May latest article from Alive Magazine talks about using September - the notorious back-to-school month - as the real springboard from which to launch changes and/or improvements to your own routine. New Year's resolutions are fine, but motivating yourself to make positive changes is challenging enough without kickstarting them during the dark, cold winter months.
Discussions about women's biological clocks are fairly routine. Interestingly, studies have begun to pop up showing that men, too, experience decreasing fertility sooner than we first thought. When asked, men also admitted to feeling deep regret about choosing career over parenthood.
This was the topic of my most recent visit to Breakfast Television:
When is the Right Time to Become a Father?
I have always craved solitude. Perhaps this is a symptom of the fractious household I grew up in. Heaven meant alone time, either in front a mirror imagining myself the Garfunkel half of the duo while lip-syncing into a deodorant stick, or lying in the dark at bedtime being entertained by Bob Newhart’s standup routine threading through my cassette player.
Now I am a 44 year-old husband, a father of two children—ages 11 and 9—and the co-owner of a 1955 detached cottage which is making demands on my DIY skills that I can’t keep up with.
I am gainfully employed at a job which allows me to earn a decent wage while also being available to involve myself deeply in household chores, to coax my daughter through piano practices and stand at the sidelines during her soccer games, and be a committed volunteer at my children’s school.
I am a solid citizen.
I am an evolved male.
What do I want for Father’s Day? For it all to go away.
There is one universal truth for parents: the moment you accept the responsibility of child-rearing is the same moment you abdicate the right to absolute selfishness, forever.
There will be date nights; there may be weekends away without the kids; and there are sleepaway camps which provide a sense of freedom while they ironically also instill a sense worry and longing. Even once alone, reclined in an Adirondack, it is impossible for a parent to psychologically transcend their role. We will read two pages of John Irving; then we may spend a moment spotting shapes of mammals in the clouds; then we will ease ourselves into a shallow dream; then, inevitably, we’ll wonder how the kids are doing.
You may have gotten away, but there are no direct flights to true escapism.
We are kind and loving, but not completely selfish and free.
I miss selfish and free.
There seem to be only two of the three-hundred-and-sixty-five days per year when a parent can attempt unabashed narcissism: Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, and on his or her birthday.
Despite that greedy right, there is an aura of Romper Room circle-time celebration surrounding Parents’ Days.
It is a day of gathering.
This is especially true when your children are tweens, as mine are.
They have outgrown the ignorance of toddlerhood—when they present you with a pipe cleaner stickman, and can then be led away and distracted by sandboxes and beetles. By the time they are teenagers, you are as relevant to them as a bathing cap in the Sahara, especially on Father’s Day. They yearn to give you the gift of abstention from your household on your auspicious day; a day with Daddy is uncool.
But, tweens? They still devote significant classroom time crafting keepsakes and composing poetry they can barely stand to withhold from you until the third Sunday in June.
“I’m so excited to show you what I made for youuuuuu!”
Crap.
They still want you, and they want you to want them.
“Daddy needs some alone time for Father’s Day,” is not only a bizarre and abstract concept to 9-year-olds, it is also hurtful to them. Once it’s run through the tween filter, it is received simply as, “I don’t want to be with you today.” The message is distilled into an empirical form of selfishness and rejection.
How can you want to be away from me? “Me” is love, “Me” is fun, “Me” is your children, you jerk!
But, I’m tired.
My Gen-X level of engagement and involvement is exhausting. I’m dizzy, perhaps due to too much helicopter parenting?
I want twenty-four hours of selfish unpredictability.
I want to lay on my bedroom floor and stare at the ceiling, listening to the baseboard heaters crackle until...until I don’t want to do that anymore.
I want to play half of a song on that piano I don’t play anymore, and listen to its sound echo off the walls of my empty house. Then I’ll play another half of a song, and then maybe a whole song. And I’d like to maybe play for an hour, or just for five minutes, and then maybe go back to that later.
I want to fall asleep in front of a movie—perhaps one of the Oscar nominees...any of them, really, I’ve seen none of them.
When I wake up from my nap, I want to rewind it and watch the rest without scolding myself for not having started dinner.
I want to stand in my son’s room and talk to his guinea pig in an honest way that I can’t do when people are home because they’ll think I’m crazy.
A heart-to-heart with a rodent who also has nowhere to be.
I just want time.
Time is that thing that, at 44-years-old, is in decline—certainly in terms of quality, if not quantity.
I’m in love with fatherhood. And loneliness, in a permanent state, is a tragedy. But, like a favorite dessert or a seat under a tree, solitude would trigger some necessary decompression.
I believe being a parent is a gift. But, by definition, it is a gift which requires you to give and give and give.
On Father’s Day, I just want to take one...full...day.
I’ve lost my corny imagination which convinced me I was Art Garfunkel; I’ve thrown out that Sanyo cassette player; I don’t want to also dismiss my need for solitude.
I just don’t know how to explain that to my kids without bruising their hearts just a little.
So, on Father’s Day, we’ll do something together, as the family we have worked so hard to build.
Perhaps I’ll call in sick the following Monday, and spend some time talking to that caged rodent.
I'm happy to announce that my book "What Do I Do While You're Pregnant?", in addition to being available for Kindle and in paperback on Amazon, is now also being distributed through all the major online retail outlets. This means it can now also be enjoyed on the Nook, iPad, and Kobo. You can find it easily through these links (or, by, you know, Googling):
iTunes Chapters/Indigo Barnes & Noble Amazon
A great gift for any new parent, or parent-to-be!
Many parenting books deal with pregnancy and mothers-to-be. Some mention fatherhood or focus on the humorous side of a dad who is all thumbs.
This book is a unique story by an expectant dad who is remarkably candid about how terrifying and overwhelming it is for BOTH parents to become responsible for a baby for the first time. It is respectful of both sexes; remarkably aware of the incomparable experience of physically carrying a baby for nine months, as well as how confusing it is for a father-to-be on the sidelines wrestling with how to voice his insecurities.
How does he encourage and comfort his wife, while also balancing and expressing his own worries about becoming a first-time parent? When he is told he should be 100% involved in the pregnancy, what does that mean? Can he insist on knowing the baby's sex? Should he be planning his own baby shower? Who can he talk to about the overwhelming job of being the source of information for an entire extended family?
What Do I Do While You're Pregnant? is an honest and touching book by a dad-to-be wrestling to find his place. He balances news of his possible infertility and his pregnant wife's medical emergencies with his own phantoms symptoms and sleepless nights. This funny and poignant story respects an experience which is unique to both first-time parents.
For my latest segment on City TV's Breakfast Television Montreal, Elias Makos and I talk about the challenges facing a working parent with a sick child. How do you manage deadlines? Do you have an understanding employer?
Enjoy, and thanks for watching.
Being a Working Parent with a Sick Child
This another in a series from my weekly column, "Questions Parents Ask" at Lifeworks.com. It was originally published Christmastime 2013. Over the past year...little has changed. Enjoy!
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My stockings were not hung by the chimney with care. They were hung with a hammer and a slight bout of impatience. My index finger, a victim of a wayward blow, began to swell.
My daughter, my son, my niece and my nephew ‘decorated’ the tree. They started by stringing the lights around my ‘discount’ spruce (which, after tax and the couple of extra garlands my wife threw on the counter, cost only slightly more than the retail one I bought last year). Before the kids were halfway done, the tree looked like a hostage of the Christmas season: it so was tightly wrapped in lighted electrical wire, its branches pointing directly north, victims of a rude and violent cinching. It took me twenty minutes to free them, another twenty minutes to re-light the bush, and a final twenty to vacuum needles which were being scattered towards heating ducts.
At least, unlike parents, the tree doesn’t have to become the Ethan Hunt of Christmas shopping:
“Hello Mr. Hunt. This mission, should you choose to accept it, includes the following tasks:
This message will self-destruct in five minutes...which will seem like a relative eternity when compared to the minutes of actual relaxation you are about to experience over the holidays.”
Did you ever wonder if, perhaps, there is a reason Santa only delivers once annually? Perhaps he avoids using a noisy motorised vehicle, and evades and face-to-face contact, after millennia of experience with children.
Maybe that’s the real lesson of Christmas: go like gangbusters for twenty-four solid hours, then retreat to cottage country - as cold as it may be - and take the next three-hundred-sixty-four days off.
I write a weekly column, "Questions Parents Ask" at Lifeworks.com. I have been authoring it for nearly two years. There are themes which return repeatedly, especially around hallmark calendar dates.
I thought it would be relevant to repost this particular column on my blog.
The financial demands put on parents leading into the holiday season (by their children as well as by the parents themselves) can put tremendous strain on a family budget.
Trying to find different and believable ways to dodge questions about expensive presents - and whether Santa will bring them, and why other friends have them - can be exhausting.
This column hints at a couple of ideas which can - especially when reinforced over an extended period of time - help ease the burden.
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Flashy electronics that are coming down in price, combined with peer pressure, and school extras “all the other kids have” (iPads are becoming more and more prevalent, but are they necessary?) are pushing parents to buy things they can’t afford for their children.
How do you say “no”?
Keith Donoghue, a financial planner with Assante Capital Management says the first step is to make sure your children have a clear understanding of where your money comes from. That explanation should take place before you and your child are in front of a shelf full of X-Box games.
“You can explain that you go to work every day,” he says, “and for the work that you perform, you are paid a certain amount of money. So each day there is only a certain amount of money that you can spend, as you should never spend more than you earn. Then I would start to explain that there are things that you need to pay for every day before you can buy the latest gadget, toy, or fashion item, such as: savings, rent/mortgage, food, clothing, utilities, the car, gas, insurance, etc.”
He emphasized that savings is first on the list, and that it is never too early to teach your kids to pay themselves first.
Go through the exercise with your children: calculate with them how much they earn through cash gifts, allowances, paychecks, etc. Have them decide how to allocate their funds, beginning with a 10 percent savings, and including setting some money aside for charity. This way, they will better understand the concept of how long it takes -- or how hard you have to work -- to buy a big ticket item.
Donoghue suggests not only helping children understand how they might earn extra cash (shovelling driveways, mowing lawns, babysitting.), but also how to stay focused on financial goals. “If they get easily sidetracked by impulse buys, one trick would be to have them tape a picture of their goal (e.g., a bicycle) to their wallet, so that they see their objective every time they go to spend some money.”
Children have a hard time accepting “no” for an answer. Where finances are concerned, that stubbornness is partly due to a lack of understanding of how hard it was for their parents to earn that money in the first place. You can teach some valuable lessons that could also save you money.
In January, I wrote this post about a Master of Public Policy student at Simon Fraser University who, as part of her thesis, was studying Canadian fathers' use of parental leave.
Now a graduate of the programme, Xiaoyang Luo completed her thesis "Organisational Factors Impacting Fathers’ Use of Parental Benefits in Canada". Some of those conclusions have been summarized in this article she wrote for the Vancouver Sun.
It is another set of findings which further support what more and more dads are accepting as fact: an involved father enriches his children's lives and also builds a stronger relationship with the other parent.
The article also discusses the importance of employers accepting the merits of flexible paternity leave. The full thesis is available here: Organisational factors impacting fathers' use of parental benefits in Canada
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE:
