentic.
And if that's coming from their parent, that can set a relationship off to down a really bad path.
So that was pretty interesting because that, that I would have thought naturally would have been a time that you didn't want to be overly genuine because of the level of impression ability that, you know, teenagers tend to, to, to experience.
But it makes sense, you know, having digested a little bit that, that, that becomes a good time because if you're not being genuine, they know they can smell it on you and that can put a relationship really down a bad path.
Like, my kids are not teenagers yet, but I think I'm going to take this piece of, of advice and just kind of tuck it away and, and try to, not that I don't think I would have done, not that I don't think I'm being genuine in general.
I do.
It, it, it was just an interesting tidbit, again, with my father dying to realize, you know, I would have liked to know that other guy.
I think we would have gotten along better than, than I did with the version of my dad that I had growing up.
And I'm not saying he did a bad job.
I'm not saying he wasn't a good parent.
It's just that I think I would have gotten along with who he really was.
And I don't know why I never got to know that person.
And I wouldn't want my kids to get to a point where they wonder why they never got to know the person that I am.