Notes to my grandchild(ren), as yet unconceived

Every generation starts out not even knowing our right hand from our left.  We don't know how to speak.  We don't have teeth.  We have to learn how to eat.  Old people have the advantage of perspective, which if appreciated, like a grand vista overlooking a vast expanse, can be edifying.  We might identify the trends and find a pattern -- the repeated errors and learn their remedies or how to avoid them.  We might grow wise.  But none of us starts out that way.  We're born knowing nothing at all.  

I was quite an arrogant youth.  I wouldn't have agreed about that, but it's true.  I deduced it, correctly: it comes from "arrogate" -- to claim, without justification.  Arrogance has nothing to do with confidence, aside from a superficial likeness.  Confidence is content to accept disagreement.  Arrogance has to be seen to be right -- it is insecure, and fragile.  Confidence accepts, arrogance argues.  One is gracious, the other is tribal.  

That's a distinction I would have profited from knowing.  Someone should have told me.  

My father meant well, but he was crippled.  He thought somehow that forbidding emotions would transform them into happiness and competence.  Suppression however is not actually any kind of disciple at all.  By lecturing about what a man should be, he thought he was teaching some kind of success.  He did not mean the harm he did to us.  His intentions were undermined by narcissism -- immaturity and unhealed wounds.  His theories about fatherhood were never corrected by their invalidation.  Thus, not theories at all, open to refinement -- rather, ideology and dogma.  I hadn't really thought about it, but I grew up in a cult.  

I raised your father with that in mind.  In contrast, I liked my little boy.  I enjoyed him, and respected him.  I let him know this, first because it was true, and also because such things need to be shown.  Hugs, and kisses, and tickles -- physical stuff, because touch is our first human experience -- fetal skin against uterine walls.  Love is not a drug, not a medicine -- these are always poisons, hopefully healing.  Love is a nutrient.  

I've allowed your father, in recent years as I write this, to see much more of how damaged I am as a man.  He didn't know.  But he's in his thirties now, late thirties, and successful, and secure, and even though it will be a burden on him, there is such a large opportunity for him to grow, emotionally and in his insight into a deeper wisdom.  I have been willing to -- well, personally it feels like I've devalued, almost degraded myself -- but, reveal myself, as crippled and neurotic, fearful, unsuccessful -- futile and ashamed.  A harsh legacy, but there was never deceit -- just appropriate truth, the revelation of which evolves. 

Part of my reevaluation of my own fathering, of your father, is where I could have been better.  I've never been shy about proclaiming how awesome I was as a dad.  It was a combination of learning from my father's mistakes, and doing the opposite -- as, for example, actually liking my son -- and also of simply being intuitive and observant -- of not being theoretical at the expense of, oh, reality.  But I didn't have exceptional insight about puberty.  That went well because of the solid childhood he had.  But, while I gave him his teenage space, appropriately, there was something missing.  I know this, because of his own teenage arrogance.  Maybe it's an inevitable stage.  But I could have made the transition out of it easier, somehow.  I know there must be a way to do this.  I just didn't know.  

Fortunately, some of the hard lessons the Army taught him dealt with this. The outcome was fortunate.  The lessons were hard.  Why did it have to come to that? So hard?  That's on me.  But I did my best. As my own father did -- his best.  We only know what we learn, and we find our lessons where we may.  In savage and depriving childhoods, or in the silence of unrecognized ignorance.  Our response, in every case, is of love, or bitterness.  

So you, a grandchild who may never be born, well, that's how it always is -- each generation is produced and turned loose with hardly any guidance at all -- in this case, because there was a message but no one there to hear.  Or maybe I won't live to know you -- I may be just a name, an important if distant influence upon your life.  If I do know you, I do love you with all the capacity of my heart.  If I do not know you, I would have loved you that much.  

Papa