Tag: healing

The Happiness of Physical Congruence

RilalyLeave a comment

“You have some killer calves bra,” Gunther, the gym rat, said at the gym. I can’t remember if I said, ‘thanks’ or ‘SECURITY!’ but Gunther (pronounced Goon~thur as opposed to Gun~thur), sensed my awkwardness. “Seriously bro, you’ve done some good work. I’m thinking of getting mine done. Gonna get me some pumped up calves.” After some back and forth, he confirmed that meant he was thinking about having calf implants surgically inserted into his legs. “I do all of the calf raises, the farmer’s walk, the Box jumps, and jumping jacks, and look at me, I got nothing down there bro. Look at those puny things! Look at them compared to my thighs, they’re incongruent!”

You ever meet this guy, a guy who appears to have it all, and he obsesses over something so trivial that if I told you about it, you might say, “He was joking. He had to be.” I didn’t bother breaking it down with him to see if he was joking, because why would I? I was there, and I knew how serious he was. I did wonder what motivated this obvious obsession with anatomical perfection, and I wondered how deep it went. Did he think everyone was staring at his “puny calves” the minute he walked into a room? Did he refuse to wear shorts, to avoid exposing his humiliation? Did he blame his parents for giving him such awful genes “down there”. I wondered if he thought that by attaining “pumped up” calves, even if by artificial means, that he might be able to improve his perception by eradicating the inadequacies below his leg pits.

“Are you looking to get into a pageant?” I asked.

“First of all, they’re not called pageants,” he said. “They’re called bodybuilding competitions. And no, I’m not looking for any of that. I just think it’s unfair that I work ten to twenty times harder than people like you, no offense, and I get no results.”

Gunther, the gym guy, had so many admirable, and I’ll say it, enviable traits that if he commissioned a poll of a thousand casual observers, my bet is one in a thousand might notice his “puny calves”. If Gunther were asked to predict the outcome of that poll, however, he would probably predict that that figure to be somewhere around 999 out of a thousand who spot them. “How could they miss them?” he might ask.

I told him that if he hadn’t pointed them out to me, I never would’ve noticed them, and I added, “I doubt that anyone else would either.” He acknowledged that and waved it off, basically admitting that he kind of knew it was his issue.

The idea that he moisturized his skin was obvious, as was the idea that he used a wide variety of hair products to color and treat his hair. Gunther, the gym rat, worked hard to perfect every element of his physical presentation, and that included achieving what bodybuilders call the X-frame: broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and well-developed thighs. This shape creates what experts call “a striking visual taper, proportion, balance, and a symmetrical emphasis that creates a harmonious and powerful aesthetic that all gym rats strive to achieve.” Yet, Gunther couldn’t do anything about his “puny calves”, so he contemplated letting a surgeon do it for him, because “it wasn’t fair” that he couldn’t.

My guess is if another perfectionist, Leonardo da Vinci, decided to give his Vitruvian Man “puny calves”, after studying the ideal proportions of the human form, none of us would notice. Da Vinci would, and Gunther would, because they were far more concerned with achieving anatomical perfection.

We can all understand and appreciate da Vinci’s drive to achieve an artistic representation of perfection, in other words, but there was something almost obnoxious about Gunther’s psychological drive to fix his “incongruity” that when he used that word it stuck with me. I never heard anyone, in the bodybuilding universe, or anywhere else, complain about their incongruity. It was almost as if he thought if he used a different, more creative term, it might exert some special kind of shame for those muscles, and they might finally respond to all of his efforts. And he did speak of these muscles as if they were disembodied entities. Then, he concluded his scorn by saying if they didn’t respond to his wishes, he would find someone (a surgeon) who would.

I don’t know if Gunther eventually purchased that unnecessary, cosmetic surgery, as that would be the last conversation I had with him. If he bought it, I wonder if it helped him feel more congruent. Our immediate guess would be no, as cosmetics only resolve superficial issues. That’s so true it’s almost a fact, but fixing what ails us, or what we think ails us, can have a placebo effect that helps us feel better about ourselves and solves so many other issues. As my science teacher once told me, our initial guesses are often correct, and my initial guess was that Gunther’s feelings of incongruence were so pervasive that the day, the week, or the month after that surgery, he’d find some other incongruity he considered a roadblock to happiness. 

***

Are we happy? Are we happier than we’ve ever been, right here, right now? We’re not as happy as we’ve been, but we’re pretty sure that once forces beyond our control align, we’re going to be happier in the future.

It’s difficult to avoid taking things for granted, but how many of us consider physical congruence an essential element of happiness? Before laughing that off as silly, we need to consider that physical beauty can lead to more confidence, and confidence can lead to greater happiness, and if the congruity of our face equates to beauty, how happy can we be with a big nose? We can get a nose job, but the minute that’s done, it makes our earlobes look flappy. If we lop those off, how congruent are our lips now, and what about our “too narrow” eyes? And, if we have too much forehead, how do we fix that? We often hear that we must accept what our Creator has given or withheld, but to what extent can absolute congruence align with our identity and eventually foster happiness?

We accuse one another of being superficial when we obsess over the physical beauty of others, but what would they think of us if they knew how superficial we are with our own? Good friends and a great family can provide an excellent support system, and making a boatload of money can help even the scales if we love what we’re doing for a living, but none of these elements of life last forever in intangible and tangible ways. Beauty doesn’t last forever either, of course, and we all know that, but instead of appreciating everything we have while we have it, we obsess over the qualities that prevent us from achieving our definition of perfection. 

I know this makes no sense to the healthy, but we should all take a moment to focus our mind’s eye internally, and appreciate how this incredibly efficient machine that we call our body, operates. We’re not talking about the big guys (heart, liver, lungs) that we all know, but the tiny mechanisms in our systems, the cogs, cranks, chains, and linkages that work in conjunction to keep us healthy and happy, because their quiet efficiencies don’t operate at optimum levels forever. And what’s the difference between internal congruence and superficial? Gunther probably wouldn’t even notice his calves if he had trouble breathing, he had heart problems, or some other internal incongruence that cried out for medical attention. His concerns with his calves were as a result of the luxury afforded to those who have achieved so many levels of optimum efficiency that they have to work their way down the list to find one that isn’t.

We’re talking about physical congruence here. We’re talking about how we should factor physical congruence into our huge, multifaceted happiness puzzle. We all know about how reducing stress and achieving emotional stability can lead to happiness, and we’ve all read how diet and exercise can affect mood stability and a general sense of satisfaction, but how many of us look down at our toes and thank our Creator for giving us foot appendages that grew in a congruent manner to provide the typical comfort we enjoy while standing, walking, or just fitting comfortably into a pair of socks?

***

Don Christie had a middle toe that grew too long for the comfort inherent in congruence. An elongated toe might not generate much sympathy from us because, “It’s a long toe! Who cares?” Compared to a person born with a physical abnormality on the face, or any of the truly sad stories we hear about what babies in prenatal units are forced to endure, it’s tough to do anything more than raise an eyebrow at an otherwise healthy man complaining about an abnormally long toe.

Don’s point was that that toe has affected his life in ways most of us take for granted. In order to find comfort standing and walking, Don has had to purchase shoes one size too large to accommodate the space that elongated toe requires. The toe and the shoes he requires, affect his gait pattern, and he has learned to give that toe some slack when he pulls his socks on. It was an annoying attribute when he was a child that grew to a frustration in adulthood, and it’s become a real painful problem, at times, in his senior years. Did it affect his overall sense of happiness? “A little bit, in the ways a toe can affect a day. I’ve adapted, of course, but every once in a while, it becomes a real, painful problem.”  

“If it’s that painful, or that big of a problem, why doesn’t he just have a surgeon lop the elongated portion of it off?” That falls under the “easy answer” umbrella, and the “easier said than done” one. That answer isn’t wrong, of course, but it’s still a toe. It’s an annoying toe at times, and it can prove painful, but it’s still his toe, and he’d obviously much rather deal with it than lop off part of his toe. 

***

Do your ears produce enough wax or too much? The incredibly complex and largely efficient machine we call the human body effectively clears out most excess wax most of the time, but some unlucky few experience a buildup that can lead to an annoying itch, tinnitus, and in some cases, vertigo that can significantly alter an otherwise pleasant Tuesday in June. 

Jack Radamacher was never what we would call a happy person, but he wasn’t miserable, until he started experiencing some hearing loss, a “muffled” sound, and occasional spells of dizziness. The latter was especially concerning to him, and it led him to experience what he considered one of the worst words in the English dictionary, dependent.

“I’d rather die than be dependent on others,” he often said as a younger man, and now, here he was. He didn’t need an arm to hold onto most of the time, but he never knew when a dizzy spell would hit. Prior to his visit to the ear, nose and throat doctor, Jack attributed his hearing loss, and those muffled sounds, to working in a loud machine shop for thirty-eight-years and his age, because he never heard that sometimes the ears neglect to clear out excess wax. Not only did he learn that some ears forget to clear excess wax, he learned that the muffled sounds and dizzy spells he experienced weren’t all age-related.

After the doctor went about cleaning his ears of excessive buildup, Jack experienced what was for him, a revelation.

“I feel cured!” he said when his sense of balance returned, and he no longer experienced muffled sounds. He experienced an odd sense of liberation that led to a greater sense of happiness, until the buildup began again weeks later. When it happened again, he learned about ear wax candles. No one, not even Jack himself, trusted him to do this himself. “The flames generated by the candle can get a little out of control,” his daughter-in-law warned him. So, he was somewhat still dependent on others, but he accepted that if it meant that he could “cure” himself at home on such a regular basis that he achieved a better quality of life as a result.

***

Do you have enough cushion to provide cushion? Some don’t, and we love going after them. “Gil, you got no butt!” we said with laughter. Gil knew that, and he’s known it his whole adult life. It’s why he carries a cushion to the employee cafeteria every day for lunch. “Those chairs are just so uncomfortable,” he said when we ask him about it.

“Huh, I never noticed how uncomfortable these chairs were,” we said. 

“Of course you didn’t,” Gil said in a dismissive manner, “because you have cushion back there.”

We called him “No butt Gil” and one person added, “He’s got back. A long ass back,” but it wasn’t a source of daily conversation.

So, when Gil said that about our biological cushions, seemingly out of nowhere, we didn’t know what he was talking about, until we thought about why he thought the cheap, plastic chairs were so uncomfortable, why he brought that cushion to lunch every day, why he had to wear suspenders, and how he always complained about lower back pain.

Gil thought the jokes were as funny as we did, but the fact remained that Gil had a physical incongruence that diminished his quality of life to some degree. Those of us who have never met a Gil, never placed the sensory delight of comfortable sitting in our happiness equation, because we never considered how the quantity or quality of bun could affect us after a hard day at work where sitting in a relatively comfortable chair provides a reward at the end of the day. Even sitting in cheap, plastic chairs in an employee cafeteria can provide some rewards to the hard worker, if they have sufficient gluteus maximus. We know this now because we know Gil, and we’ve seen him bring that cushion to the lunchroom area.  

Gil’s doctor prescribed that Gil get a gym membership and do certain workouts, with a particular focus on squats, so he could increase the muscle back there, but Gil didn’t have much to work with, and he knew his physical incongruence would prevent him from ever knowing the absolute joy of sitting in a chair, in a manner the rest of us take for granted.

***

“Have you ever had a bad back?” Imelda asked me at the gym. “It goes away, right? What if it didn’t? What if you experienced the worst back pain you’ve ever had, every day, for years? What would you do if you saw every expert, in every field you could think up, and they couldn’t help you? I am not a suicidal person, but I was in such horrible pain, for so long that I thought this was my life now. I just didn’t see how I could go on living like that.”

Imelda and I used to be great friends at our previous place of employment. When we switched jobs, our plan was to always keep in touch and keep connected in some way, but do we ever do that? No, we often leave those people behind. Sometimes, we don’t even remember who we left behind, until we randomly run into them, a decade later, at a gym.

The Imelda I knew back then was such a little thing, and she was someone I considered extremely attractive, because she hit all the bullet points of a small, attractive woman. The woman standing before me now had biceps, triceps, and her shoulders appeared so round and full. She almost looked like a different person, a big sister of the person I once knew. She was ripped, and I thought about all that in all of the complimentary and somewhat insulting ways. She lost all of her beautiful, feminine form, and replaced it with a form that suggested she was rugged and tough looking. She now looked like a person we probably shouldn’t mess with, and I meant that in complimentary and somewhat insulting ways.  

“I was in a car accident, and it really wasn’t even a bad one,” she said. “The woman hit me just right, in a manner that happened to knock me out of alignment.” Imelda went onto to talk about all of the doctors, chiropractors, and massage therapists she visited over the years. “Every time you enter one of these offices, you have hope, and you pray that they are going to be the ones who are going to end it all for you. Then you leave their office, almost in tears, thinking that if you follow their orders it will end it once and for all. They tried, all of them tried, but nothing helped. I was so desperate, at one point, that I accidentally became an addict, addicted to pain meds, the worst of the worst ones,” she said. “They all provided some, limited relief, but the pain, the excruciating pain of not even being able to pick yourself up off the floor, was never far behind the temporary relief those drugs provided.

“When I finally met my Helen Keller, my miracle worker, I thought she was the worst of all. She was a physical therapist who said, ‘There is only so much I can do to help you, and you have to do the rest.’ She was so honest that I considered asking for my money back. What do you mean you can’t help me? What am I doing here, then? Her prescription was working out.  

“Working out?” I said, “I can’t even get off the floor, and you’re telling me to workout?” It made no sense. I thought the massage therapist was an idiot who didn’t understand my level of pain, but I tried it. I did a couple of her low-stress workouts, and I had to admit I felt some relief, some relief as in a little. Then, I worked my way, through her slow, methodical, and prescribed progressions, until I felt even more relief. I told her about it on my next visit, and we cried together, because I thought she saved me, and she did, but it kept coming back. She suggested, after a time, and when she thought I was finally ready, a full-on powerlifting regimen, and I did it,” and here Imelda cried a little, right in front of me, “and she’s my savior now, and I tell her that, and thank her every time I see her.

“I might not be as attractive as I used to be,” she said, and I tried to dispel her of that notion, but she knew. “No, I know that I no longer look cute with all these muscles, but if you knew what I went through for those two long, excruciating years, you’d understand.”

After hearing Imelda’s testimonial, I thought of Gunther’s complaints about his incongruent calves. I thought about how biologists call the human body a marvel of engineering that is also structurally flawed in places, and in various cases. Some people might experience a flaw in their calves ability to respond to specific workouts, but those biologists also direct specific criticism at the structural flaws inherent in the back that make it prone to pain, injury, and dysfunction. Our rush to end our quadrupedal movement and achieve bipedalism is to blame, they say, and some suggest if we never want to have back pain again, we should revert back to the ways of our ancestors and crawl from space to space. Walking is what screwed us all up, because our rush to walk left little time for optimizing the spine’s ability to handle all of the new mechanical stresses bipedal movement caused. Our S-shaped spine enabled balance and flexibility, but it sacrificed some levels of stability when compared to the straighter spines of apes.

So, if Imelda’s testimony taught me nothing else, I learned to appreciate whatever temporary comfort I have, because this marvel of engineering we call our body has structural flaws that are vulnerable to tweaks, and there are no manufacturer’s warranties on these parts either. They’re as is. How was your back today? Good? So good that you didn’t even notice it? Notice it, mentally mark it down as a great day, and be grateful, because it is structurally flawed, and you might learn that one day, the hard way.  

***

“You experienced a vasovagal syncope episode,” the doctor informed AJ Pinter. 

“A vaso what?” AJ asked.

“A vasovagal syncope episode,” the doctor added. “When you were listening to popular podcast, your vagus nerve became overstimulated, causing blood vessels to dilate and pool in the lower body, reducing flow to the brain. Such an episode can also trigger a sudden drop in heart rate and blood pressure, often due to a reflexive response to stress, pain, or fear.”  

There are a number of results that can occur as a result of a vasovagal syncope episode, but in AJ’s experiences, it led him to faint. Most fainting spells are a reflexive response to a high level of stress, pain and fear. These episodes are usually brief, and recovery is quick, but those who study the effect suggest that the best way to experience such an episode, or recover from one, is to do so while lying down. This is impossible to do in most cases, as it’s almost impossible to predict when such episodes will occur.

AJ’s vasovagal syncope episode arrived when he was driving a delivery truck down the road. AJ had a documented history of fainting at the sight of blood, but that’s so common that documented research shows that 15% of the population faint at the sight of blood. What isn’t as common, and something an overwhelming majority of us have never heard of before, is that some hemophobia (the fear of blood) sufferers cannot maintain consciousness after hearing a discussion about blood. AJ’s case is so uncommon that some suggest that sufferers of those who lose consciousness as a result of hearing such a discussion could number under 1% of the population.

AJ experienced just such an episode while listening to a popular podcast containing an in-depth discussion of blood. When AJ felt the symptoms coming on, he tried to pull off to the side of road, while simultaneously trying to turn the podcast off, but he couldn’t manage to do either in time. He lost consciousness while driving and hit an oncoming truck head-on. AJ broke bones in both hips in his pelvic region. If AJ is now able to endure the arduous, lengthy, and painful rehab his doctors prescribed for him, he’ll relearn how to walk but he may never be able to walk without a noticeable limp, and he’ll likely experience moderate to extreme pain for the rest of his life.

“And this happened because he heard a discussion about blood?” we asked the informant detailing for us the catastrophic consequences of AJ’s obscure condition. We asked that a couple times with an ‘Are you sure you have that right?’ tone, because we never heard of a person passing out as a result of hearing another talk about blood. 

“AJ said it was an in-depth, detail-oriented discussion,” the man informed us, but that didn’t help us understand the matter any better. After working through the particulars of this discussion, we immediately thought about Gunther “the gym rat”, and how Gunther and AJ represented two ends of the spectrum of physical incongruities and their impact on personal happiness. Gunther chose to see an inadequacy that few would notice while failing to recognize the privilege of his otherwise healthy and fully-functional body. He chose to believe that it was “unfair” that he had such “puny calves”. AJ’s story, on the other hand, illustrates true unfairness: a random, obscure condition that upended his life in an instant. Gunther’s fixation is a choice to dwell on an issue most of us consider a non-issue, whereas AJ had no choice in the face of his medical condition. This contrast critiques Gunther’s lack of gratitude and perspective, suggesting that his pursuit of superficial congruence blinds him to the broader, more meaningful aspects of happiness—like the ability to walk, drive, or live without chronic pain. In that light, AJ’s tragedy illustrates the absurdity of Gunther’s self-imposed suffering, framing it as a cautionary tale about the dangers of obsessing over minor flaws at the expense of appreciating one’s overall well-being.

***

Some of us have knee-jerk, impulsive reactions to tales of the incongruent. “They’re weak!” some say. “How can a man survive, or thrive, if he cannot maintain consciousness during a discussion of blood?” Others react with sympathy and/or a sense of appreciation. Some might say that they’re put here, in our lives, to help us gain a renewed sense of appreciation for the idea of physical and mental congruence that we should cherish. 

We rarely think about how our relative levels of congruence produces happiness, until we meet the incongruent. An enlarged heart, prostate, shrunken kidneys, or brain atrophy are more common incongruences that elicit sympathy, but how much sympathy do we have for a man with an elongated toe? If a man was dumb enough to complain about a lack of gluteal muscles, and he did so in manner that suggested he was upset about it, would we be able to restrain our laughter long enough to express sympathy?

“The man can’t sit in most chairs comfortably,” we say to scorn those who cannot control their impulses. “And he experiences chronic back pain as a result.” It’s funny, and it’s not, because most of us don’t consider sitting in a chair or walking on a sidewalk without discomfort one of the luxuries of life, until we have our perspective altered. 

If we hear the terms congruent and incongruent, we often hear them in relation to social, psychological, physiological, philosophical, and spiritual concerns. We rarely talk about the physical, because it just feels so superficial. With all the problems in the world, both in general, and those we learn others experience, it almost feels narcissistic and trivial to complain about an apparent lack of buttocks, an elongated toe, or excessive wax build up. Yet, if we can’t walk or sit without some discomfort, it can affect our quality of life.

When we give thanks for all that we have, we often include good health, but we don’t really mean it. We say it, because that’s just something good people say. A part of us knows that good health can be fleeting, but it’s difficult to appreciate good health, or the incredible machine we have running life for us, until we hear others’ stories. We normally only appreciate such functions when we recover from deficiencies, pain, or some form of tragedy, but when we hear stories of poor health as a result of some odd physical incongruity, it renews our appreciation for even minor functions we currently have operating in peak form, because we know they’re not going to last forever.

Ten Rules of Parenting

RilalyLeave a comment

You’re a parent, congratulations and my condolences. It might be hard to picture now, if your kids are little more than screaming sacks of flesh but you will eventually be glad you had them. When that prospect becomes a reality, it’s a life-altering event to realize that someone is going to be dependent on us for everything for life, and for life. We’ve never had someone dependent on us for everything before, and we’ve all heard someone talk about that dependency, but we’re never prepared for it when it hits home. It’s a shocking revelation that occurs in phases and layers. The first layer of dependency involves money, food, shelter, and all of the superficial needs that humans require to survive. Those needs can be hard to fulfill, depending on the situation, but compared to the other, deeper layers of need, the superficial ones are cake. If you are a scared first-time parent, this formerly frightened, first-time parent of nearly ten years, offers ten rules to working through those layers.

Don’t Die

This first rule of quality parenting is a result of experience-based wisdom, because I survived, and I am a better parent for it. Neither of my parents followed this rule, but my step-dad did. He decided to not die of a massive heart attack one day, and he did that long enough to correct most of the errors he made as a parent. The explanations, descriptions, examples, illustrations and testimonials of why a parent should live has filled other books, but let’s just say that if my step-dad died as a result of that massive heart attack, I might be more wrecked than I already am. In the decade that followed that massive heart attack, and his eventual demise, my step-dad went from being a step-father to a dad. He was a flawed human being, but he taught me things that inspired this list.

Spend Time with Them

The second rule of quality parenting might be more important than the first, but if you’re dead, spending time with your kids will prove more difficult. Those of us who lived long enough to see it know that the steps involved in raising, training, refining, and redefining a small human into a halfway decent person requires a boatload of time. It’s also fraught with failure. First-time parents should know that they will fail, loudly, and often. If you don’t see this now you will, you will. If you want to correct the record now before that day of personal reckoning arrives, there is a cure. The best and worst model we have for parenting is our parents. “I might not be the best parent in the world, but I am light years better than my dad,” might be a refrain you tell yourself, and you may captain your ship in such a way that you don’t repeat his errors, but you’ll make others, and when you do, expect to hear time-honored laughter from your father, “It’s not as easy as you thought is it?” Quality parents will try to correct their errors, of course, but those corrections will be as flawed as we are. The best way to make a difficult situation better is to spend so much time around your kids that they’ll eventually weave our mistakes and flaws in with our admirable efforts and qualities that they mix them together in an big old soup bowl of memories. I normally despise new age terms like being present, but there is a huge difference between being in the same room with them and living in the present tense with them, and we cannot achieve the latter with a device-colored nose. I saw an illustrative example of this when I went to a friend’s house, and I saw my grade-school friend chatting it up with his parents. My friend and his siblings weren’t talking about awful grades, discipline, or sports, they were talking about stuff, interesting, uninteresting, and funny and funny stuff, and their parents were listening. There were no raised voices, neither party required the other to take them more seriously, and there were no clever, demeaning jokes about the other. Those parents knew things about their kids, and I’m not talking about the important things either. They knew about the stupid things their kids liked, and they appeared to enjoy talking about those things with them. They had what we call a relationship, a relationship that was outside what I considered the normal parent-child framework. I wasn’t jealous, because I didn’t really want a relationship with my step-father, but being among normal kids discussing normal matters with their parents did make me feel like a stranger in a strange land, and they accomplished that simple feat by spending massive amounts of time with one another. It was weird. 

Be a Hypocrite

“Do everything you can to make his youth last as long as possible,” someone told me when my son was too young for that advice to apply. I didn’t know what that meant at first. How do I make their years of youth last longer? We’ve all heard that phrase, and we all know and don’t know what everyone is talking about.  What do kids, preteens, and teenagers prize more than anything else? That’s easy: Fun. Next question, what’s their definition of fun? We, as parents, will always be the primary influence on them, but friends provide their primary definition of fun, and that changes with age, sometimes dramatically. We might not even know about the progressive changes in his definition of fun as he ages, but it can change them and bring about a premature close to their naive, carefree youth. After a certain age, the only role, influence, or power a parent has in the arena of fun is adversarial. Our job, as their parent, is to sniff such situations out, slam the door on them, and take all the slings and arrows that follow.  “They’re going to do it anyway,” my friends’ parents said when we were teens. “I’d prefer that they do it around me, where I can keep an eye on them.” I had some great times in those cool parents’ homes and under those rules, and my definition of fun changed dramatically. I went from thinking that all I had to do was throw a ball around to have fun, to needing a beer, a girl, and whatever substance I could find to further explore the definition of fun. Now that I’m an old man, I no longer see those progressions as inevitable, and when I think about how damaging those inevitable progressions were to me, I cringe. Those years of innocent, naive youth could’ve lasted a lot longer if I made different friends in high school, and those kids had better parents. I heard my friends’ parents further justify their actions by saying, “We can’t tell them not to do it, because we did it. What kind of hypocrites would we be if we didn’t allow them to do it?” Wait a second here, how did you make this about you? It’s not about you anymore, and I’ve even heard you acknowledge that on different topics, but you make this decision based on you? If we take a step back and analyze that now, age-old excuse for not being a better parent, we could view our fear that someone, somewhere might see us as a hypocrite, as somewhat narcissistic. In lieu of the carnage I inflicted on my youth, as a result of these justifications, I now challenge other parents to be more hypocritical for their kid’s sake. “Call me a hypocrite, because that’s what I am,” we should say to our kids. “Give me the badge, or scarlet letter ‘H’, and I will wear it proudly. You might thank me one day when you’re old enough to appreciate what I’m doing here and why, or you won’t. I don’t give a bit! We can talk about the things I did at your age, and I will detail for you why I don’t want you to do them. I’m not going to allow you to do the stupid things I did to wreck my life and end my youth far too early.” I don’t know if the ‘they’re going to do it anyway’ message started in the movies, daytime talk shows, or if it simply passed down from generation to generation, but some parents I know suggest that they’re willing to permit their children to do the dumbest things, under their roof, with the hope that they never hear their children call them a hypocrite. “Why do you care if they call you names?” I asked one of them. “You did it too!” they say, reminding me of what we all did together, and they say that with all sorts of exclamation points and index fingers pointed at me, as if I haven’t examined my life properly. “I did,” I say, “and I know how it wrecked me. Why would I stand back and allow him to wreck himself in the same way?” “Well, he’s going to do it anyway,” she said. I could’ve asked her how she knows that, or I could’ve said no he won’t, but the truth is she doesn’t know, and either do I. I do know that I’m not going to concede to that supposed inevitability to such a degree that I permit him to do it in my home, with the fear that he might one day call me a name, like hypocrite.

Respect Your Authority

You provide the definition of authority in your child’s life, and they will hold onto that definition of authority for the rest of their lives. I didn’t think any of my bosses knew what they were talking about, until they proved otherwise. Was this a reflection of how I viewed my step-dad, or was I just an overly skeptical person? Someone suggested that a child’s definition of an ultimate authority figure in life, reflects their definition of God. If they viewed their dad as the ultimate authority figure in their lives, and that dad was a mean, unforgiving man, chances are the kid will view God in the same manner. If their dad was loving and kind, they will view God in the same manner, generally speaking. So, if a parent wants to see how their children view them, they might want to ask their child how they view God. It’s an interesting theory, whether 100% true or not, and it is a nice addendum to the idea that you provide them the definition of an ultimate authority figure.

Needless to say, these are formative years for your child, and what they believe at six-years-old will have a profound effect on what they think when they’re thirty-six. This is why I dismiss those who view my definition of authority as ego-driven. I see it as the opposite. I see it as my job to provide my child with a level of consistency that will hopefully lead to a sense of clarity. He experiences confusion now, and he will experience inconsistency and confusion throughout his chase of happiness and success, but if he has a, “I know what my parents would do in this situation, and I know what they would think” base, it could help him make better decisions.

Thus, when he experiences confusion, I see it as my job to help him end that, and I try to answer him with as much objectivity as I can. My kid knows this particular answer so well that he repeats it with me whenever he has a question, “Some people believe this … Some people believe that, and I believe this …” I then back my answer up with as many facts and opinions as I know, and I try to provide as much information about “the other opinions” as I do mine. I try to answer his questions comprehensively and with as much objectivity as I possibly can, because I do not want someone else to tell him things he’s never heard before. I approach these questions from the perspective that other people don’t care about him as much as I do, and they will tell him the other, negative things for their own purposes. I try to tell him about all things beautiful and wonderful, but I also want him to know about the ugly and awful, and I want him to hear it from me first before some less responsible person tells him about it.

If you’re one who puts a focus on the beautiful and the wonderful, and you shield them from the awful, because they’re kids, and they don’t need to hear that mess. They’ll learn it from someone, somewhere. They’ll then consider that purveyor of the awful a cool truth-teller who treated them like an adult, and you’ll never be able to recover your role in that arena. 

I also try to keep it concise enough to adhere to the constraints of his attention span. (The latter can be challenging at times.) One of the simple keys to success and happiness, I’ve given him, is to try to enjoy being around people as much as they enjoy being around you.

One of the numerous challenges to your authority will be excuses. Excuses work, because we love and care for our child, and we know that they have challenges. One of the primary challenges in their life is, of course, grades. One thing we hear in our home is, “Well Jerry and Judy got worse grades than I did. Jerry got a 60%, and Judy got a 45%. I know this is hard to believe, but I actually got one of the best grades in the class.” This, of course, is the time-honored excuse for bad grades, and the time-honored response is, “I don’t care about Jerry or Judy, or anyone else in the class.” I’ve repeated that line a number of times, but I put an end to that excuse with one heart-felt response once, when I repeated that line, but added the addendum, “I only care about you. You might live your whole life and never run across someone who cares about you as much as I do.” I meant all that, and I looked him in the eye when I said it, and he held my gaze as I said it. He saw how true it was to me, and he hasn’t tried to drop that meaningless excuse on me again. “She always had my back,” a friend of mine said at his mother’s funeral. “Even when I was wrong, she took my side.” He was right, of course, and I saw it on numerous occasions. His mom was as loyal to he and his sister as any parent I’ve witnessed, but by always taking their side without qualification, she failed to hold them accountable for their actions. It led the two of them to commit numerous criminal and self-destructive acts, and they were only held to account for their actions a few times. The only damage they received, in my opinion, was to their character. As one who has yet to manage the arena of excuses, the only thing I can add here is it takes a deft hand to learn how to manage their excuses and their challenges, because we can’t accept or refuse to accept excuses with a broad brush, for that would be a reflection on us, but we also don’t want them to use excuses as a crutch for not adhering to guiding principles or performing to the best of their ability.

As a child of an older parent, who spent most of his life as a bachelor, my dad wasn’t exactly honed in on parenting. As long as I didn’t embarrass him in front of other parents, teachers, or any other authority figures by doing something awful, I was on my own. My friends envied me for that, and I loved it for a while, but I began to view my step-dad’s laissez faire style of parenting as him not caring as much as my friends’ parents did.

Get Old

If it’s too late for you to get old, physically and mentally, because you’ve already had the kid, I suggest you try getting old spiritually. What’s the difference between old parents and young? We can answer that question with another question, what’s the difference between parents and grandparents? Older people, in general, have more of a ‘been there, done that’ mentality that suggests they no longer have that unquenchable need to do ‘it’ so often that they become ‘it’. Older people, generally speaking, are satisfied, settled, and they tend to be happier. Older parents and grandparents give young kids more time and attention. They actually listen to the nonsense that comes out of a kid’s mouth, and they interact with them on a level younger parents rarely do. Older parents also don’t resent this new ball of flesh and bones standing before them asking stupid questions and taking up so much of their time and limiting their freedom with such nonsense. If we boil all of the elements of parenting together, the big difference between older parents and younger ones is resentment. Younger parents love their children from beginning to end, and they probably love their child as much as any older parent can or will, or it’s so relative to the person that it’s often tough to suggest that one is better than the other. The younger parent still has an almost incurable itch to do things, see things, hang out with their friends, and pursue their career to its fullest extent, and they can perceive that child as inhibiting them from enjoying their younger years as much as they could. If I had a child as a young adult, my guess is that resentment would’ve influenced my relationship with them. How much of an influence would it have had? Impossible to know, but I still had a lot of youth to get out before I got old. Having a child as an older man was perfect for me, because I already had most of that out of my system by the time he arrived. So, my advice is to get old before you have a child, and if that’s not possible, get old mentally and spiritually. 

It’s Not about You Anymore

This fourth rule of parenting is more of a mindset than anything else. Your life’s not over of course, but if you’re going to try to be a decent parent, you should at least concede that it’s not all about you anymore. “It was never about me,” a parent said. “My parents never paid attention to me, my whole life, and I turned out just fine.” The very idea that you would say such a thing tells me that even if your parents didn’t pay attention to you someone else did. Someone felt so sorry for you that they filled the gap. They showered you with sympathy, because your parents didn’t pay enough attention to you, and you now want us to feed your sympathy fix? We’re talking about devoting attention to your kids, and you want us to pay more attention to you? My first response to someone who offers me such a figure eight is, ‘So, due to the fact that your parents did nothing for you, you’re going to compound that error by doing nothing for your kids?’ Before I say that, however, I realize that as confused as I am by such a reply, I’m probably not half as confused as the person who gives it. If it’s possible, I suggest we try to stop the narcissism and realize that in the grand scheme of your life, it’s not about you anymore.

Do no harm

“My actions aren’t harming the kids,” one parent said. I’m going to make an outrageous, bold, and opinion-based (as opposed to fact-based) statement that just about everything we do affects our children. They might not be paying attention to us, and they might not react to what we do, but some of the whims we have to be something other than a good parent have a collateral damage effect that might not be apparent on day one or week one, but like those old dot-matrix selfies we used to make of ourselves in the 70’s, the tiny, insignificant things we do, could end up forming a relatively dysfunctional child over time.

Read, Listen to, and Talk about Parenting

The very idea that you’ve read this far suggests that you’re probably a good parent. The idea that you’re open to considering another person’s ideas on parenting, no matter who they are, suggests that you’re interested in learning, developing, and eventually becoming a better parent today than you were yesterday. Being interested in others’ ideas suggests that you’re trying, and you’re probably already doing a relatively good job as a parent.

Become Wise

The difference between intelligence and wisdom is the that latter involves learning from experience. Our grades in school suggest that if we had any intelligence in our youth, we rarely applied it, and some of the moronic decisions we made after school suggests that our scores haven’t improved much. The eighth rule of parenting suggests that if we learn anything from our past, and we’re able to pass that along, we’re imparting wisdom. Parents are the beacon in their darkness. They’re as confused about the way the world works as we were at their age, so they ask us questions, and we answer, and they learn the ways of the world from us. Your kid is not an online message board for all of your ideas. Be careful and as thorough as possible with the ideas that you plant in their head. It’s almost impossible to be objective, and some say it’s impossible. We all have knowledge, ideas, and positions that are subjected to us and our upbringing. If it’s near-impossible-to-impossible, why try? If we don’t make some effort to teach them in the most objective manner we can, they might end up making all of the same mistakes we did.

Keep it Simple Stupid

The ninth rule of quality parenting leans on the eighth in that our kids view the world through our lens. They will learn from teachers, their friends, other family members, and they’ll learn various nuggets of information from too many people to list, but we are their primary influence. If we’re doing it right, every piece of knowledge they learn will pass through you, both positively and negatively. “Don’t underestimate them,” was the piece of advice a three-time parent told me when I became a first-timer. I valued that advice for a time, until I realized that a better course of action might be to underestimate them and let them surprise us. If we underestimate them, we keep it simple. This is not to suggest that we dumb it down for them, but that we exhibit some patience for the gradual time frames it takes a young human to learn. I’ve heard social commentators talk about the learning process that animals go through. “How long does it take a horse to learn how to walk after it falls out of the womb?” they ask. “How long does it take for a young chimp to learn what it needs to know? It takes the human being eighteen years, sometimes longer, to be able to competently exist in the adult world of their species.” I considered that a humorous profundity, initially, until I compared what those other species’ need to learn and what a young human needs to learn to compete among their peers. If we choose to underestimate them, they will surprise us with their knowledge, and when they drop those big questions on us it could be a hint that they’re ready. That’s when we leap to action. I prefaced my answer to one of these big questions about the reproduction process with a word of caution. “I’m going to launch, until you tell me to stop, and I want you to stop me when this becomes too much for you.” He did tell me to stop, and he added, with a pained expression, that he thought he probably waited too long. “Ok, when you’re ready for more, don’t go to your friends, or any other adult. You come to me.” Another element to keeping it simple is to try to avoid introducing our confusion into their thoughts. The confusion involves fact versus opinion and all of the variable truths we know that underly our definition of fact. We might think we’re helping them achieve some of the advanced intelligence it took us decades to achieve. Depending on their age, of course, they’re still trying to grapple with how one plus one equals two in math, and we’re trying to teach them our advanced knowledge on human interaction. There are all sorts of exceptions to the keep it simple rule, of course, as we need to test them and push them if we want to help them learn and advance, but if we allow them to dictate the pace of their learning, we might increase their retention level tenfold.

Lie to Your Kids

When one of my friends got pregnant, she was glowing internally and externally. One of the beautiful, wonderful things she whispered to her newborn was, “I will never lie to you.” The thing with beautiful and wonderful whispers is that they often turn out to be flawed. There’s nothing wrong with being honest with your children, but there’s honest and there’s brutally honest. There are some circumstances when the truth has diminishing returns. Example: Your daughter is a strong, independent woman who has strong ties to her flawed father, your ex-husband. She has become a relatively successful woman, and a well-rounded adult that other people enjoy being around, and although it grates on you, you know that 50% of her admirable qualities are due to her strong relationship with him. So, the next time she swerves into some sort of character assessment of your ex-, you’re going to drop the bomb on her. You think she finally deserves to know the truth about the man she reveres. If you view this in an objective manner, you’ll know that it does nothing for her to learn the truth, but you think she’s been in the dark for too long, and you think she’s old enough now to know the truth about him. Stop right there, before we go another further, does she love him, and will she love him forever, and does she need him, and will she need him forever? Will he make her so happy for the rest of her life that your testimony might actually do more harm than good? Are you going to drop this bomb on her for her own good, or yours? We all have competitive instincts in any given situation, and this is a situation in which our loved one does not know that we were the “good guy” all along, because we’ve been fudging the truth to her for so long for her benefit, and to promote the good relationship she had with him. These competitive instincts kick in when she constantly reminds you that she sees your messy, spiritually devastating divorce as an amicable one, and she’s done this for far too long in your estimation. She deserves to know the truth, you say to yourself, or do you want vindication, validation, and all of the terms you could loosely define as synonyms of narcissism? You tell her. You drop the bomb on her, and the bomb, and all of its shrapnel has a devastating effect on her. Now she won’t talk to him, and the other day she said something along the lines of “Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner? It feels like my whole life has been based on a lie.” And she now has a hole in her soul that’s as deep as yours that threatens to eventually mirror your wound, but you got all of the validation and vindication you wanted, as she now sees her dad as a father, and a bad guy. Congratulations, and my condolences. Some of the times the truth has diminishing returns. I write the latter, because I met a woman who would never disparage her ex-husband to her daughter, even though he wasn’t a good guy, and he was largely an uninvolved parent who was ambivalent to her existence for much of her maturation, and her daughter forgot almost all of that. The daughter apparently doesn’t remember examples of his negative attributes or characteristics, and her mother would never do anything to spark those memories. The mother considers her daughter’s uninformed relationship with her father as beneficial to the daughter, even when, EVEN WHEN, the daughter’s faulty memory has proven falsely detrimental to the mother. The daughter will also never have an epiphany on subject, and the mother has vowed to never remind her. “I think I’m going to nominate you for parent of the year,” I told this mother. “I know I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put up with it. Especially when she ignorantly claims you were the one at fault. I would eventually break after one of her ignorant little comments, and I think there might be some infinitesimal nugget below 100% that wouldn’t eventually break. I don’t know how you do it.” She said something about doing it for her daughter, even though the daughter won’t speak to her, has rejected her mom almost completely, and she shows no signs of ever reversing her stance.

Bore Them with Consistent, Quality Parenting

“Parenting is one of the most difficult jobs in the world,” people will tell you.

“Really?” I say now, ten years in. “I really enjoy it.” There are times when it’s frustrating, confusing, and time-consuming, but I really like being a dad. I enjoy spending time with him. I like being there for him, and I love letting him know that I’m one of the few people he’ll ever meet who genuinely and comprehensively cares about what happens to him without conditions. He might take all that for granted now, but I have firsthand knowledge that taking a parent for granted is one of the best backhanded compliments he can ever give me. He knows I’ll always be on the sidelines, figuratively and literally, cheering him on. He knows I’ll always be there for him no matter what, and right now that bores him so much that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

If you are a first-time parent, and you’ve heard that it’s the most rewarding job in the world, it’s not. It’s not, if you’re seeking immediate rewards. That kid will probably avoid rewarding you with any forms of gratitude, compliments, or outward displays of love. And if you ever complain about that, someone will probably say something that is impossible to define like, “Parenting is its own reward.” I still don’t know what that means, but it might have something to do with the idea that you’ll always be there for them, as the consistent beacon in a world of confusing darkness, and you’ll always be “so you that I can’t imagine you doing what you said you’ve done.” If you do it right you’ll be so boring that you might become the one thing, the only thing, they can count on life.