When we started Fandads five years ago, we had a somewhat of a vision of what we wanted to do. We wanted to share how two "fanboys" grew up into "fandads" and how they passed down their geekiness to their kids. As in life, things do not always go as planned. We veered away from that path here and there, but we always tried to get back on course. There are a few heartfelt posts on here hidden among the reviews, giveaways and geeky news that we share with you. Click the Dadlife tab to read some of these.
At Dad 2.0 I realized that we never really established a voice for the blog and that is something that we are going to try to do. While we are a site about having fun and doing geeky things with our kids, we have to face the reality of life and how it is not always so sunny.
My English Professor and I established a good friendship when I was studying at school. He helped me out with my Honor's Thesis and even came out and handed water to me and other teachers during our strike two years ago. He is a real passionate man and I always had fun in his classes, no kidding.
I have followed him on Facebook for a good while now and I would always comment on his posts about his sons. The things he would write about what they would talk about were hilarious and heartbreaking at times. I mean, we are all floored every now and then by the words that come out of our children's mouths. I reached out to him and asked him if he would like to contribute to the blog (we are always looking for submissions) and he responded with a yes and wanted to share about what he has been going through with his family.
So my friends, please welcome Dr. Tim Libretti and enjoy his first post of many to come.
My friend Victor
asked me if I would be interested in writing a blog about my experiences as a
dad. He followed many of my postings on
Facebook, which were often about my two sons, Caleb and Elijah, who are eleven
and nine years-old, respectively; and I guess he thought my material seemed
suitable for his forum. I told him I
would love to write about being a parent on one condition: the blog would be an
ongoing series. I let him know that I’m
going through a divorce and that such a forum would be a meaningful place for
me to reflect on this significant life transition as I worked through it with
my sons. Perhaps needless to say, going
through the divorce has made me hyper-conscious of what is going on with my
sons and how my behaviors, moods, and attitudes impact them. People—and all the
books—tell me that what will matter most in this painful process is how they
see me handling and adjusting to the situation.
If I can act like everything is ok and will be ok and move in the world
as if a happy life lies ahead for us despite this rupture in our family life,
they will feel reassured and have a sense of stability.
Acting is what
I’ve been trying to do, and I’m not always the best at it as the stress and
exhaustion of the divorce ordeal often get the best of me, which is why it felt
good the other night to relate on Facebook an experience I had with my
son. After Caleb’s band concert, I was
driving home with Elijah past the university where I chair the English
Department. Perhaps motivated by the all
of the energy and talk around the mayoral run-off in Chicago last spring, Elijah
thought to ask me if I had to be elected to be chair of the English Department
and also if the president of the university had to be elected. I explained that the university president was
hired but not elected, and that I had to be elected by the English Department
faculty and then approved and appointed by the administration. Elijah responded that he understood why the
faculty in the English department, many of whom he knows, would elect me. I
asked what he meant, and he explained, “Well, you’re a teacher, too, so they’ll
like that because you’ll understand them, and you really care about the people
you work with.”
As you might
imagine, this answer floored me. It’s
not that often that parents get a glimpse into how their children see them, and
this statement represented one of those times.
More to the point, Elijah’s conclusions were the result of his observations
of how I behave in the world, how I do my job, and how I interact with and
treat others. Elijah has spent a good
amount of time with me at the university so he sees me interacting with
faculty, students, and other administrators and generally going about the
business of my profession. I don’t
really talk overtly about caring about my colleagues, students, and other
co-workers, but that he observed this meant a lot to me and also revealed to me
just how carefully my children watch and absorb what I do, far more than what I
say. And it felt good to know that he
was learning from me how to respect people and the work they do and to create a
community that values mutual aid.
This moment
reinforced how important it is that I model in my behavior how to move through
the difficult process of the divorce with a faith that, despite whatever
struggles we face, we will work through the process cooperatively and caringly
and hopefully with some measure of grace and humor and live a happy life
together as we all evolve. I had to
remind myself of this lesson in a recent encounter with Elijah, who is an
extremely sensitive person who radars in on one’s feelings. I was folding
laundry in the living room and chatting with him while he played with his
action figures, when he stopped, looked at me, and said, “You look really sad,
daddy.” Well, I was really sad, so
chances are I looked so. My first response internally, though, was a kind of
anxiety that I had revealed myself in a way I shouldn’t have. I wanted to show strength, not weakness. I wanted to maintain a positive attitude to
convey to them that our lives would be happy ones even as we dealt with a
trying transition. My first verbal
response, having been caught in the act of feeling sad, was to admit that
indeed I was very sad and to stress that, even so, it was not his job to worry
about it or to take care of me. It’s my
job to take care of him, I emphasized.
He looked at me point blank with his compassionate eyes and said, with a
wisdom and maturity seemingly beyond his years, “But I want to take care of
you, daddy.” As they say, out of the mouth of babes!
Letting my
nine-year old son take care of me, though, strained every instinct, every
sense, of what it meant to me to be a good parent and to take care of my
children, especially as we transition through a divorce and I try to be
hyper-vigilant of their emotional states and needs. But then I reflected on what lesson I wanted
to impart to my sons through my behavior.
Certainly, I want them to behave in caring ways towards others and the
world at large and to act with an ethos of mutual aid, so why should I
discourage him from acting in caretaking and compassionate ways towards another
human being, even if that person is his father? After all, I always joke with
my sons that I’ll need them to take care of me when I’m an old man, which is
not too far off.
Perhaps even
more importantly, though, I thought, is modeling how to accept care and
compassion from others in times of need.
Of course I expect and want my children to seek and accept my help. I no
doubt model that behavior and also foster the expectation that it is perfectly
right and natural both that I help them and that they accept that help. That is
the world I want for them. I want them to feel comfortable asking for what they
need and want and accepting it gratefully when it is given. Yet, as I often
have difficulty accepting help, not to mention even asking for it, I recognized
in this encounter with Elijah that I was not doing a good job of modeling how
to accept the care he was offering me.
My own insistence that it’s my job to take care of him and not his to
take care of me was at once discouraging him from taking care of others and
also modeling for him a reluctance to accept the help of others, neither of
which characteristics I would wish upon him.
In teaching him
to be a man in a world in which men are often dissuaded from expressing and
understanding their feelings, showing emotion, and caretaking—qualities and actions
deemed “feminine”—I want him to cultivate an emotional intelligence that allows
him to be sensitive not just to others’ feelings, as he clearly already is, but
to his own so he knows how to work through and understand his emotions and his
larger self. This lesson calls up for me
Bob Dylan’s words from his song Forever
Young:
May God bless and keep you always.
May your wishes all come true.
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
My sons give me
much every day and enrich my life in ways I don’t have space here to expound.
They are my rabbis. Indeed, any parent can acknowledge and attest to how much
their children give them. For those of
us who seek to cultivate a world that practices the cultural value of mutual
aid, it is important we accept and acknowledge all that our children have and
want to give us so they will continue to give of themselves as they grow and
mature and, equally importantly, so they can seek and accept the aid of others. It strikes me that too often in our
individualist culture, we are taught the value of doing things for ourselves,
of achieving on our own, when rarely are our highest achievements purely
individual. My son Elijah reminded me of
the skill and maturity required to acknowledge and accept aid from others and
to embrace a truly cooperative and compassionate ethos to guide us in our
social and emotional lives.
It is often my
children who remind me of the world I want to create for them and the larger
world I want them to enjoy now and in the future.
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