Thank you my children

… my friends, my teachers, my window to life

Once upon a time, I was a man. A self-satisfied, know-it-all man, living in his own bubble. Then life took a scary turn into the unknown and an old, unfriendly looking lady handed me a meat lump and said “Congratulations, here is your son”. Honestly, my head was blank at the point and I was pretty tired and scared after seeing my wife going through labour. I said “Thank you” and thought to myself, “Now what the hell am I supposed to do with this?” Answers were coming, oh yeah they were and I was in for a huge surprise.

Naïvely I always thought that the parenting package also came with a set of super powers. It didn’t take me long to realise that I was completely wrong. Patience and energy levels were running thin, you actually start day dreaming about dreaming. Probably one of the first things you have to deal with is the fact that babies poop a lot, stinking up the whole place every single time! Perfectly timing that throwing up milk/curd act on a nicely ironed spotless shirt, to the point that you start thinking they are doing it on purpose.

And wait until they get sick for the first time, it usually happens around 2am in the morning, when you are just about to get comfortable with your pillow. Realising you have absolutely no clue how to deal with that situation, you might figure they should just get up and pop a few pills and just deal with it but no sir, you would be very wrong. You are going to spend the next little while figuring out the right place to get the right medication from, a non-trivial task for a first timer.

Once you finally return home feeling like superman, another adventure awaits. You realise that stuffing the magic potion in the tiny mouth is not as easy as you would like to think. After several attempts, the baby decides to have mercy on you and gulp a few drops down. Now you watch the baby patiently, checking the temperature, you wonder why the medicine hasn’t worked, you have after all given it a whole 30 seconds! Regardless of whatever happens next, you will probably remember that night for the rest of your life and at some point you will be able to laugh about it as well.

Trust me all of that is going to change, this is just the beginning and just like anything worth doing in life, the beginnings are always the hardest.

“Children are like blank canvases, you can paint whatever you want on them”, someone told me once, what an idiot!

When you plant a seed, you can water it, provide it with the right environment to grow up to be an actual plant, but you can never train it to give out daffodils instead of tulips. Being a hardcore programmer, my brain is trained to think in terms of inputs and outputs, predictable and consistent results, fortunately raising a human is an entirely different story. “I made this funny face yesterday and it cracked my son up, why isn’t he loving it today?” Well, hello! Other human beings besides yourself are allowed to have mood-swings, be bored and have short attention spans!

Amazingly, even though these little creatures can’t talk, there is still a huge amount of communication happening, all you have to do is start focusing on the whole person rather than just the words. Your kid is going to skill you up and will save you on that communication workshop you have been meaning to attend, which was essentially going to tell you that 90% of the communication is non-verbal.

Things get really interesting when your babies grow up a little and you start having actual conversations with them. Talking to them is like an ongoing refresher course on humanity. For instance you start having these strange feelings when lying to someone over the phone, you haven’t felt like this in a while, you don’t understand whats happening to you and then all of sudden it hits you, its shame that you are feeling. Just because you were telling your child that lying is bad, a few sleeping cells of your brain woke up as well. During the process of “imparting wisdom” on your kids, you will actually learn and re-learn quite a few things. They are going to poke holes in your wisdom and you are not going to like it, so be prepared to re-think, research and be okay with not knowing everything.

Having had a pretty shite childhood myself, I had nothing to compare my parenting skills against, probably the only guideline was “I don’t want to be like my parents”. Sitting down one day I had an epiphany, my bad childhood had a purpose. Its sole purpose was to turn me into a better father for my kids. With that understanding, I was able to finally forgive my parents somewhat and move on.

I am a proud father of two beautiful children and it amazes me everyday that regardless of all my weaknesses, my kids still love me, hug me and kiss me. They think I am superman and I am the smartest person in the world. It humbles me everyday that I have been blessed with this responsibility. I just need to find my place in the cycle, all it asks of me is to ensure I nurture the seed and help it become a full grown plant rather than manufacture something new.

Its hard to admit but I think my children have taught me more than I have taught them, I am today a better person because of them. They have taught me how to forgive, how to smile. They have taught me how to move on and how to make the best of what I have. The best part is that they have given me the childhood I never had by showing me how to be a child.

So my children, if you ever read this, I love you dearly and I thank you for coming in to my life and giving me the opportunity to be around you, in reality you took more care of me than I ever did of you. Feel proud in the fact that you have shown a grown man how to live, now go on and make the world a better place by just being you.