the Progenitor

17 days… and counting…

It has just occurred to me, upon glancing over at the book I am presently reading, Sneaky Parenting by Jo Wiltshire, that although the word “parent” has become a verb, when did you last hear someone say…

“I have parented!”

…?

Actually, come to think of it, now I’ve written it down, I may indeed have heard someone say something along those lines…

“I have parented 2 children…”

…for example.

…or am I going mad?!

*  *  *

PS. also see the following discussion on ABC Tales for further commentary on the above…

http://www.abctales.com/forum/2008/06/09/parent

17 days… and counting…

After watching the film, I Am Legend, I started thinking about parenthood, and the following phrase came into my head…

There is no greater challenge, and nothing is more rewarding.

I was struck by the parallel between the message behind this film and the challenge that lies ahead of me.

Earlier in the day, my mum and her partner came to visit. I thought about the passing down of the baton, and the immortality inferred by raising children, passing on one’s genes, leaving behind a legacy. It has struck me that what I am doing now could reverberate through eternity. Obviously, in accordance with the laws of Chaos and the so-called “Butterfly Effect,” this could always be the case – consequences instigating consequences, which bounce and ripple throughout the vast Ocean of Existence… but having a child seems to amplify the significance of this potentiality… there is no telling what kind of pyramid my child – any child – may form the apex of.

The film, I Am Legend, is, in a nutshell, about a man turning the tide of a devastating global plague… reverberating consequences… the apex of a pyramid… it is an immensely sad film, but has at its core the message that however bad things may get, there is always hope…

Hope…

However we feel about the world, we should send our children into it infused with the stuff!

On an eternal pyramid, where the apex is hope… no amount of darkness cannot be made light…

23 days… and counting…

I have just been sent the following, which I wish to share with the readers of this here blog…

———-

PARENT - Job Description

POSITION :
Mum, Mummy, Mama,
Dad, Daddy, Dada

JOB DESCRIPTION :
Long term, team players needed, for challenging, permanent work in an often chaotic environment. Candidates must possess excellent communication and organizational skills and be willing to work variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24 hour shifts on call. Some overnight travel required, including trips to primitive camping sites on rainy weekends and endless sports tournaments in far away cities! Travel expenses not reimbursed. Extensive courier duties also required.

RESPONSIBILITIES :
The rest of your life. Must be willing to be hated, at least temporarily, until someone needs £5. Must be willing to bite tongue repeatedly. Also, must possess the physical stamina of a pack mule and be able to go from zero to 60 mph in three seconds flat in case, this time, the screams from the backyard are not someone just crying wolf. Must be willing to face stimulating technical challenges, such as small gadget repair, mysteriously sluggish toilets and stuck zippers. Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and coordinate production of multiple homework projects. Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings for clients of all ages and mental outlooks. Must be a willing to be indispensable one minute, an embarrassment the next. Must handle assembly and product safety testing of a half million cheap, plastic toys, and battery operated devices. Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. Must assume final, complete accountability for the quality of the end product. Responsibilities also include floor maintenance and janitorial work throughout the facility.

POSSIBILITY FOR ADVANCEMENT & PROMOTION :
None. Your job is to remain in the same position for years, without complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills, so that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE :
None required unfortunately. On-the-job training offered on a continually exhausting basis.

WAGES AND COMPENSATION :
Get this! You pay them! Offering frequent raises and bonuses. A balloon payment is due when they turn 18 because of the assumption that college will help them become financially independent. When you die, you give them whatever is left. The oddest thing about this reverse-salary scheme is that you actually enjoy it and wish you could only do more.

BENEFITS :
While no health or dental insurance, no pension, no tuition reimbursement, no paid holidays and no stock options are offered; this job supplies limitless opportunities for personal growth, unconditional love, and free hugs and kisses for life if you play your cards right.

———-

…which, as much as anything else, proves there are far greater rewards in life than material ones!

23 days… and counting…

Whilst walking to work this morning, I saw a poster which had a child’s drawing depicting the fact that we should put chewing gum in the bin… and I got to thinking about childhood values… what values we instil in them… how mouldable they are… and… to what extent should we mould our children? And to what extent even can we mould our children? From whence do the values of our children arise, and to what extent is it the responsibility of adults (teachers, parents, etc) to enable our children to find their own values, as opposed to encouraging, forcibly or otherwise, the adoption of particular values?

Our children can teach us about values… if so, where is it that these values come from? Do children have an innate sense of Good and Evil, right and wrong, and so on and so forth?

What values will my child have?
What values should I teach him/her?

The above was brought to you by another of “those moments”…

The world is already starting to become “parent-coloured”…

24 days… and counting…

We’re finally in the month that the baby’s due! He or she may, of course, arrive late, possibly nudging into the next month… but if they’re anything like Jo, their arrival will be right on schedule, if not sooner! I have not mentioned much on this blog about the varied and delightful aspects of the personality of my progeny’s mother, but she is nothing if not punctual (I also, incidentally, believe in punctuality, but perhaps a more, as it were, idle punctuality…).

Tiz the oddest of things that, as one might say, “bring it home” to one… that being one’s imminently pending dadhood status… I did, for example, renew my monthly train pass this morning, only for it to occur to me that the next time I do this I will be a parent… this wasn’t the first of this kind of moment, and no doubt there will be a few more in the coming weeks!

Weeks, not months…

Less than thirty days…

Crikey!

And things.

29 days… and counting…

Where have these protective urges come from?! They make no sense! They’re infused with irrationality! I don’t want anyone or anything near my baby and its mother! You say you’re her friend? I don’t care! Stay away! If there’s even just the slightest hint that you are a threat, that you might bring danger or risk… stay away!

Grrrr!!

I stand at the entrance of the cave and wave my club at thee!

Come any closer and I’ll smash in your skull!!

… *** ahem *** …

29 days… and counting…

…is happening to me. I used to worry that, in venturing into dadhood, I wouldn’t have the time/energy to do anything else. I mean, anything significant. But now I’m starting to feel like… maybe… being a dad is… pretty much… all I want to be. Or at least, it’s the only thing that really, truly matters. Everything else will play a part, but will be secondary. Everything will be geared towards raising my child the best I can.

Such strange feelings!

They may, of course, change.

But for now…

I’m not even that bothered about not having a working PS2!

30 days… and counting…

…is what my PS2 has done the weekend just gone, as I have just mentioned on my other blog… and, as also mentioned on my other blog, this time it appears that it is, as they say, for real (as opposed to when it happened a few months ago, and I was able to squeeze a bit more life out of the machine). I’ve just traded some games at Gamestation, in which I now have a total of £35 credit, and I could buy a pre-owned machine with two “free” (ish) games, for as little as £55… and inasmuch as stumping up £20 wouldn’t be that tricky… I feel that I want to resist!

And here is why…

I want to free my head… my mind… make space in my consciousness for my child. Obviously, as a parent, I will need distractions – I will need things in my life that are unrelated to being-a-dad… but… I want to be in control of those things. Mentally in control. At which point in this piece, I think I need to make a bit of a confession… I am far short, I would say, of being addicted to my PS2, but it does have a tendency, sometimes, to take over my mind…

God, that sounds sinister… what I mean to say is, it can sometimes occupy my thought processes perhaps a little more than it should – a little more than is, perhaps, “healthy.” I will, no doubt, replace my PS2 at some point, but for now I have put it and its games away, and I want it to be one of a number of more “mentally proportionate,” fun non-dad-related “distractions”… including reading (being something that is easily pick-up-and-put-down-able – which may, I suspect, be an advantageous quality in the near future!)… watching some of those DVD’s I have been meaning to get around to watching… writing… and… other things I haven’t thought of yet…

When our child arrives in the world, it will take over our lives… at least at first… at least until we settle into a “routine”… and I don’t want any part of me to resent that. As far as possible, when I am immersed (hopefully not literally!) in dirty nappies, sleepless nights and everything else one becomes immersed in as a new parent, I want to eliminate things that I “would rather be doing” – those things are bound to exist, but I want to reduce them to a minimum… without, of course, forgetting who I am other than a dad! Unless, of course, I come to the realisation that “being a dad” is everything that I want to be…

30 days… and counting…

Something rather monumental has just occurred to me… I’m going to be a dad! Hang on… no, I think I’ve already mentioned that…

What was it?

Oh yes…

My life appears to run in 18 year cycles! Give or take a few months. Those familiar with things of a numerological nature may be aware of the concept of things running in 9 year cycles. If I thought about it, I might be able to find significant “phase-change” type events occurring every 9 years throughout my life thus far, but to be honest it might be a struggle, and the 18 year “phase-changes” seem far more significant and easy to spot. To whit…

At the age of 18 I left home for uni, shortly after which I met Jo, who became my life partner.

For about the next eighteen years, they were the Childless Adult Years, in which Jo and I lived together, did things that adults do together, and, by way of an immense expression of oversimplification, “established” our adult lives (you know, doing various jobs, exploring various “careers,” living in various places, and having numerous other pre-parenthood adult-type experiences).

It would appear that the next 18 year cycle is going to commence on the 26th of June 2008… or thereabouts… and will conclude when my child becomes an adult and leaves home!

Now the above may seem arbitrary and coincidental to the casual observer, but the fact is that I do believe in cycles and the beginning of my last 18 year cycle was significant in the extreme… I (obviously) always knew that becoming a parent would be a significant, immensely monumental landmark in my life, but realising the above has… imbued it with layers of additional significance! When I think of how my life was for the first 18 years, how different it was for the next… and just how different it will be for the next! Mind-boggling…

38 days… and counting…

Jo and I went to the Baby Show at the Birmingham NEC yesterday. I can honestly say I have never seen so many pushchairs and pregnant women under one roof in my life! Whether it was because of the intense aura of parent-ness and parent-to-be-ness at the show or simply the exhaustion-inducing factor of such (believe me, traipsing round a packed hall for four hours, filling in forms, talking to people about various baby and pregnancy-related things, and scavenging as many freebies as one pair of arms (i.e. mine) can take, is exhausting), but when we got home, after we had counted the freebies, had something to eat and finally flopped onto the living room floor with a cup of tea… I suddenly felt this overwhelming flood of emotions…

As you may have gathered, if you have been reading this blog thus far, I have been feeling what one might call “the usual sorts of emotions” in relation to my pending dadness – these emotions are, of course, on the one hand, unique to me, but also they do loosely fall under the commonly known categories of “desperately terrified” and “desperately excited”… I have had a few, as it were, “reality checks,” the impact of which has been cumulative, but overall it has all felt pretty abstract. I’m having a baby… I’m having a child… I’m going to be a dad… and all that… hmm, still does not entirely compute…

But…

What a Reality Check of immense proportions the Baby Show was!

I can’t remember if I have ever mentioned in any kind of online context that a few years ago I had something of a “mortality crisis”… in which I came to the fearful realisation that my life henceforth may remain pretty much the same… this terrified me… it made me pretty depressed, on and off, for a while… this fear did kind of go away, but not entirely – it has always lingered, been something my worrisome mind could dive into, swim around in, if I allowed it… and as such it has taken something of an effort to see, to believe that there could be any major, positive, future developments in my life…

Until now! This is, of course, not entirely due to the Baby Show, but 18 May 2008 will, I think, go down as a pretty big landmark in the course of my changing attitude towards new status-to-be… the “to-be” part being something which can be crossed off in only a few short weeks!

Speaking of landmarks… there are so many of them I am now looking forward to! So many of them ahead! First crawl, first word, first step, first birthday, first Christmas, first time one doesn’t have to buy/wash nappies, first school, first book he/she reads on his/her own, first box of Lego, first time I can play a “proper” board game and/or computer game with him/her, first “best friend,” first girlfriend/boyfriend, first bike, first time I am asked to help him/her with homework or revising for exams, first pint, first car… and no doubt a zillion other things I haven’t thought of.

I had the fear a few years ago that my life henceforth may remain pretty much the same…

However else you look at it… there’s no way that’s going to happen now!