The best most sons and fathers can do...
As the norm for several of my blog posts goes, this one's inspired by another quote from something I watched on Netflix. Something, that coincided with a profound dream that I've had of late as well. I was watching Community on Netflix, and this was Season 5, Episode 10. The lead characters play a game of Dungeons and Dragons in an effort to rekindle a father-son relationship. In the end, one of the characters summarizes the father-son as:
The first one, I believe happened around Christmas. As part of my annual Christman ritual, I sat down to watch Love Actually. As I watched Liam Neeson struggle with reaching out to his son, on a lonely Christmas Eve in Madrid, I missed my father. It was a feeling I haven't had very often before and I struggled to come to terms with it. As if coming to terms with those feelings wasn't hard enough, being actually able to talk to my dad about it was near impossible for me. I couldn't just call up my father and tell him I miss him. That's just not how we're hardwired I guess. Somehow, I managed to write him a letter and sent it to him, wrapped up in a Merry Christmas wish.
The second one happened pretty recently. It's a vivid dream I had a few days ago, and it's pretty rare for me, but I woke up remembering every little detail about that dream. While the details of the dream are too personal, the dream ended up with me crying on my dad's shoulders, telling him how tired I feel, and I don't think I'll ever have enough courage to talk to him about this.
What I've realized over the past 6 months, I've consciously given a thought about my relationship with my father on numerous occasions. I've also heard how a lot of my friends have struggled to get through to their fathers. The first problem that we have is that as men, we struggle with acknowledging and talking about our feelings.
Men, for the most part of history and the present, are raised to be tough. For reasons that are simply too many to discuss in this blog, we grow up learning, consciously, or subconsciously, to keep our emotions in check. Phrases like, "Men don't cry", or "Men don't feel pain" are thrown about casually. By the time a man reaches adulthood, he has nearly perfected the art of keeping eating up his emotions. In each adult man's brain, is a whole metaphorical lab full of jars that contain nothing but suppressed emotions.
My father, to this day, cannot admit that he misses me. He will always call and say he called because "your mum is missing you" instead of actually acknowledging that he wanted to talk to me and see how things are.
By the time a man reaches a stage of his life when he is raising a son, not only has he perfected the art of bottling up his emotions, he has also seen enough of the world to know how hard life is. A man is well aware of his flaws and fears and weaknesses that he would never admit even if you put a gun to his head. However, they all come out on his son, and that's the second problem with men, pride.
A son is a man's chance to remake himself. Every time I missed a perfect score in math by a small margin, my dad would be dissatisfied and ask me what caused that mistake, rather than congratulate me. When he taught me cricket, he'd throw the ball at me just a bit quicker than I could manage to hit and tell me that in a real match, nobody will go easy on you, and I should be ready for that. I can talk about such examples all day.
While I was frustrated at each of those instances as a kid, I can now see the bigger picture. I can see how each of those little things made me into who I am. That need to push the boundaries in math led me to do well in my engineering and career as a whole. The quick balls thrown at me taught me to not complain when life is unfair and to work hard and get my share of the pie. Every little thing he did, things he learned in his experiences, he poured it into me.
A father would raise their sons to not only be as good as themselves but be even better than them. All the sacrifices, all the sleepless nights when the kid's unwell, every breath they take from the moment that boy is born, they're doing themselves all over again, but better. At the same time, most fathers would rather take a bullet than admit to their young man often enough of how he has done them proud. We, as adult men, reciprocate equally well. We'd rather take a bullet instead of saying thank you to our dads. We'll complain about how tough our dad was on us, rather than acknowledge how it made us a better man.
I think the roots of a lot of our struggles lie in these. Our inability to get through to each other starts with our inability to acknowledge half our emotions, and if that isn't hard enough, our pride doesn't let us speak about it. However, as long as we can figure out a way to not have to stand each other too much and yet, not manage to stay too far apart, I think that we'll get along just fine.
"They can't stand being in the same room, and I also don't think they can stand being apart, and I think they've just found a way to avoid doing either, and that's the best most sons and fathers can do"It got me thinking about my own relationship with my father, and about how complex most adult men's relationships with their fathers are. A question keeps coming back on my mind again and again, and in this blog post, I've decided to pen my thoughts on that question:
Why do so many adult men struggle in their relationships with their fathers?Over the last half a year, I've struggled with understanding my own relationship with my father. There are 2 incidents I'd like to talk about.
The first one, I believe happened around Christmas. As part of my annual Christman ritual, I sat down to watch Love Actually. As I watched Liam Neeson struggle with reaching out to his son, on a lonely Christmas Eve in Madrid, I missed my father. It was a feeling I haven't had very often before and I struggled to come to terms with it. As if coming to terms with those feelings wasn't hard enough, being actually able to talk to my dad about it was near impossible for me. I couldn't just call up my father and tell him I miss him. That's just not how we're hardwired I guess. Somehow, I managed to write him a letter and sent it to him, wrapped up in a Merry Christmas wish.
The second one happened pretty recently. It's a vivid dream I had a few days ago, and it's pretty rare for me, but I woke up remembering every little detail about that dream. While the details of the dream are too personal, the dream ended up with me crying on my dad's shoulders, telling him how tired I feel, and I don't think I'll ever have enough courage to talk to him about this.
What I've realized over the past 6 months, I've consciously given a thought about my relationship with my father on numerous occasions. I've also heard how a lot of my friends have struggled to get through to their fathers. The first problem that we have is that as men, we struggle with acknowledging and talking about our feelings.
Men, for the most part of history and the present, are raised to be tough. For reasons that are simply too many to discuss in this blog, we grow up learning, consciously, or subconsciously, to keep our emotions in check. Phrases like, "Men don't cry", or "Men don't feel pain" are thrown about casually. By the time a man reaches adulthood, he has nearly perfected the art of keeping eating up his emotions. In each adult man's brain, is a whole metaphorical lab full of jars that contain nothing but suppressed emotions.
My father, to this day, cannot admit that he misses me. He will always call and say he called because "your mum is missing you" instead of actually acknowledging that he wanted to talk to me and see how things are.
By the time a man reaches a stage of his life when he is raising a son, not only has he perfected the art of bottling up his emotions, he has also seen enough of the world to know how hard life is. A man is well aware of his flaws and fears and weaknesses that he would never admit even if you put a gun to his head. However, they all come out on his son, and that's the second problem with men, pride.
A son is a man's chance to remake himself. Every time I missed a perfect score in math by a small margin, my dad would be dissatisfied and ask me what caused that mistake, rather than congratulate me. When he taught me cricket, he'd throw the ball at me just a bit quicker than I could manage to hit and tell me that in a real match, nobody will go easy on you, and I should be ready for that. I can talk about such examples all day.
While I was frustrated at each of those instances as a kid, I can now see the bigger picture. I can see how each of those little things made me into who I am. That need to push the boundaries in math led me to do well in my engineering and career as a whole. The quick balls thrown at me taught me to not complain when life is unfair and to work hard and get my share of the pie. Every little thing he did, things he learned in his experiences, he poured it into me.
A father would raise their sons to not only be as good as themselves but be even better than them. All the sacrifices, all the sleepless nights when the kid's unwell, every breath they take from the moment that boy is born, they're doing themselves all over again, but better. At the same time, most fathers would rather take a bullet than admit to their young man often enough of how he has done them proud. We, as adult men, reciprocate equally well. We'd rather take a bullet instead of saying thank you to our dads. We'll complain about how tough our dad was on us, rather than acknowledge how it made us a better man.
I think the roots of a lot of our struggles lie in these. Our inability to get through to each other starts with our inability to acknowledge half our emotions, and if that isn't hard enough, our pride doesn't let us speak about it. However, as long as we can figure out a way to not have to stand each other too much and yet, not manage to stay too far apart, I think that we'll get along just fine.
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