I Love This

The below blog entry is taken from a Blog I love so much: Motherhood Is Not for Wimps (the link is posted on the right side here of my own blog). Liz, the writer, has just had her third baby and has asked her brother to write a guest post. He is also a new dad (2 months in). I LOVE his perspective on being PRESENT. It is actually something Paul and I are very cognizant of and have implemented since the day Anna was born. In the beginning, I was afraid to confuse being present with obsessing over Anna. But Paul and I both feel innately that what's the point in having a kid if you don't fully engage with them? They're a litte person. So many parents can simply "check out". And believe me, it'd be much easier to check out on days that are already draining and demanding. No lie, I am often grateful for Anna's early bedtime so that I can unwind. But even on days when Paul and I are both super exhausted for one reason or another, an inner voice remind us that parenting is a non-stop job and that's what we signed up for going in. Fortunately, Paul and I have great work ethic that I guess just keeps us going even when we're too tired. Anyway, I like this post from Liz's brother:

GUEST POST:What, me guest?
April 24th, 2009

Everybody asks me about what it’s like being a dad. I don’t want to tell them. Not because I’m afraid or overwhelmed, but because there is nothing new I can contribute. Everything everybody has ever told me, everything I thought was trite, and I only half listened to, about it being the greatest and most rewarding experience of your life – well all of that is true. And it’s been uttered by most of the nearly 3.5 billion fathers in the history of mankind. If you’re a parent you know what I’m talking about, if not you don’t, but I wish upon you that you might someday feel it, because nothing in the world prepares you for the first time your daughter smiles at you, and you know it’s because it’s you (as opposed to the fact she just pooped, which to her is always cause for celebration).

So I won’t discuss the pleasures of it – if you have a child you know, if you don’t, I can only be condescending and tell you you won’t get it until you have one, and since I hate condescending people…. Well I’ll shut up on how life changing this experience is.
So what can I say… What can I contribute to this blog?

Well, there is only one thing I have learned of any value (besides which end gets the diaper, a lesson which staggeringly improved my and my daughters relationship). That lesson is presence.
Presence. What is that? Certainly there are parents who are with their children all the time, and parents who work all the time and can’t be there with their kids. Neither is presence.
Presence, for me, means being there with my daughter. It means not thinking about the newest character on “Lost” to be… well lost, or the latest new idea for a book, or what the Dow Jones is doing. Honestly it doesn’t even involve thinking about my daughter, about her future, how I’ll pay for her education, or what will she chose to be.

Being present, to me, means being there on her terms. It means congratulating her when she poops, passes gas, lifts her head, or for the most part accomplishes much of anything. It means watching her actively, not simply to make sure she has not gotten into trouble, but for it’s own sake. It means putting a hand on her, not to steady her, but just to let her know that I am… well, present.

Sometimes presence means being involved, sometimes it involves just watching, but if it is true presence, it is always active, not passive. It costs energy, you have to make an effort and you have to let her be your focus.

Therein lies the rub. I don’t have a lot of energy. I get to stay home all day, I don’t even need to go into some job for $10 an hour, and I still feel too tired to be “present” in my relationship with Emily. Too often I feel like just tossing her onto the changing table, slapping on a pair of diapers, and watching television while I rock her to sleep. I get so few simple pleasures in life compared to B.E. (Before Emily), that I furiously hold onto the ones I get.

And yet, if I allow my love for her to fill me, if I watch her with the eyes and wonder of a new father, it’s not as hard to be “present” as I would think. And presence, while a wonderful ideal, can’t be achieved perpetually. You can not be present 100% of the time, even when you’re there all the time. Much of the time you’ll walk through the day a zombie, and you’ll not have a lot of energy to spare.

Yet above all else – loving your child unconditionally, keeping them from licking the electrical sockets, feeding and swaddling them, speaking to and singing to them – above all that, if someone asked me to write an essay, a “blog” if you will… If some sadist who thinks I have gobs of time to spend writing on subjects about which I know very little asked me to write on parenting and say something I thought was important on the subject – above all those things I would say that finding a little time each day, even if it’s only 15 minutes a day, to be “present”, has been both the most rewarding, and in my mind the most important part of being a father. Be present, and as far as I can tell, the rest takes much better care of itself.

Nick