As I travel back in time in my mind I am always fascinated by how complimentary my mom and dad's relationship seemed at any given moment. For example, my dad used to love to drive, while my mom was extremely content to be sitting on the passenger side for hours on end. At any given instant I can close my eyes and visualize in my head the image of my mom's left had reaching over my dad's right shoulder touching the back of his head as he took us all on a "little drive" which typically meant several hundred miles of sightseeing. Many times we would start at noon and usually not get back home until dark. When I was just seven years old and the household finances would allow it, we would get started on a Saturday morning around 5:00 a.m. and drive in my father's Chevy Malibu all the way from Phoenix Arizona to Southern California. Typically we would arrive just within minutes of our destination opening its doors and would not start heading back to our home the same night until Disneyland, Universal Studios, or Sea World was closing their doors for the night. One by one we would all fall asleep, except for one of my sisters that typically kept dad company awake most of the way back home. I can only assume that with my father's Air Force salary and my mother's private school income, the budget only allowed for one day of fun at a time without the extra added expense of lodging. Incredibly though, I never once heard my father complain about being too tired to take us out on these "little rides." Every time we would go out as a family we truly had a great time regardless of our financial limitations.
The first time we went to Universal Studios Hollywood I remember being so impressed with all the special effects and secrets the movie industry used to make movies. My most vivid memory is of us posing for a Kodak moment next to a giant rotary phone and some enormous sized scissors that were used as a prop in the creation of episodes for the show "Land of the Giants." The show was not a great hit, in fact it was cancelled after only two seasons, yet the memories of being exposed to the magic of Hollywood in the creation of this show remain solid and fixed in my mind. One by one my childhood experiences create a scrapbook or memories that I am now able to easily flip through its pages and enjoy at will. Of course not everything is a good memory since in between the great times there were also hard times. For example, my father had his first heart attack at the age of 33 sealing with that event a great deal of insecurities and worries in all of our minds. It was bad enough that he had been gone for almost a year serving on a tour of war in Vietnam when he was suddenly brought back home to attend his father's funeral, but then about a year after this he found himself holding on to dear life himself. In an instant the joy of having our family finally back together again was ripped away with the preoccupation of my father being ill and close to death. Of course both him and my mother tried to trivialize their new reality in order to not have us children freak out, but the truth is that we all knew that our lives had changed and one way or the other we all needed to adapt.
"Let's go for a little ride..." my mother would say after attending church while pulling out a map of the state of Arizona that we kept in the family car. In less than a minute my father would find a road that we had never taken before and steer us in the right direction for another day of family time. If the road would furnish us with some obscure little Indian reservation museum or shop, immediately the car would come to a full stop, we would all get out to stretch our legs and check it out. One weekend after the other we visited pretty much everything that there was to see in Arizona including the border towns to Mexico. A lot changed after my father had his first cardiac arrest, but a lot stayed the same too. Family time remained pretty much intact with the exception that it really took a lot more out of my father to do so many of the things he was used to doing and had taken for granted. Walking up hill looking for the perfect Christmas tree to cut in Flagstaff Arizona was a much different experience that year.
Eventually my father was forced to retire from his military career much earlier than he really wanted to. On our last summer before permanently moving back to Puerto Rico he took us all for a three month "little ride" all the way down from Arizona to Acapulco, then back up to Arizona again to pick up our dog and all the way across to Florida, and finally back up to South Carolina where we took a standby military aircraft ride back to our beloved island. I've written a previous post detailing most of this trip that included a new car, a squeaky and leaking windshield, a new transmission, three adults, three kids, a dog, and towing a uHaul trailer with our luggage for almost 90 days. As you can see from the highlights, it really was an adventure!
Eventually and finally we made it back to Puerto Rico. School had already started by then, so us kids basically had to get ourselves back into the groove of learning without hesitation, and our mother went back to teaching again but now in a totally different language. I guess the hardest one hit with our move back home was probably my dad because he had to adapt to the idea of not doing what he loved to do at such a young age. Retiring in his early 30's was by far not ideal and had probably never crossed his mind. At different stages he tried different things including going back to college, but in the end nothing was as fulfilling as his job in the U.S. Air Force. One thing though never changed, even though we were back living in a small island, we all still packed ourselves into the car to take our little rides as a family. Sometimes we'd get in the car with no destination in mind and eventually end up on the south side of the island visiting relatives or just driving around taking in the sites. Typically we'd head out in the early afternoon and not make it back home until at least midnight or even later.
The little rides were not all saved just for weekends only. During the week, when it was almost bedtime, many times my mom would ask my dad to take us for a little ride. These midweek little ride requests meant just driving from our home in the countryside until we reached downtown, taking a few different roads to get there, buying milk and some fresh baked bread or treats from one of the local bakeries, and finally coming back home to dunk the still warm fresh bread covered in butter in a cup of hot coffee or chocolate. Many times, if it was early enough, instead of coming back home after the drive we would take our warm bread bounty over to my grandparents home and eat it there instead. Both my mom and dad loved visiting her parents and two sisters that lived in the farm house that was just five minutes away from our home. As we'd drive into the narrow road entering my grandparents farm my father would slowly and carefully navigate his huge Chevrolet Impala between the branches of bushes and trees that would reach out and make their mark on our car if not done correctly. In the early years the road was not paved, which also meant making sure that you knew where the potholes full of water from the typical earlier rain where located. As we would pull our car in total darkness in front of my grandparents home, someone would peek through the one of the windows and instantly turn on the porch light as a welcoming gesture of hospitality and love. Stepping up the steps into their home my mom and dad would typically lead asking my mother's parents to give them their blessings. Originally a protestant, and before marriage converting to Catholic, my grandparents had become my father's godparents at that time. I never heard him call them anything other than "padrino" and "madrina", and these titles where always preceded by a "bendición," which translates to "bless me godmother or bless me godfather." This genuine and whole hearted gesture became a beautiful example of respect and love that I still admire from both my parents. All of us kids learned to do the same and from the moment we were able to speak we always walked into my grandparents home asking for their blessings and greeting them with a hug and a kiss.
If I consider that my own kids were already talking full sentences by the age of 3, I can assume that for the last 45 years of my life I have been asking either my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and parents for their blessings every day. This means that as a minimum I have been blessed at least 16,425 times. In fact, if I extrapolate the thousand of times that I have requested blessings from my loved ones I can probably safely assume that I have easily been blessed more than 30,000 times in my lifetime. That my dear readers is a lot of blessings!!! The point that I am trying to make here is that thanks to what my parents taught me at such a young age, I am a very blessed man!
Recently my oldest son has curved his impulses and obsessions towards becoming more independent. The same powerful forces that drive him to do scary things is currently at work to better himself. Being sober and wanting to have more control over his own life have brought out of him a great deal of the tenderness that I had not seen a very long time. I have always hugged, kissed, and given him my blessing regardless of how difficult a moment we might be going through. Not an easy task if you ask me, but I have always felt it important to be this way. Since I came back from my absence due to my job out at sea, everyday he has been the one to approach me with a hug when we greet first thing in the morning, or later when I get back home in the afternoon. I am amazed of how powerful this beautiful habit of showing a loving gesture consistently since he was a child truly has become at this age. I feel it genuinely, from his heart, and not imitated or forced. To me it is an amazing indicator of how love can surpass some of the most difficult challenges in an individual's life. We went hiking just the two of us on Saturday, then with his brother on Sunday. Later on Sunday night we all got into the jacuzzi together and spent something like 90 minutes sharing stories and jokes. To me, all of these moments are like those moments in which we would all get into my dad's car for a little ride. One by one they create pages in the scrapbook of my children's lives so that they can later on, when they are older, go back and see how much they were loved by their father too.
Dad
Monday, August 30, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Catching my breath...
It always feels so good when I finally make it home after being gone on work related travel. My longest absence in my 25 years of working for the Department of Defense was 6 weeks. At the time I was still single and without any parenting responsibilities, so even though it felt like a really long time to be gone, it was not as bad as it might seem. Now days, when I am gone anywhere from one to three weeks at a time, it truly feels like a really long time regardless of what the calendar might say. This last trip was almost three weeks long, which is on the borderline of being too long. Just a few minutes after arriving at my home, my ex-wife brought my youngest son over and as I approached to give him a hug and kiss I found myself looking into his Adam's apple. "My goodness, when did you suddenly grow another inch?" I asked while feeling so short standing in front of him. I went into the garage, grabbed a measuring tape and made him stand against to wall to mark and measure how tall he had become during his summer vacation. The almost 15 year old young man had grown a full inch during those short months, making him now five feet and 10 inches tall. He grinned as I said out loud his new height, knowing that he was now an inch taller than his older brother which just a few years ago would constantly torture him by telling him he was "short."
That same day, while catching up with my oldest son on how he had managed during my three week absence, he surprised me with a request for me to take him hiking the next day. This sudden request was like music to my ears knowing that being able to spend some time with him outdoors typically brings out of both of us some very enlightening conversations. I quickly agreed and offered to head up a local mountain the next day. We invited my younger son to accompany us, but he had already invited some friends over for that day and thought it would be rude to cancel. So there we went each carrying a small water bottle in one of our hands with a very small and conservative goal of just doing 4 miles that day. On our way up we started simply sharing generic information about movies we watched during our summer vacation, books we've read, and other simple pleasantries. However, it was not very long before we started opening up with regards to more personal issues. To get things going I inquired about what were the different motivations for people to turn vegetarian, all along knowing that he had done so several months back. In his typical bright mind style he summarized for me all the different vegetarian categories which served me well to inquire about his own personal reasons. To that question he replied by saying "I just like being in control over certain things in my life." I thought that was extremely insightful while he continued to explain that it was only temporary and anytime soon he would be treating himself to a plate of his favorite buffalo wings to commemorate his achievement of losing weight from a high in the 190's all the way down to 140 pounds.
As the hike continued, a little bit at a time I found different ways to bring up a lot of unanswered questions that I had been waiting to find answers for several months by now. I told him, "I've noticed that none of your friends have been coming over anymore and that you have locked to gate on the side of the house, what's going on?" He answered the question telling me that he had graduated from high school a year early and that he thought it to be important to start being more independent. "They are all hanging out and doing the same thing every day, in and out...all they do is play beer pong, and if I go there I am going to want to play too, which means I am going to get drunk, and I've discovered that when I get drunk I eventually pass out and then cannot remember what happened the day before while I was drunk...the next day everyone is telling me all the stupid things I did and said and I find myself having to apologize for things I can't even remember saying and doing in the first place." At that very moment my heart skipped a beat because I knew he was, as he usually is, being truthful and honest and what parent does not want to hear that their wild child has grown another inch in his personal life. It felt just like I felt when I reached into the garage looking for the measuring tape to see how tall my youngest boy had become during summer vacation. Again I wanted to reach out and find anything in my toolbox that could tell me the true measure of his personal growth.
I then asked him how he was doing with his sleeping problem. To this he answered that he was having major problems with anxiety at nights. He said that when he closes his eyes to go to sleep he finds himself realizing that he is about to turn 18 in two months and that he still does not have his act together. He said that he wants to be independent and not have to be asking me and his mother for money and things so he was already trying to find a part-time job to fill in the hours between the classes that he wanted to take at the local Community College. I tried to give him some perspective and told him that I thought it was great that he was taking responsibility for himself, but that he should give himself realistic goals and not put too much pressure so that he could curve some of the anxiety it was all causing him. I told him that the important thing was that he was aiming in the right direction, which I thought was a true sign of maturity and growing up.
I took advantage of the moment of clarity between us and offered several recommendations and advice. We also talked about being sober and how different the world seems when you look at it with a clear mind. By the time our hike was done, in one day I had learned more about his current state of mind than I had been able to during the last six months. It was a very hot triple digit day and I was not in great shape so by the time we reached the peak I was totally out of breath. Amazingly, he looked pretty much the same as he did when we started our hike. Just a few months ago I had taken a good look at my son as he dragged himself staggering into our home drunk and out of control and all I could see was ugliness. His appearance was that of a young man that had suddenly turned into an old beaten individual with wild eyes, totally out of control behavior, and such a scary demeanor that I had no other choice but to lock my bedroom doors at nights in fear. Suddenly, just as I have been praying and asking God for a miracle to open his eyes, heart, and soul, the miracle seems to be happening right before my eyes. I am not ignorant to the reality that he will fall again, we all fall again. However, these moments of lucidity, of brilliant behavior, or amazing self control are nothing short of God's way of telling me to hang in there a little longer because this child is blessed. I cannot describe how good it feels to have peace in our home, to be able to sleep without locking my bedroom door.
A week later we did it again, this time we coerced my youngest son to go with a promise to buy him the biggest size fresh squeeze orange juice from Jamba Juice after the hike. I took a step back and watched and listened as both my teenage sons walked just a few feet in front of me sharing and endless supply of good humor between themselves. Both of them so beautiful in my eyes, so talented, so incredibly loving. As we hiked up the mountain I was remembering how just two years earlier the oldest boy would be calling his brother "short" in almost every sentence spoken out of his mouth, yet now he was an inch shorter himself. Without saying a word I just smiled to myself understanding quite well how this process of growing up takes time. I am still amazed how well they get along even while there is a three year difference between each other, so just imagine how amazing it is that an old man like me can still get along with two teenage boys too. It was easier to share on the way down since in an effort to stay by their side I had to step up my pace and pretend that I was not having a heart attack on the way up. The subject matter was much more light hearted on our second hike, but still just as enlightening because of their willingness to answer any question I would ask them. I love that about my kids, I can ask anything and regardless of how terrifying the answer might be they never lie to me. I have learned to censor myself at the moment and become a good listener in order to give them the freedom to speak their minds. I don't intervene during the moment of sharing, but I do eventually find a place and time to plant my seeds of warning. Telling a child not to do something is almost like begging them to do it in the first place. I have learned that if I want them to stay away from something, it has to seem like it is their idea to stay clear of whatever it is they should not be doing in the first place. So I typically try to steer the topic into a reasoning process, but not at the moment of the confession, later on.
Today I pray with more motivation and faith than ever, thanking God for his intervention and allowing me to have a moment to recharge my mind and heart with what I need to stay true in my parenting path. I am blessed with two amazingly beautiful children that are on their way to become great men.
Dad
That same day, while catching up with my oldest son on how he had managed during my three week absence, he surprised me with a request for me to take him hiking the next day. This sudden request was like music to my ears knowing that being able to spend some time with him outdoors typically brings out of both of us some very enlightening conversations. I quickly agreed and offered to head up a local mountain the next day. We invited my younger son to accompany us, but he had already invited some friends over for that day and thought it would be rude to cancel. So there we went each carrying a small water bottle in one of our hands with a very small and conservative goal of just doing 4 miles that day. On our way up we started simply sharing generic information about movies we watched during our summer vacation, books we've read, and other simple pleasantries. However, it was not very long before we started opening up with regards to more personal issues. To get things going I inquired about what were the different motivations for people to turn vegetarian, all along knowing that he had done so several months back. In his typical bright mind style he summarized for me all the different vegetarian categories which served me well to inquire about his own personal reasons. To that question he replied by saying "I just like being in control over certain things in my life." I thought that was extremely insightful while he continued to explain that it was only temporary and anytime soon he would be treating himself to a plate of his favorite buffalo wings to commemorate his achievement of losing weight from a high in the 190's all the way down to 140 pounds.
As the hike continued, a little bit at a time I found different ways to bring up a lot of unanswered questions that I had been waiting to find answers for several months by now. I told him, "I've noticed that none of your friends have been coming over anymore and that you have locked to gate on the side of the house, what's going on?" He answered the question telling me that he had graduated from high school a year early and that he thought it to be important to start being more independent. "They are all hanging out and doing the same thing every day, in and out...all they do is play beer pong, and if I go there I am going to want to play too, which means I am going to get drunk, and I've discovered that when I get drunk I eventually pass out and then cannot remember what happened the day before while I was drunk...the next day everyone is telling me all the stupid things I did and said and I find myself having to apologize for things I can't even remember saying and doing in the first place." At that very moment my heart skipped a beat because I knew he was, as he usually is, being truthful and honest and what parent does not want to hear that their wild child has grown another inch in his personal life. It felt just like I felt when I reached into the garage looking for the measuring tape to see how tall my youngest boy had become during summer vacation. Again I wanted to reach out and find anything in my toolbox that could tell me the true measure of his personal growth.
I then asked him how he was doing with his sleeping problem. To this he answered that he was having major problems with anxiety at nights. He said that when he closes his eyes to go to sleep he finds himself realizing that he is about to turn 18 in two months and that he still does not have his act together. He said that he wants to be independent and not have to be asking me and his mother for money and things so he was already trying to find a part-time job to fill in the hours between the classes that he wanted to take at the local Community College. I tried to give him some perspective and told him that I thought it was great that he was taking responsibility for himself, but that he should give himself realistic goals and not put too much pressure so that he could curve some of the anxiety it was all causing him. I told him that the important thing was that he was aiming in the right direction, which I thought was a true sign of maturity and growing up.
I took advantage of the moment of clarity between us and offered several recommendations and advice. We also talked about being sober and how different the world seems when you look at it with a clear mind. By the time our hike was done, in one day I had learned more about his current state of mind than I had been able to during the last six months. It was a very hot triple digit day and I was not in great shape so by the time we reached the peak I was totally out of breath. Amazingly, he looked pretty much the same as he did when we started our hike. Just a few months ago I had taken a good look at my son as he dragged himself staggering into our home drunk and out of control and all I could see was ugliness. His appearance was that of a young man that had suddenly turned into an old beaten individual with wild eyes, totally out of control behavior, and such a scary demeanor that I had no other choice but to lock my bedroom doors at nights in fear. Suddenly, just as I have been praying and asking God for a miracle to open his eyes, heart, and soul, the miracle seems to be happening right before my eyes. I am not ignorant to the reality that he will fall again, we all fall again. However, these moments of lucidity, of brilliant behavior, or amazing self control are nothing short of God's way of telling me to hang in there a little longer because this child is blessed. I cannot describe how good it feels to have peace in our home, to be able to sleep without locking my bedroom door.
A week later we did it again, this time we coerced my youngest son to go with a promise to buy him the biggest size fresh squeeze orange juice from Jamba Juice after the hike. I took a step back and watched and listened as both my teenage sons walked just a few feet in front of me sharing and endless supply of good humor between themselves. Both of them so beautiful in my eyes, so talented, so incredibly loving. As we hiked up the mountain I was remembering how just two years earlier the oldest boy would be calling his brother "short" in almost every sentence spoken out of his mouth, yet now he was an inch shorter himself. Without saying a word I just smiled to myself understanding quite well how this process of growing up takes time. I am still amazed how well they get along even while there is a three year difference between each other, so just imagine how amazing it is that an old man like me can still get along with two teenage boys too. It was easier to share on the way down since in an effort to stay by their side I had to step up my pace and pretend that I was not having a heart attack on the way up. The subject matter was much more light hearted on our second hike, but still just as enlightening because of their willingness to answer any question I would ask them. I love that about my kids, I can ask anything and regardless of how terrifying the answer might be they never lie to me. I have learned to censor myself at the moment and become a good listener in order to give them the freedom to speak their minds. I don't intervene during the moment of sharing, but I do eventually find a place and time to plant my seeds of warning. Telling a child not to do something is almost like begging them to do it in the first place. I have learned that if I want them to stay away from something, it has to seem like it is their idea to stay clear of whatever it is they should not be doing in the first place. So I typically try to steer the topic into a reasoning process, but not at the moment of the confession, later on.
Today I pray with more motivation and faith than ever, thanking God for his intervention and allowing me to have a moment to recharge my mind and heart with what I need to stay true in my parenting path. I am blessed with two amazingly beautiful children that are on their way to become great men.
Dad
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Lesson #1 - When to bend my knees.
The 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 10).
Today I celebrate an entire year of an incredible journey of sharing my parenting life with all of you. I now look back at over 150 posts that one by one gave birth to an amazing relationship between us all. To be honest it never occurred to me in the beginning that so many of you would take the time to read these pages. At the most I expected only my closest relatives and a few friends to be interested, and yet a huge array of individuals have crossed through these pages of love and hope from many different parts of the world. There is a small feature in my pages that allows me to know how many times somebody has tuned into read one of my stories, and another one that gives me an idea of the general area where they are at when they do so. Do not worry, your visits are anonymous and not even I am privy to the actual individuals that come in to visit. The United States of America, Kenya, Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Greece, Netherlands, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, France, Russia, Mexico, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Italy, and my dear Puerto Rico are all just a few locations that I can name off the top of my head that have been shown to read this blog. Something else the feature tells me is whether the visitor came in directly or by doing a search online and then clicking your way into my pages. Surprisingly, many of you that originally showed as just wandering in, later on kept coming back to share with me some more. I am aware that when something is very popular its online content can reach millions of visitors a year. That was truly not my goal at all, yet I am still amazed that over 3,700 times somebody has been driven to read these excerpts of my life as a father. Today, twelves months after beginning this path of bare honesty and and many times brutal truth sharing, I sit humbled by your interest and support. I celebrate quietly while typing away on a computer on board the mighty USS Cape St. George, where again destiny has taken me for a ride because of my job. It is almost ten o'clock in the evening, but today I want to share with you the number one lesson I have learned in the past 12 months. Read and enjoy!
Lesson #1 - When to bend my knees.
As a young boy my family did a lot of moving around because of my father being part of the U.S. Air Force. Us kids that have lived this kind of life are called Air Force brats, a term of which I am quite fond regardless of its possible original intent. In my lifetime we lived in England, Arkansas, Arizona, and back and forth to Puerto Rico in between every move. My mother was always a teacher in whatever school we attended while growing up, giving up a career with much better retirement benefits from the public school system by always teaching in the private sector in order to be with us and keep us in better schools. By private sector I really mean Catholic schools, which brings me to the next part of this story.
At age seven, since my mother was always an early bird getting to school at least an hour before classes would commence, and not having much more else to do, I attended Catholic mass every morning during the week. Soon enough just watching these services did not fulfill my curiosity so I became an altar boy for more of a hands on experience. Every morning at the crack of dawn I went into the St. Vincent de Paul church, put on the white garment that seemed the appropriate size for my scrawny little body, and served as an altar boy in mass. I really enjoyed doing this and it took very little sacrifice on my end to participate. I believe that it was this early interaction with God that put in my heart the desire for me to be a good son. As a child my parents gave us very little choice of whether we would attend mass on Sundays or not, so unless you were on your death bed, odds were favor that you would be bending your knees for a while that day. The funny thing is, no matter how much that act of humility might of hurt, it grew on me as a sign of what it took for God to listen. I know what you might be thinking, those Catholic rituals are probably totally unnecessary in order to make a phone call to heaven, but the truth is that we all grew up with different habits and it is very doubtful we will change them that much later on in life. What can I tell you about bending my knees? To begin with, you have to understand that in my religion, talking to God is serious business. I do not take it lightly when I decide to get in touch with the Big Kahuna, the fact of the matter is that if I am going to dial 911 for help upstairs, I am definitely going to do it my way.
Life found a way to do what it does best, throw me curve balls on every single important pitch. My marriage was a prime example that life took its sweet time in teaching me how to get it right. In fact, it took me so long that it eventually cost me my marriage. Then again, life could of given me two kids that were perfectly wired and ready to challenge me in all the different ways it does to the average parent. However, there too life decided to throw a fast ball with a really good spin on it so it would slide right under my bat by giving me what I find to be a REALLY challenging older son. As I have said before, if it were not for my younger son, I might of never known that my oldest son was so different. This time however, I did not proceed in the same way that I did during my marriage. Instead of trying to figure it all out on my own, I found it totally necessary to dial up the Boss and ask him for help. It's a really good thing that I did, otherwise there would definitely not be much left of me today in order to be writing this post for all of you.
The most important lesson I have learned during these past 12 months is that I am not in control of my son's life. If I was, I would of been able to straighten out everything that is twisted without any help. This lesson is a hard one to swallow and much harder to accept. I do not have the power to change my son. In fact, I do not have the power to change anyone else but myself. So if I am going to take on the job of trying to be a better father, I might as well figure out who it is that has the ability to make any real changes around my kids. In my incredibly stubborn and surprised mind I have come to accept the role of facilitator as a parent, and not that of an enforcer and much less a dictator. How is it that I am so sure that God is the only one that is in control and has the power to help my son? Because when I have given it my all, and I really mean my "all," I have seen myself fail miserably many, many times. So much have I failed in my quest of being an effective parent that I've found myself way too often bending my knees and assuming the position of humble prayer begging for God to intervene and help me out. I can tell you that without a doubt, every single time I have done so, I have received God's grace in one way or the other pulling me through those difficult moments. I might scream and yell at the world for the injustice that I feel by being hurt so deeply when my son has pointed a knife at me, or spit in my face in a moment of rage. However, those desperate words that depart my from the bottom of my heart and soul have never done me any good. Instead, one day, when I was pacing around in my room like a caged lion from side to side waiting to find the strength in me to carry on after an incredible hurtful moment with my child, my knees came off of their walking position and they took me down to the ground as I finally gave into accepting that only God could get me through that moment. I would be lying if I told you that from one desperate prayer all of the solutions to my problems came flowing from heaven. I would be exaggerating if I told you that instantly I found peace in my heart and soul after calling up to my Lord for answers. However, what is the God honest truth is that He definitely got me through those incredibly painful moments by filling my mind with a true understanding of my son's condition and putting inside my heart a great deal of love to be able to get through it all a little bit at a time.
Everyone is free to deal with their challenges in any way they seem fit. All I can tell you is that it was not until I turned over this incredibly difficult parenting challenge to God, that I started to see through it all. The best way I can describe it would be to say:
"Imagine an incredibly dark forest in which every branch in the night seems to be reaching out to grab you and scare you to death. As you wander aimlessly through the darkness you find yourself lost and confused. You try to build a fire but every branch you reach out to is either wet or too green for them to ignite with the only box of matches that you have in your pockets. Soon it starts to get colder and no matter how prepared you thought you were with the garments you put on in the morning the chilling air finds a way to filter itself inside and make you shiver. You call out for everyone you thought that might be there to get you through this darkness, yet the only thing you hear back is your own echo as it bounces off nearby rocks and more. You've heard of others not making it through this dark forest either because they were lost and never found again, or somebody else later finds their carcases huddled up inside a hollow tree where they were trying to stay warm and survive. Just as you think that there is no hope and you too will end up inside the belly of some ravaging creature, you finally see a very dim light at the other side of what seems to be the edge of the forest. Tell me my dear friends, what would you do next? Would you ignore the light and stay put in hopes that somebody else will come and rescue you? Would you pretend that the light was not really there and keep looking for something else? I somehow doubt that you would do any of the above choices. The logical and instinctive thing to do would be to march on towards the light in hopes that it might be shelter or something that could save you from your impending doom.
I've found hope in my solitude and prayers. I truly believe that my son is destined to be a good man with an amazing future. It is true that he is very different to many other kids, but it is also true that he has been gifted with an enormous collection of talents that puts most of us to shame. Why else would he be given so many beautiful things if it were not because he has an incredible journey ahead in his life? Why else would he be given two good parents that love him so much that they are always ready to charge into his life when he needs us? I choose to believe that the reason is because God has an amazing plan for him, and everything he and I have had to endure is part of that plan. I once stood there in total darkness in the past, not understanding why this journey had to be so hard and many times even cruel. I reached out and found very little help in the so called professionals and experts, none of them had a single dry branch to light up a fire inside of my then dark soul. It was not until I saw that dim light at the other side of my journey that I realized that God was there for me to show me a way out. Today, after so much that has happened I can honestly say that the most important lesson I have learned during the last 12 months is when to bend my knees in humility to thank my God for my beautiful children, just the way they are!
Dad
Today I celebrate an entire year of an incredible journey of sharing my parenting life with all of you. I now look back at over 150 posts that one by one gave birth to an amazing relationship between us all. To be honest it never occurred to me in the beginning that so many of you would take the time to read these pages. At the most I expected only my closest relatives and a few friends to be interested, and yet a huge array of individuals have crossed through these pages of love and hope from many different parts of the world. There is a small feature in my pages that allows me to know how many times somebody has tuned into read one of my stories, and another one that gives me an idea of the general area where they are at when they do so. Do not worry, your visits are anonymous and not even I am privy to the actual individuals that come in to visit. The United States of America, Kenya, Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Greece, Netherlands, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, France, Russia, Mexico, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Italy, and my dear Puerto Rico are all just a few locations that I can name off the top of my head that have been shown to read this blog. Something else the feature tells me is whether the visitor came in directly or by doing a search online and then clicking your way into my pages. Surprisingly, many of you that originally showed as just wandering in, later on kept coming back to share with me some more. I am aware that when something is very popular its online content can reach millions of visitors a year. That was truly not my goal at all, yet I am still amazed that over 3,700 times somebody has been driven to read these excerpts of my life as a father. Today, twelves months after beginning this path of bare honesty and and many times brutal truth sharing, I sit humbled by your interest and support. I celebrate quietly while typing away on a computer on board the mighty USS Cape St. George, where again destiny has taken me for a ride because of my job. It is almost ten o'clock in the evening, but today I want to share with you the number one lesson I have learned in the past 12 months. Read and enjoy!
Lesson #1 - When to bend my knees.
As a young boy my family did a lot of moving around because of my father being part of the U.S. Air Force. Us kids that have lived this kind of life are called Air Force brats, a term of which I am quite fond regardless of its possible original intent. In my lifetime we lived in England, Arkansas, Arizona, and back and forth to Puerto Rico in between every move. My mother was always a teacher in whatever school we attended while growing up, giving up a career with much better retirement benefits from the public school system by always teaching in the private sector in order to be with us and keep us in better schools. By private sector I really mean Catholic schools, which brings me to the next part of this story.
At age seven, since my mother was always an early bird getting to school at least an hour before classes would commence, and not having much more else to do, I attended Catholic mass every morning during the week. Soon enough just watching these services did not fulfill my curiosity so I became an altar boy for more of a hands on experience. Every morning at the crack of dawn I went into the St. Vincent de Paul church, put on the white garment that seemed the appropriate size for my scrawny little body, and served as an altar boy in mass. I really enjoyed doing this and it took very little sacrifice on my end to participate. I believe that it was this early interaction with God that put in my heart the desire for me to be a good son. As a child my parents gave us very little choice of whether we would attend mass on Sundays or not, so unless you were on your death bed, odds were favor that you would be bending your knees for a while that day. The funny thing is, no matter how much that act of humility might of hurt, it grew on me as a sign of what it took for God to listen. I know what you might be thinking, those Catholic rituals are probably totally unnecessary in order to make a phone call to heaven, but the truth is that we all grew up with different habits and it is very doubtful we will change them that much later on in life. What can I tell you about bending my knees? To begin with, you have to understand that in my religion, talking to God is serious business. I do not take it lightly when I decide to get in touch with the Big Kahuna, the fact of the matter is that if I am going to dial 911 for help upstairs, I am definitely going to do it my way.
Life found a way to do what it does best, throw me curve balls on every single important pitch. My marriage was a prime example that life took its sweet time in teaching me how to get it right. In fact, it took me so long that it eventually cost me my marriage. Then again, life could of given me two kids that were perfectly wired and ready to challenge me in all the different ways it does to the average parent. However, there too life decided to throw a fast ball with a really good spin on it so it would slide right under my bat by giving me what I find to be a REALLY challenging older son. As I have said before, if it were not for my younger son, I might of never known that my oldest son was so different. This time however, I did not proceed in the same way that I did during my marriage. Instead of trying to figure it all out on my own, I found it totally necessary to dial up the Boss and ask him for help. It's a really good thing that I did, otherwise there would definitely not be much left of me today in order to be writing this post for all of you.
The most important lesson I have learned during these past 12 months is that I am not in control of my son's life. If I was, I would of been able to straighten out everything that is twisted without any help. This lesson is a hard one to swallow and much harder to accept. I do not have the power to change my son. In fact, I do not have the power to change anyone else but myself. So if I am going to take on the job of trying to be a better father, I might as well figure out who it is that has the ability to make any real changes around my kids. In my incredibly stubborn and surprised mind I have come to accept the role of facilitator as a parent, and not that of an enforcer and much less a dictator. How is it that I am so sure that God is the only one that is in control and has the power to help my son? Because when I have given it my all, and I really mean my "all," I have seen myself fail miserably many, many times. So much have I failed in my quest of being an effective parent that I've found myself way too often bending my knees and assuming the position of humble prayer begging for God to intervene and help me out. I can tell you that without a doubt, every single time I have done so, I have received God's grace in one way or the other pulling me through those difficult moments. I might scream and yell at the world for the injustice that I feel by being hurt so deeply when my son has pointed a knife at me, or spit in my face in a moment of rage. However, those desperate words that depart my from the bottom of my heart and soul have never done me any good. Instead, one day, when I was pacing around in my room like a caged lion from side to side waiting to find the strength in me to carry on after an incredible hurtful moment with my child, my knees came off of their walking position and they took me down to the ground as I finally gave into accepting that only God could get me through that moment. I would be lying if I told you that from one desperate prayer all of the solutions to my problems came flowing from heaven. I would be exaggerating if I told you that instantly I found peace in my heart and soul after calling up to my Lord for answers. However, what is the God honest truth is that He definitely got me through those incredibly painful moments by filling my mind with a true understanding of my son's condition and putting inside my heart a great deal of love to be able to get through it all a little bit at a time.
Everyone is free to deal with their challenges in any way they seem fit. All I can tell you is that it was not until I turned over this incredibly difficult parenting challenge to God, that I started to see through it all. The best way I can describe it would be to say:
"Imagine an incredibly dark forest in which every branch in the night seems to be reaching out to grab you and scare you to death. As you wander aimlessly through the darkness you find yourself lost and confused. You try to build a fire but every branch you reach out to is either wet or too green for them to ignite with the only box of matches that you have in your pockets. Soon it starts to get colder and no matter how prepared you thought you were with the garments you put on in the morning the chilling air finds a way to filter itself inside and make you shiver. You call out for everyone you thought that might be there to get you through this darkness, yet the only thing you hear back is your own echo as it bounces off nearby rocks and more. You've heard of others not making it through this dark forest either because they were lost and never found again, or somebody else later finds their carcases huddled up inside a hollow tree where they were trying to stay warm and survive. Just as you think that there is no hope and you too will end up inside the belly of some ravaging creature, you finally see a very dim light at the other side of what seems to be the edge of the forest. Tell me my dear friends, what would you do next? Would you ignore the light and stay put in hopes that somebody else will come and rescue you? Would you pretend that the light was not really there and keep looking for something else? I somehow doubt that you would do any of the above choices. The logical and instinctive thing to do would be to march on towards the light in hopes that it might be shelter or something that could save you from your impending doom.
I've found hope in my solitude and prayers. I truly believe that my son is destined to be a good man with an amazing future. It is true that he is very different to many other kids, but it is also true that he has been gifted with an enormous collection of talents that puts most of us to shame. Why else would he be given so many beautiful things if it were not because he has an incredible journey ahead in his life? Why else would he be given two good parents that love him so much that they are always ready to charge into his life when he needs us? I choose to believe that the reason is because God has an amazing plan for him, and everything he and I have had to endure is part of that plan. I once stood there in total darkness in the past, not understanding why this journey had to be so hard and many times even cruel. I reached out and found very little help in the so called professionals and experts, none of them had a single dry branch to light up a fire inside of my then dark soul. It was not until I saw that dim light at the other side of my journey that I realized that God was there for me to show me a way out. Today, after so much that has happened I can honestly say that the most important lesson I have learned during the last 12 months is when to bend my knees in humility to thank my God for my beautiful children, just the way they are!
Dad
Monday, August 9, 2010
Lesson #2 - Finding the right moments.
The top 10 most important things that I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 9).
Just as there is a season for everything under the sun, there is also the right moment for taking action or taking pause with the growth of your children. The mere fact that you want them to understand something makes absolutely no difference when they are not ready to consume your wisdom. Every child is a little different than the others, so no single strategy will answer all of your questions as to how to find the right moments in which you can reach them effectively. As a parent I have learned in these past 12 months to pick my battles, listen and watch carefully, and act only when the tide is in my favor. The alternative of putting on a blindfold and constantly spouting out rules and reprimands is just not very effective at all.
Lesson #2 - Finding the right moments.
It is said that in comedy timing is everything. An effective comedian not only knows and understands his audience, but he also knows what to say, when to say it, and most of all when to pause. Jumping the gun is much less effective than timing it just right with a good punchline. It took me a while but I eventually realized that there is a very similar correlation to being an effective parent. In order for me to be an effective father, I too need to know and understand my child well enough to be able to gauge what words are effective, when I need to intervene, and most of all, when I need to stay out of it during challenging moments. Otherwise I am just talking to myself, and wasting a whole lot of time gaining absolutely nothing in return.
The hardest part of being effective in helping my son during challenging moments was realizing that it is in those exact moments that I typically must take a back seat approach and take almost no action at all. Instinctively I want to rush in and save him from the moment, the dangers, the repercussions that I already can see coming his way from a very great distance. However, it is my intervention that keeps him from learning and figuring out what is a good or bad decision on his part in the first place. The shallow gratification that comes afterwards by me being able to say "I told you so" does nothing to improve his level of maturity and much less our interpersonal relationship. In fact, it simply draws us farther apart in the end. So, instead of waiting for when he is about to, or in the middle of doing something really scary for me to intervene, I need to find prior moments in his life to plant the seeds of knowledge that he is going to need to make better choices. These prior moments are not so easy to find, so this is where your parenting skills and tools need to be taken out to do their mystic work.
I have learned a great deal about finding the right moments during the past 12 months. First of all you should know that making a connection with our teenage child is never going to be easy. The way my oldest son is wired makes it an even greater challenge, but to my surprise not impossible to do. The key is to not force the moment, it can never seem to be artificial or induced by an eager parent that wants his child to listen. Instead you must be patient and wait for the few and in between opportunities that grant you access to their mind, heart, and maybe even soul. For me this became an incredible challenge for which I refused to give up until I felt I had succeeded. Perseverance pays off. It is not as simple as walking into the room and saying "let's talk about drugs today!" That would just be futile to say the least. Instead, when I noticed that there had been drama in his life because of one of his friends making mistakes related to drugs, that signaled an open door. Again, the direct approach rarely works, so I became a master of knowing how to ask the right questions. For example, "I noticed thatseems to be kind of down, is he ok?" The passive approach of showing empathy for his friend allows him to talk about others instead of himself without the need of revealing his own drug related issues. Another approach that has a much less immediate positive effect, but nonetheless typically results in a connection in the long run is to simply state "I can tell that you are going through a rough moment, if you need me, I am here for you..." which leaves the door wide open for some other time. Not barging into his life and trying to portray that I know all the answers is crucial. In fact, for most moments to be right, he has to believe in his own mind that "he" is the one that is picking the moment to open up and share.
Whenever my son is playing some new music that I have never heard before, regardless of whether I like it or not, I take the time to ask him who the band is and what else he knows about them. It is instantly that he is willing to open up and talk about this kind of stuff. The same thing goes for any books he is reading, no matter how scary the subject matter might appear at first glance, I always ask him to tell me about the author, before I ask him to tell me about the subject matter in itself. He never feels pre-judged when I do this, allowing him to give me the true reason for why he is reading the book in the first place. Since I have never contradicted any of the material that he puts on paper in writing, it is he that typically approaches me to tell me that he has written a new essay. I usually tell him, "If you'd like me to read it just leave me a copy on my dresser..." which puts all of the weight on him as to deciding to share it with me or not. In fact, he has always done so in the end, giving me access to his mind and thoughts. The subject matter can sometimes be frightening and other times simply delightful, but my intention is not to pass judgment on his mental process, instead I utilize this opportunity to ask him more questions, to clarify what he means and why he feels of thinks at any given time. Since I do not criticise his stuff, he's gone forward and allowed me to read just about everything he has written. In the end it is I that mostly benefit from these opportunities by utilizing them as portals to plant seeds of love, hope, compassion, wisdom, and much more. One by one these seeds have a way of growing inside such a fertile mind and heart. Not all will stick, but the ones that do make it all worth while in the end.
Offer to do simple things with them...instead of bringing the pizza, ask them to go with you to get it. On the way there find something simple to share about your own day that will make them feel that sharing your life with them is important to you. Instead of picking up the favorite book, movie, or game for them, always find an excuse to have them come with you and do it together. If you have more than one child, take turns doing special things with each of them individually because they need to feel that they are each special in their own way. It is great to have family time, it is even greater to have "you and me" time. Don't play favorites because one is easier to convince than the other to share with you...make the extra effort to get them to be part of those special moments. "No" does not mean "never", so if they say no today, ask again tomorrow, and the next day, until they finally give in, which they will if you are persistent.
Finally, realize that children are people too. They have their ups and downs just like anyone else, so don't be so hard on them that one mistake on their part ruins your entire relationship all together. I have said this before and I will say it again, forgiveness really means letting go of the issue and not bringing it back every time there is conflict. It will not win you any battles to bring forth issues from the past that you have already agreed on letting go and forgiving. The more you do this terrible habit of repeating old issues, the less opportunities you will find in the future to bond with your children. Nobody, not even them who truly love you because of your parental role, can live up to expectations of being perfect at all times. In fact, if there is something that drives you nuts because they are unable or unwilling to change in their behavior, just let it go and watch as the wheels of time teach them the lessons they need to know for them to change all on their own. I have yet to know an adult that truly enjoys listening to music at ear piercing levels, we all give up those habits sooner or later on our own.
Dad
Just as there is a season for everything under the sun, there is also the right moment for taking action or taking pause with the growth of your children. The mere fact that you want them to understand something makes absolutely no difference when they are not ready to consume your wisdom. Every child is a little different than the others, so no single strategy will answer all of your questions as to how to find the right moments in which you can reach them effectively. As a parent I have learned in these past 12 months to pick my battles, listen and watch carefully, and act only when the tide is in my favor. The alternative of putting on a blindfold and constantly spouting out rules and reprimands is just not very effective at all.
Lesson #2 - Finding the right moments.
It is said that in comedy timing is everything. An effective comedian not only knows and understands his audience, but he also knows what to say, when to say it, and most of all when to pause. Jumping the gun is much less effective than timing it just right with a good punchline. It took me a while but I eventually realized that there is a very similar correlation to being an effective parent. In order for me to be an effective father, I too need to know and understand my child well enough to be able to gauge what words are effective, when I need to intervene, and most of all, when I need to stay out of it during challenging moments. Otherwise I am just talking to myself, and wasting a whole lot of time gaining absolutely nothing in return.
The hardest part of being effective in helping my son during challenging moments was realizing that it is in those exact moments that I typically must take a back seat approach and take almost no action at all. Instinctively I want to rush in and save him from the moment, the dangers, the repercussions that I already can see coming his way from a very great distance. However, it is my intervention that keeps him from learning and figuring out what is a good or bad decision on his part in the first place. The shallow gratification that comes afterwards by me being able to say "I told you so" does nothing to improve his level of maturity and much less our interpersonal relationship. In fact, it simply draws us farther apart in the end. So, instead of waiting for when he is about to, or in the middle of doing something really scary for me to intervene, I need to find prior moments in his life to plant the seeds of knowledge that he is going to need to make better choices. These prior moments are not so easy to find, so this is where your parenting skills and tools need to be taken out to do their mystic work.
I have learned a great deal about finding the right moments during the past 12 months. First of all you should know that making a connection with our teenage child is never going to be easy. The way my oldest son is wired makes it an even greater challenge, but to my surprise not impossible to do. The key is to not force the moment, it can never seem to be artificial or induced by an eager parent that wants his child to listen. Instead you must be patient and wait for the few and in between opportunities that grant you access to their mind, heart, and maybe even soul. For me this became an incredible challenge for which I refused to give up until I felt I had succeeded. Perseverance pays off. It is not as simple as walking into the room and saying "let's talk about drugs today!" That would just be futile to say the least. Instead, when I noticed that there had been drama in his life because of one of his friends making mistakes related to drugs, that signaled an open door. Again, the direct approach rarely works, so I became a master of knowing how to ask the right questions. For example, "I noticed that
Whenever my son is playing some new music that I have never heard before, regardless of whether I like it or not, I take the time to ask him who the band is and what else he knows about them. It is instantly that he is willing to open up and talk about this kind of stuff. The same thing goes for any books he is reading, no matter how scary the subject matter might appear at first glance, I always ask him to tell me about the author, before I ask him to tell me about the subject matter in itself. He never feels pre-judged when I do this, allowing him to give me the true reason for why he is reading the book in the first place. Since I have never contradicted any of the material that he puts on paper in writing, it is he that typically approaches me to tell me that he has written a new essay. I usually tell him, "If you'd like me to read it just leave me a copy on my dresser..." which puts all of the weight on him as to deciding to share it with me or not. In fact, he has always done so in the end, giving me access to his mind and thoughts. The subject matter can sometimes be frightening and other times simply delightful, but my intention is not to pass judgment on his mental process, instead I utilize this opportunity to ask him more questions, to clarify what he means and why he feels of thinks at any given time. Since I do not criticise his stuff, he's gone forward and allowed me to read just about everything he has written. In the end it is I that mostly benefit from these opportunities by utilizing them as portals to plant seeds of love, hope, compassion, wisdom, and much more. One by one these seeds have a way of growing inside such a fertile mind and heart. Not all will stick, but the ones that do make it all worth while in the end.
Offer to do simple things with them...instead of bringing the pizza, ask them to go with you to get it. On the way there find something simple to share about your own day that will make them feel that sharing your life with them is important to you. Instead of picking up the favorite book, movie, or game for them, always find an excuse to have them come with you and do it together. If you have more than one child, take turns doing special things with each of them individually because they need to feel that they are each special in their own way. It is great to have family time, it is even greater to have "you and me" time. Don't play favorites because one is easier to convince than the other to share with you...make the extra effort to get them to be part of those special moments. "No" does not mean "never", so if they say no today, ask again tomorrow, and the next day, until they finally give in, which they will if you are persistent.
Finally, realize that children are people too. They have their ups and downs just like anyone else, so don't be so hard on them that one mistake on their part ruins your entire relationship all together. I have said this before and I will say it again, forgiveness really means letting go of the issue and not bringing it back every time there is conflict. It will not win you any battles to bring forth issues from the past that you have already agreed on letting go and forgiving. The more you do this terrible habit of repeating old issues, the less opportunities you will find in the future to bond with your children. Nobody, not even them who truly love you because of your parental role, can live up to expectations of being perfect at all times. In fact, if there is something that drives you nuts because they are unable or unwilling to change in their behavior, just let it go and watch as the wheels of time teach them the lessons they need to know for them to change all on their own. I have yet to know an adult that truly enjoys listening to music at ear piercing levels, we all give up those habits sooner or later on our own.
Dad
Lesson #3 - Managing my own life.
The 10 most important things that I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 8).
One of the biggest mistakes that I have found myself doing in the past is allowing my own anger and frustration to cloud my vision of the rest of the things that important in my life. As impossible as it might seem at times, the task of prioritizing and separating issues is actually more important than the issues themselves. If I fail to manage my own life properly I find myself taking things too personal when in fact many times they are not meant to hurt me at all. These last 12 months have been groundbreaking in my own personal development. I suggest that anyone interested in having clarity when looking at the problems that surround them first take a really close look at themselves, manage their lives properly, and then set themselves out to helping others. Changing the order of this suggestion is just asking for trouble.
Lesson #3 - Managing my own life.
It was easy to be a good dad when my children were little boys. The most demanding side of parenting in those days was making enough time for my kids. As a relatively young father I had career aspirations, marital challenges, and personal desires that seemed to be pulling me each in opposite directions. Eventually though, I did find a center, a comfortable place in my life that allowed me to be relatively happy with myself while still having ample time to give to my deserving wife and kids. I guess it takes growing up, maturing, learning a few good lessons to make a young man into a better father. Life never stoped to give me a breather. One day turned into the next and soon enough my children were teenagers ready to challenge my parenting skills at every possible level. At that very moment when this all began I did not have my life in order, and I really wished I did. Every personal struggle took away moments of my life that could of been better utilized in being a better father. My failed dreams came in many flavors that somehow mixed themselves creating a muddy substance of my life and making it so much more difficult for me to see a clear path on how to proceed. I sat still because all of my troubles had taken the wind from my sails, and for the length of time that I did not move, I lost precious valuable time that should of been put to better use with my children. By the time I woke up from my own personal and emotional crisis, when I finally opened my eyes and was able to see clearly again, my boys had gone from being babies to quickly becoming young men.
I believe that to be a good parent you need to get over yourself, recover from where ever it is you might have fallen into, and bounce back into action. In the past year I have learned that nothing is more important to be able to have a clear vision than managing your own life first. If you are hurt, you need to heal. If you are angry, you need to learn to manage your anger. If you are frustrated, you need to channel your frustrations elsewhere and not towards your family. What happens at work needs to stay at work and never bring it home. Separating, compartmentalizing your life is crucial to avoiding a blurred vision of your path. This is not only sound advice for parenting, but also for any relationship in your life. When I was in the middle of my own emotional crisis, I took everything personal and as if it was all about me. The discovery that none of the challenges that my teenage son has been putting me through were about me made a huge difference on my ability to be part of the answer, a solution, and not part of the problem. It was too often that I as parents took my rude teenager's response personal and to heart. It is difficult to separate the child from the behavior, but the truth is that they are two very different things. The child is still the same child I cuddled in my arms when he was little, the only thing that has changed is the behavioral responses that this child has towards what he is facing in his life at that very moment. Not that different from you and I, right? I doubt that you would say that you are a totally different individual than what you were when you were a young adult. Not at all. In fact, that is why it is so hard to look at myself in the mirror sometimes, I barely recognize the older full of grey hair reflection. It is almost as if when I peek I am seeing a stranger, a "me" dressed up as an "older me" instead.
As soon as I started taking care of my own emotional needs, I then discovered that it was easier to understand my child's emotional needs too. As soon as I learned to manage my own anger and frustrations, I also learned how much simpler it was to understand his anger and frustrations. They say that you should not through stones in a glass house. I agree full hearted with that statement. If you want to be a better parent, start taking a really close look at yourself, and your own shortcomings and try to work on them a little bit at a time. Nothing worth doing can be done quickly, so take your time and realize that it is not a one or two day process. Invest in yourself by healing some of your own wounds and finding help from the outside if needed. Look into your own reflection and decide what needs to be improved in order to be more appealing to your family. Start by managing the little things first, so that you can see success and savor it's beauty. Then, once you get a hang on making progress in your life, pick something a little harder to fix or improve and go at it with all your heart and soul. Give it a try, I promise you won't regret it.
Dad
One of the biggest mistakes that I have found myself doing in the past is allowing my own anger and frustration to cloud my vision of the rest of the things that important in my life. As impossible as it might seem at times, the task of prioritizing and separating issues is actually more important than the issues themselves. If I fail to manage my own life properly I find myself taking things too personal when in fact many times they are not meant to hurt me at all. These last 12 months have been groundbreaking in my own personal development. I suggest that anyone interested in having clarity when looking at the problems that surround them first take a really close look at themselves, manage their lives properly, and then set themselves out to helping others. Changing the order of this suggestion is just asking for trouble.
Lesson #3 - Managing my own life.
It was easy to be a good dad when my children were little boys. The most demanding side of parenting in those days was making enough time for my kids. As a relatively young father I had career aspirations, marital challenges, and personal desires that seemed to be pulling me each in opposite directions. Eventually though, I did find a center, a comfortable place in my life that allowed me to be relatively happy with myself while still having ample time to give to my deserving wife and kids. I guess it takes growing up, maturing, learning a few good lessons to make a young man into a better father. Life never stoped to give me a breather. One day turned into the next and soon enough my children were teenagers ready to challenge my parenting skills at every possible level. At that very moment when this all began I did not have my life in order, and I really wished I did. Every personal struggle took away moments of my life that could of been better utilized in being a better father. My failed dreams came in many flavors that somehow mixed themselves creating a muddy substance of my life and making it so much more difficult for me to see a clear path on how to proceed. I sat still because all of my troubles had taken the wind from my sails, and for the length of time that I did not move, I lost precious valuable time that should of been put to better use with my children. By the time I woke up from my own personal and emotional crisis, when I finally opened my eyes and was able to see clearly again, my boys had gone from being babies to quickly becoming young men.
I believe that to be a good parent you need to get over yourself, recover from where ever it is you might have fallen into, and bounce back into action. In the past year I have learned that nothing is more important to be able to have a clear vision than managing your own life first. If you are hurt, you need to heal. If you are angry, you need to learn to manage your anger. If you are frustrated, you need to channel your frustrations elsewhere and not towards your family. What happens at work needs to stay at work and never bring it home. Separating, compartmentalizing your life is crucial to avoiding a blurred vision of your path. This is not only sound advice for parenting, but also for any relationship in your life. When I was in the middle of my own emotional crisis, I took everything personal and as if it was all about me. The discovery that none of the challenges that my teenage son has been putting me through were about me made a huge difference on my ability to be part of the answer, a solution, and not part of the problem. It was too often that I as parents took my rude teenager's response personal and to heart. It is difficult to separate the child from the behavior, but the truth is that they are two very different things. The child is still the same child I cuddled in my arms when he was little, the only thing that has changed is the behavioral responses that this child has towards what he is facing in his life at that very moment. Not that different from you and I, right? I doubt that you would say that you are a totally different individual than what you were when you were a young adult. Not at all. In fact, that is why it is so hard to look at myself in the mirror sometimes, I barely recognize the older full of grey hair reflection. It is almost as if when I peek I am seeing a stranger, a "me" dressed up as an "older me" instead.
As soon as I started taking care of my own emotional needs, I then discovered that it was easier to understand my child's emotional needs too. As soon as I learned to manage my own anger and frustrations, I also learned how much simpler it was to understand his anger and frustrations. They say that you should not through stones in a glass house. I agree full hearted with that statement. If you want to be a better parent, start taking a really close look at yourself, and your own shortcomings and try to work on them a little bit at a time. Nothing worth doing can be done quickly, so take your time and realize that it is not a one or two day process. Invest in yourself by healing some of your own wounds and finding help from the outside if needed. Look into your own reflection and decide what needs to be improved in order to be more appealing to your family. Start by managing the little things first, so that you can see success and savor it's beauty. Then, once you get a hang on making progress in your life, pick something a little harder to fix or improve and go at it with all your heart and soul. Give it a try, I promise you won't regret it.
Dad
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Lesson #4 - Listen to what others have to say.
The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 7).
There is nothing more important in any successful quest than knowledge. The more you know, the simpler it is to be successful at almost anything you set your mind to. However, there is always the matter of the difference between book smart and street smart. In other words, you could read every book ever written about swimming, but unless you go out there and jump in the water and try to swim, chances are you will never be great at it. In parenting believe it or not, the experts are not all those books that pleasantly sit comfortable on the shelves of a bookstore or library. Although there are several good authors that will inspire you and give you insight into different techniques and tools you should know about parenting, nothing beats the knowledge you are able to gain from other parents themselves.
Lesson #4 - Listen to what others have to say.
I have been on a quest for the last 18 years in search of answers on how to be a better father for my now two teenage boys. As early as when they were still in their mother's womb, I had already taken the task of buying and reading educational material on the matter of good parenting. In those books I discovered subjects like "effective time out" and "tough love." Each and every one of these experts brought to the table an assortment of what in their minds and experience worked, and what did not work or simply made things worse when parenting your children. I will not lie, as inexperienced in parenting as any other young father I too found a great deal of wisdom in many of these books and took their what at the time seemed solid advice to heart. What none of these books tell you is that not every child is wired equally, and what might work outstandingly well for one, might have the total and opposite effect for the other. This I learned on my own, the hard way, by doing what I thought was right and later on discovering that it was just a really bad idea to proceed as it had been recommended in a book.
I, like most parents, also took the approach of "well if it worked for my parents with me, why should it not work for me with my children?" Not that our parents were not wise in their parenting abilities, but again the same situation you encounter in the books, where one size does not fit all, repeats itself with the single point of reference of utilizing your parent's skills on your own children. Another fault in the "do as it was done to me" technique is that several generations have already transpired during my time and my children's time, so a lot has obviously changed on what is going on in the lives of my children versus what was going on in my life as a child. So, if the experts are not the best source of parenting knowledge, and your parents aren't either, then who is, you may ask? The answer is simple, all of you, my readers and my dear friends.
Every time I take the time to share some of my parental situations with friends, co-workers, family members, and even total strangers, I suddenly find answers to many of my questions. Why does my child do this? What do I do to stop him from doing that? Where do I find help? How long does it take him to get past that stage of behavior? I can go on and on with questions that as far as I have been able to ascertain, only other parents that have been going through similar situations as my own have a good realistic answer. Everything else is pie in the sky. The so called experts typically talk in general terms and afraid to give any advice that could come back and bite them in the end. Other parents on the other hand, well let's just say they have had plenty of time to digest their own reality and figure out what to say about it without fear of any repercussion.
The key to gaining true knowledge from other parents is to be a good listener. Yes, you need to plant the seed by giving enough information on your situation to be able to compare notes, but once another parent, grandparent, or guardian starts talking about how difficult it has been for them to manage their children, trust me, you are on the right track to learning a great deal from them. I have discovered that if anyone starts a sentence with saying, "oh that's easy, I simply...," never mind the advice you are about to receive, if it is easy it means that their child is not really a challenging child and most likely their technique will not work with your own child. On the other hand, if their advice starts with them saying, "that was a challenge for me, it took time but I finally figured out that...," then you are back on track to learning from someone that has a child that is pretty much a handful to say the least. I think that you understand where I am going with this, right? Become an attentive true listener when you share while you are seeking true parental wisdom. Even if you disagree with their approach, pay close attention to their story, in the end there is typically something useful in the overall context of their approach to solving a difficult situation.
In the past 12 months I have become a very good listener compared to what I was before then. Since I come here and pour my heart out to you telling you all of my stories and sharing with you so much of my difficulties, I find it easier to take the passenger seat when I am sharing with others. I have pretty much said my peace by the time someone starts giving advice, so I am able to focus and listen better than ever. I have never found a single advice that has been given to me that in one way or the other, once I have modified it to my particular set of circumstances, has not been useful. I hope that with me sharing all of this with you, at some level I have given back some of what has been so freely given to me by my friends, family members, and others too. Listen to what others have to say, within their words there is a gold mine of useful parental advice, skills, and tools that you too can use to become a better parent.
Dad
There is nothing more important in any successful quest than knowledge. The more you know, the simpler it is to be successful at almost anything you set your mind to. However, there is always the matter of the difference between book smart and street smart. In other words, you could read every book ever written about swimming, but unless you go out there and jump in the water and try to swim, chances are you will never be great at it. In parenting believe it or not, the experts are not all those books that pleasantly sit comfortable on the shelves of a bookstore or library. Although there are several good authors that will inspire you and give you insight into different techniques and tools you should know about parenting, nothing beats the knowledge you are able to gain from other parents themselves.
Lesson #4 - Listen to what others have to say.
I have been on a quest for the last 18 years in search of answers on how to be a better father for my now two teenage boys. As early as when they were still in their mother's womb, I had already taken the task of buying and reading educational material on the matter of good parenting. In those books I discovered subjects like "effective time out" and "tough love." Each and every one of these experts brought to the table an assortment of what in their minds and experience worked, and what did not work or simply made things worse when parenting your children. I will not lie, as inexperienced in parenting as any other young father I too found a great deal of wisdom in many of these books and took their what at the time seemed solid advice to heart. What none of these books tell you is that not every child is wired equally, and what might work outstandingly well for one, might have the total and opposite effect for the other. This I learned on my own, the hard way, by doing what I thought was right and later on discovering that it was just a really bad idea to proceed as it had been recommended in a book.
I, like most parents, also took the approach of "well if it worked for my parents with me, why should it not work for me with my children?" Not that our parents were not wise in their parenting abilities, but again the same situation you encounter in the books, where one size does not fit all, repeats itself with the single point of reference of utilizing your parent's skills on your own children. Another fault in the "do as it was done to me" technique is that several generations have already transpired during my time and my children's time, so a lot has obviously changed on what is going on in the lives of my children versus what was going on in my life as a child. So, if the experts are not the best source of parenting knowledge, and your parents aren't either, then who is, you may ask? The answer is simple, all of you, my readers and my dear friends.
Every time I take the time to share some of my parental situations with friends, co-workers, family members, and even total strangers, I suddenly find answers to many of my questions. Why does my child do this? What do I do to stop him from doing that? Where do I find help? How long does it take him to get past that stage of behavior? I can go on and on with questions that as far as I have been able to ascertain, only other parents that have been going through similar situations as my own have a good realistic answer. Everything else is pie in the sky. The so called experts typically talk in general terms and afraid to give any advice that could come back and bite them in the end. Other parents on the other hand, well let's just say they have had plenty of time to digest their own reality and figure out what to say about it without fear of any repercussion.
The key to gaining true knowledge from other parents is to be a good listener. Yes, you need to plant the seed by giving enough information on your situation to be able to compare notes, but once another parent, grandparent, or guardian starts talking about how difficult it has been for them to manage their children, trust me, you are on the right track to learning a great deal from them. I have discovered that if anyone starts a sentence with saying, "oh that's easy, I simply...," never mind the advice you are about to receive, if it is easy it means that their child is not really a challenging child and most likely their technique will not work with your own child. On the other hand, if their advice starts with them saying, "that was a challenge for me, it took time but I finally figured out that...," then you are back on track to learning from someone that has a child that is pretty much a handful to say the least. I think that you understand where I am going with this, right? Become an attentive true listener when you share while you are seeking true parental wisdom. Even if you disagree with their approach, pay close attention to their story, in the end there is typically something useful in the overall context of their approach to solving a difficult situation.
In the past 12 months I have become a very good listener compared to what I was before then. Since I come here and pour my heart out to you telling you all of my stories and sharing with you so much of my difficulties, I find it easier to take the passenger seat when I am sharing with others. I have pretty much said my peace by the time someone starts giving advice, so I am able to focus and listen better than ever. I have never found a single advice that has been given to me that in one way or the other, once I have modified it to my particular set of circumstances, has not been useful. I hope that with me sharing all of this with you, at some level I have given back some of what has been so freely given to me by my friends, family members, and others too. Listen to what others have to say, within their words there is a gold mine of useful parental advice, skills, and tools that you too can use to become a better parent.
Dad
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Lesson #5 - True/Real empathy.
The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months (Part 6).
The WIKIPEDIA defines empathy as "the capability to share another being's emotions and feelings." According to theorists and their definitions, "empathy is an ability with many different definitions. They cover a broad spectrum, ranging from feeling a concern for other people that creates a desire to help them, experiencing emotions that match another person's emotions, knowing what the other person is thinking or feeling, to blurring the line between self and other." I have learned during these last 12 months that when someone says "I empathise, but..." this individual does not have true empathy. The "but" statement typically follows with a clause describing how they disagree, which in every sense of the word means that they truly do not feel the same as you do at that moment. Finding others that truly empathise with the difficult task of parenting a challenging child is extremely important in order to survive this extremely difficult yet important task in my life.
Lesson #5 - True/Real empathy.
Regardless of what I might think of myself as a parent, the image that I portray to those that surround me while conducting this difficult task sets the tone to which others pass judgement on not just me, but also my child. I might be doing everything right, which is doubtful, and still there will be people that will find a million faults to my ability to parent my children. These are the people with no real empathy towards my cause and I have learned to steer clear from their path as to not allow them to take away the wind from my parenting sails. However, if there is something I have learned in the past 12 months more clearly than anything else, it is the fact that I need the support of others with empathy in order for me to keep going and be able to help my child. There is absolutely no way I could survive this on my own. With all the second guessing that I have to do when I am making decisions and trying to figure out what the correct course of action should be, the true empathy of family members, loved ones, and dear friends is what truly helps me see my parenting role much more clear than I would all on my own.
It is so difficult for most of us to put out in the open the realities that rule our lives. There is a great deal of fear in lowering one's guard and allowing others to peek into our homes. Yet it never ceases to amaze me how no matter how green the grass might look in other people's yards, once you befriend them and are able to openly share realities, the grass is never as green as it ever seemed before. There is no such thing as a perfect household, perfect life, and much less perfect child. Everyone has flaws and in one way or the other something that might bring them down to their knees asking God to help them overcome, survive, or remove from their lives. In the past 12 months I have openly shared some incredibly personal moments and experiences that many of you might think are too close to home and should remain private. Personally, I strongly disagree with that attitude, yet I still respect your opinion and choices. The reason I mostly disagree is that I have learned that I am not embarrassed by anything my child has done, right or wrong. This my dear friends is because I have true empathy towards him. He was not in control of the miracle of his birth, much less the biological and chemical differences that wired his mind inside his mother's womb. How amazingly ignorant would it be for me to expect him to be a different individual, when he was never in control of the process that created him in the first place? Just yesterday I read an article of a 40 year study that revealed results that show evidence that an individuals personality is pretty much set by the time they are in 1st grade. This does not surprise me one bit. It seems to me that even though as we grow up our environment must have a great deal of influence on us, I doubt that the essence of who we are is truly affected. This explains why brothers and sisters raised by the same parents in the same household can be so different one from another.
Too many times I have bent over to pick up cigarette butts in my backyard left behind from a teenager that should not be smoking in the first place. It is habit that I wish he would put away and drop altogether, but it is also part of his compulsions and obsessive behavior. If he was not wired differently it would be a simple matter of making a rule with a set of consequences and eventually the entire situation could be resolved. Not this child, nope, rules and consequences are only triggers to ignite much worse behavior than smoking. So as much as it bothers and truly worries me to see him hurting himself by smoking, I empathise with him and the physiological conditions that drive him to do so in the first place. Instead of arguing about this subject, we talk about it and I plant seeds of choices and hope so that one of them might land in his mind and heart and grow enough to help him overcome this addiction. The same goes for so many of the things that he does that scare me so much, instead of getting all bent out of shape as I used to in the past and start arguing, and raising my voice, and eventually colliding with his explosive personality, I've taken the path of dialogue and subliminal parenting. I do this not because I agree with his actions and choices, but because I truly understand and feel for him on how hard it is to have enough self control to not do the wrong things. Talking to him works so much better than anything else I have tried, and believe me when I tell you that I have tried everything in every parenting book I have read.
True empathy, I need it from those that care about me in order to find a way to continue doing my job as the father of two beautiful teenage boys that are as different as water and fire. Real empathy, I need it within me to be able to truly understand my kids and be able to be a part of their lives and guide them while we walk together this path of love, caring, and growing up. This did not come easy, but when I found it I instantly realized how important and effective a tool it is for me to have in my parenting toolbox.
Dad
The WIKIPEDIA defines empathy as "the capability to share another being's emotions and feelings." According to theorists and their definitions, "empathy is an ability with many different definitions. They cover a broad spectrum, ranging from feeling a concern for other people that creates a desire to help them, experiencing emotions that match another person's emotions, knowing what the other person is thinking or feeling, to blurring the line between self and other." I have learned during these last 12 months that when someone says "I empathise, but..." this individual does not have true empathy. The "but" statement typically follows with a clause describing how they disagree, which in every sense of the word means that they truly do not feel the same as you do at that moment. Finding others that truly empathise with the difficult task of parenting a challenging child is extremely important in order to survive this extremely difficult yet important task in my life.
Lesson #5 - True/Real empathy.
Regardless of what I might think of myself as a parent, the image that I portray to those that surround me while conducting this difficult task sets the tone to which others pass judgement on not just me, but also my child. I might be doing everything right, which is doubtful, and still there will be people that will find a million faults to my ability to parent my children. These are the people with no real empathy towards my cause and I have learned to steer clear from their path as to not allow them to take away the wind from my parenting sails. However, if there is something I have learned in the past 12 months more clearly than anything else, it is the fact that I need the support of others with empathy in order for me to keep going and be able to help my child. There is absolutely no way I could survive this on my own. With all the second guessing that I have to do when I am making decisions and trying to figure out what the correct course of action should be, the true empathy of family members, loved ones, and dear friends is what truly helps me see my parenting role much more clear than I would all on my own.
It is so difficult for most of us to put out in the open the realities that rule our lives. There is a great deal of fear in lowering one's guard and allowing others to peek into our homes. Yet it never ceases to amaze me how no matter how green the grass might look in other people's yards, once you befriend them and are able to openly share realities, the grass is never as green as it ever seemed before. There is no such thing as a perfect household, perfect life, and much less perfect child. Everyone has flaws and in one way or the other something that might bring them down to their knees asking God to help them overcome, survive, or remove from their lives. In the past 12 months I have openly shared some incredibly personal moments and experiences that many of you might think are too close to home and should remain private. Personally, I strongly disagree with that attitude, yet I still respect your opinion and choices. The reason I mostly disagree is that I have learned that I am not embarrassed by anything my child has done, right or wrong. This my dear friends is because I have true empathy towards him. He was not in control of the miracle of his birth, much less the biological and chemical differences that wired his mind inside his mother's womb. How amazingly ignorant would it be for me to expect him to be a different individual, when he was never in control of the process that created him in the first place? Just yesterday I read an article of a 40 year study that revealed results that show evidence that an individuals personality is pretty much set by the time they are in 1st grade. This does not surprise me one bit. It seems to me that even though as we grow up our environment must have a great deal of influence on us, I doubt that the essence of who we are is truly affected. This explains why brothers and sisters raised by the same parents in the same household can be so different one from another.
Too many times I have bent over to pick up cigarette butts in my backyard left behind from a teenager that should not be smoking in the first place. It is habit that I wish he would put away and drop altogether, but it is also part of his compulsions and obsessive behavior. If he was not wired differently it would be a simple matter of making a rule with a set of consequences and eventually the entire situation could be resolved. Not this child, nope, rules and consequences are only triggers to ignite much worse behavior than smoking. So as much as it bothers and truly worries me to see him hurting himself by smoking, I empathise with him and the physiological conditions that drive him to do so in the first place. Instead of arguing about this subject, we talk about it and I plant seeds of choices and hope so that one of them might land in his mind and heart and grow enough to help him overcome this addiction. The same goes for so many of the things that he does that scare me so much, instead of getting all bent out of shape as I used to in the past and start arguing, and raising my voice, and eventually colliding with his explosive personality, I've taken the path of dialogue and subliminal parenting. I do this not because I agree with his actions and choices, but because I truly understand and feel for him on how hard it is to have enough self control to not do the wrong things. Talking to him works so much better than anything else I have tried, and believe me when I tell you that I have tried everything in every parenting book I have read.
True empathy, I need it from those that care about me in order to find a way to continue doing my job as the father of two beautiful teenage boys that are as different as water and fire. Real empathy, I need it within me to be able to truly understand my kids and be able to be a part of their lives and guide them while we walk together this path of love, caring, and growing up. This did not come easy, but when I found it I instantly realized how important and effective a tool it is for me to have in my parenting toolbox.
Dad
Friday, August 6, 2010
Lesson #6 - Walking, not running.
The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 5).
In today's fast paced world we have become so accustomed to getting everything so fast, that it takes us time to realize that not everything in life works that way too. The instant gratification of so many technological advances has the disadvantage of muddling our mind's perspective of what and how quickly things should happen in our lives. During these last 12 months I have had to learn to slow down the pace of my dreams and goals as I realize that nothing is worth doing in life unless I take the time to enjoy the process while I do it. Good parenting is no exception to this rule.
Lesson #6 - Walking, not running.
Would it not be grand if with every child born, a parenting manual would be delivered by the proverbial and mystical stork too? You hear it all the time from just about every parent, "I wish there was a manual to this child!" I have learned that indeed, parenting is probably one of the toughest jobs out there. Maybe one of the reasons is because by the time we have children at least one generation has transpired in time and a whole bunch of the rules that made sense in parenting in our time, suddenly are questionable in their time. It does not make things any easier the fact that more and more we are learning that our children are riddled with emotional and sometimes mental illnesses that until recently nobody had even named. To make things worse, even after they name them, they truly don't understand them. As a parent, what is it that I should do with respect to this worsening situation? What is my responsibility and how far do I take on the challenge of understanding and being a part of healing my son's mind? For the longest time I would spend hours on end digging through books, journals, and the news to find whatever small bit of information that I could find useful in understanding why it was that my child behaved so differently from the rest. I had him tested over and over again with neurological assessments and counselors whom all seemed somehow willing to go along with the mechanics of discovering what might be his problem, but never taking it one step forward to truly helping him in the end. Frustrated and confused I joined the club of desperate parents who knew their children had something that needed fixing, but nothing seemed to make that great of a difference in the end to make things better. So eventually my responsibility turned from research seeker to researcher. Instead of expecting to find answers in what was already out there, I decided to take matters into my own hand and find as many ways as possible to truly understand and help my son myself.
Amazingly, my own son having such a bright mind, he himself recognized that he was different. Several times he has approached me with much more insight than I could ever learn on my own of from anyone else. In many ways that is why I have had to respect him when he has made the conscious choice of not taking the prescribed medications that were given to him at random times. I feel absolutely zero confidence that the few doctors that met him shortly and in less than 45 minutes decided to prescribe him some mind altering medications truly knew what they were doing. Last Christmas I was on my way to Puerto Rico to visit my family when I encountered a longer than six hour delay at my final connecting flight. An older looking and later discovered very intelligent gentleman that sat close to me engaged me in conversation and we talked about many things in those long hours. Eventually the subject of our children came up and he went on to tell me how he had missed out on much of his years of being a parent because of a mental illness. When I curiously asked what kind of treatment he was given, he quickly replied with the name of more than a dozen medications that were prescribed to him throughout the years. Eventually he stop dropping names and he said, "none of them truly did me any good, in fact they all mostly turned me into a zombie making me miss out on most of the lives of my children." Then he proceeded to tell me how after so many years he finally was able to find a doctor that could help him. One by one the doctor started to slowly remove each of the medications and a little bit at a time a great haze lifted from his mind. At the time of our conversation he said that it has already been two years since he was off of all medications and that he had never felt better in his entire life. He was doing so well that his children where now coming back to him asking him for advice about parenting and to please help them with their own children, his grand kids. There are definitely reasons to take medications, and I am sure that many mental illnesses can benefit greatly from these concoctions. However, many of the individuals prescribing them truly have no business doing so without taking the time to help diagnose correctly the patients illnesses.
Why do you think I would take such an attitude about such an significant issue? Because in the end, my job is not so much to understand the illness, my job is to understand and help my child. Of course you might probably be compelled to say that by understanding a mental illness one should be much more equipped to understand the patient, and I will agree with that statement. However, he is my son, not my patient. So far I have not found a single doctor that has truly been able to help my son. That is not to say that there is not one out there that can do so, it is just a statement of fact. So what would make me think that if all of these so called professionals have barely found the inclination to help my son, I should take upon me as a parent the task of understanding their jobs in order to help him myself? Nope, either because of incompetence or negligence, whichever the reason might be, none of these individuals have done their clinical duty of truly understanding the illness and how to help heal my child and I do not feel compelled to force this duty upon myself, his father. Neither should any parent under these same circumstances. I've read it over and over again in the messages that desperate relatives write searching for answers and help because a family member is ill and they feel all alone, abandoned by not just the rest of their relatives and friends, but also by the very same people that supposedly dedicate their lives to understanding and helping individuals with mental illnesses. I can safely say that if I want to help my son get better, I truly need to understand him, his mental state, his way of thinking, and the things that he feels are important in his life. Inside his mind is the answer to his healing, not inside the illness in itself. If I simply medicate him, thinking that this will heal him, nothing has truly changed inside him, so why would he be healed? Yes, certain medications might help him, if in fact the medical community could truly agree on what his illness is, but playing "take a pill and let's see what happens" is not his or my cup of tea. So in the meantime, while they truly do nothing about it, I've taken the time to understand him instead.
So how does this work? What is it that I do to understand him? How can I help him by understanding him? It works the same way that everything in life worthwhile works, a little bit at a time. Instead of hoping for a quick answer that rushes us to the drugstore to find a magical pill, we walk together the path of his life which happens to have an illness inside it. Mind you, we walk, not run! There is no purpose in running through any ones life, what would be the point of living? There is no hurry, we take baby steps in discovering what are the things that make him well, and which ones don't. One day at a time I have learned to see much more to him than his illness. In fact, as devastating as his illness might seem at times, it is only but a small part of his life. It might touch every aspect of his personality, making him different, but not any worse than anyone else. When I discover something beautiful inside him, I try to encourage it to grow and to flourish. Music sets the path to so much in his personality, so I let him breath it and use it to grow as an individual. Reading his books sometimes scare me to no end with so many subjects that are truly hard to grasp and accept, yet one at a time he devours them and surprisingly keeps what truly helps him inside and simply ignores what might hurt him in the end. It is almost as if he had a mental liver to process the information that he consumes and rid him of toxins. Yes, sometimes it takes him a long time to consume properly what he reads, challenging me to have to hold back and let him make his own mistakes, but what would be of the bird if when it was coming out of it's egg we intervened? Would it not be strong enough and perish? Indeed it would, and so I too have to allow him to walk on his own much of the journey to become well.
Ever now and then I go into my son's room to do some cleaning up and get rid of junk that should not be there in the first place. If I take more than several weeks to return, it never fails that when I do I always find some drawing on the floor. In fact, I don't think that I have ever found any less than a dozen drawings and that if not more lyrics to some song he is writing. Crumbled up on the floor as if it had absolutely no value left to it I keep finding these treasures left behind from a mind that is constantly creating, evolving, changing, and most of all growing. What originally started as non-comprehensive mumble jumble eventually began to make sense to me. Not because he was making more sense, but because I was one day at a time learning to understand him better. So I walk this path of love toward the healing of my child, knowing well enough that I was extremely ignorant when I started to walk with him, but now I truly can see what is inside him a little bit at a time. Is this not better than changing him? Would you want to turn off the music if it was such a lovely melody that it entranced you? Would you not be compelled to understand it better when at times it seems frustrating and scary? I do, and in fact I cannot imagine now doing it any other way.
The trick is walking, not running. If you rush it, you won't see it...if you are running, you will pass by it all so fast that there is no way you can understand it. I can honestly suggest to all of those parents that at this very moment are pulling their hair because their child is doing something incredibly dumb, scary, stupid, offensive, hurtful, and more to take a step back and instead of trying to put a stop to it, which most likely is impossible, take a step back and try to understand why your child is doing these things instead. Don't cop out and compare him to any other child because this one you know very well in your mind and heart is different. Find the reasons one at a time and you will probably will find a way to help them stop. If you can understand them, you can help them, otherwise you will just get frustrated and tired and eventually give up. Next time your child is being totally disrespectful instead of trying to put a stop to it, try to figure out why, what is the root of his emotion that is making him or her behave this way. If you are able to figure it out, you are on your way to becoming a much better parent. This does not come easy. My instinct is to raise my voice, lift up a hand, and sometimes do and say things that I can't even understand why I would do and say in the first place. Unfortunately that is what we might of learned from our parents because it worked with us, which did not have a mental illness. I can tell you with 100% certainty that it will not work with a child that is wired differently. Once you know this, why would you keep running in the wrong direction with your parenting skills. Instead, turn around and start walking back to the root of it all and find a way to connect, to bond, and most of all to make sure they can tell that you love them regardless of how they are and their challenges. I'm not saying it is easy, all I am saying is that it works.
Dad
In today's fast paced world we have become so accustomed to getting everything so fast, that it takes us time to realize that not everything in life works that way too. The instant gratification of so many technological advances has the disadvantage of muddling our mind's perspective of what and how quickly things should happen in our lives. During these last 12 months I have had to learn to slow down the pace of my dreams and goals as I realize that nothing is worth doing in life unless I take the time to enjoy the process while I do it. Good parenting is no exception to this rule.
Lesson #6 - Walking, not running.
Would it not be grand if with every child born, a parenting manual would be delivered by the proverbial and mystical stork too? You hear it all the time from just about every parent, "I wish there was a manual to this child!" I have learned that indeed, parenting is probably one of the toughest jobs out there. Maybe one of the reasons is because by the time we have children at least one generation has transpired in time and a whole bunch of the rules that made sense in parenting in our time, suddenly are questionable in their time. It does not make things any easier the fact that more and more we are learning that our children are riddled with emotional and sometimes mental illnesses that until recently nobody had even named. To make things worse, even after they name them, they truly don't understand them. As a parent, what is it that I should do with respect to this worsening situation? What is my responsibility and how far do I take on the challenge of understanding and being a part of healing my son's mind? For the longest time I would spend hours on end digging through books, journals, and the news to find whatever small bit of information that I could find useful in understanding why it was that my child behaved so differently from the rest. I had him tested over and over again with neurological assessments and counselors whom all seemed somehow willing to go along with the mechanics of discovering what might be his problem, but never taking it one step forward to truly helping him in the end. Frustrated and confused I joined the club of desperate parents who knew their children had something that needed fixing, but nothing seemed to make that great of a difference in the end to make things better. So eventually my responsibility turned from research seeker to researcher. Instead of expecting to find answers in what was already out there, I decided to take matters into my own hand and find as many ways as possible to truly understand and help my son myself.
Amazingly, my own son having such a bright mind, he himself recognized that he was different. Several times he has approached me with much more insight than I could ever learn on my own of from anyone else. In many ways that is why I have had to respect him when he has made the conscious choice of not taking the prescribed medications that were given to him at random times. I feel absolutely zero confidence that the few doctors that met him shortly and in less than 45 minutes decided to prescribe him some mind altering medications truly knew what they were doing. Last Christmas I was on my way to Puerto Rico to visit my family when I encountered a longer than six hour delay at my final connecting flight. An older looking and later discovered very intelligent gentleman that sat close to me engaged me in conversation and we talked about many things in those long hours. Eventually the subject of our children came up and he went on to tell me how he had missed out on much of his years of being a parent because of a mental illness. When I curiously asked what kind of treatment he was given, he quickly replied with the name of more than a dozen medications that were prescribed to him throughout the years. Eventually he stop dropping names and he said, "none of them truly did me any good, in fact they all mostly turned me into a zombie making me miss out on most of the lives of my children." Then he proceeded to tell me how after so many years he finally was able to find a doctor that could help him. One by one the doctor started to slowly remove each of the medications and a little bit at a time a great haze lifted from his mind. At the time of our conversation he said that it has already been two years since he was off of all medications and that he had never felt better in his entire life. He was doing so well that his children where now coming back to him asking him for advice about parenting and to please help them with their own children, his grand kids. There are definitely reasons to take medications, and I am sure that many mental illnesses can benefit greatly from these concoctions. However, many of the individuals prescribing them truly have no business doing so without taking the time to help diagnose correctly the patients illnesses.
Why do you think I would take such an attitude about such an significant issue? Because in the end, my job is not so much to understand the illness, my job is to understand and help my child. Of course you might probably be compelled to say that by understanding a mental illness one should be much more equipped to understand the patient, and I will agree with that statement. However, he is my son, not my patient. So far I have not found a single doctor that has truly been able to help my son. That is not to say that there is not one out there that can do so, it is just a statement of fact. So what would make me think that if all of these so called professionals have barely found the inclination to help my son, I should take upon me as a parent the task of understanding their jobs in order to help him myself? Nope, either because of incompetence or negligence, whichever the reason might be, none of these individuals have done their clinical duty of truly understanding the illness and how to help heal my child and I do not feel compelled to force this duty upon myself, his father. Neither should any parent under these same circumstances. I've read it over and over again in the messages that desperate relatives write searching for answers and help because a family member is ill and they feel all alone, abandoned by not just the rest of their relatives and friends, but also by the very same people that supposedly dedicate their lives to understanding and helping individuals with mental illnesses. I can safely say that if I want to help my son get better, I truly need to understand him, his mental state, his way of thinking, and the things that he feels are important in his life. Inside his mind is the answer to his healing, not inside the illness in itself. If I simply medicate him, thinking that this will heal him, nothing has truly changed inside him, so why would he be healed? Yes, certain medications might help him, if in fact the medical community could truly agree on what his illness is, but playing "take a pill and let's see what happens" is not his or my cup of tea. So in the meantime, while they truly do nothing about it, I've taken the time to understand him instead.
So how does this work? What is it that I do to understand him? How can I help him by understanding him? It works the same way that everything in life worthwhile works, a little bit at a time. Instead of hoping for a quick answer that rushes us to the drugstore to find a magical pill, we walk together the path of his life which happens to have an illness inside it. Mind you, we walk, not run! There is no purpose in running through any ones life, what would be the point of living? There is no hurry, we take baby steps in discovering what are the things that make him well, and which ones don't. One day at a time I have learned to see much more to him than his illness. In fact, as devastating as his illness might seem at times, it is only but a small part of his life. It might touch every aspect of his personality, making him different, but not any worse than anyone else. When I discover something beautiful inside him, I try to encourage it to grow and to flourish. Music sets the path to so much in his personality, so I let him breath it and use it to grow as an individual. Reading his books sometimes scare me to no end with so many subjects that are truly hard to grasp and accept, yet one at a time he devours them and surprisingly keeps what truly helps him inside and simply ignores what might hurt him in the end. It is almost as if he had a mental liver to process the information that he consumes and rid him of toxins. Yes, sometimes it takes him a long time to consume properly what he reads, challenging me to have to hold back and let him make his own mistakes, but what would be of the bird if when it was coming out of it's egg we intervened? Would it not be strong enough and perish? Indeed it would, and so I too have to allow him to walk on his own much of the journey to become well.
Ever now and then I go into my son's room to do some cleaning up and get rid of junk that should not be there in the first place. If I take more than several weeks to return, it never fails that when I do I always find some drawing on the floor. In fact, I don't think that I have ever found any less than a dozen drawings and that if not more lyrics to some song he is writing. Crumbled up on the floor as if it had absolutely no value left to it I keep finding these treasures left behind from a mind that is constantly creating, evolving, changing, and most of all growing. What originally started as non-comprehensive mumble jumble eventually began to make sense to me. Not because he was making more sense, but because I was one day at a time learning to understand him better. So I walk this path of love toward the healing of my child, knowing well enough that I was extremely ignorant when I started to walk with him, but now I truly can see what is inside him a little bit at a time. Is this not better than changing him? Would you want to turn off the music if it was such a lovely melody that it entranced you? Would you not be compelled to understand it better when at times it seems frustrating and scary? I do, and in fact I cannot imagine now doing it any other way.
The trick is walking, not running. If you rush it, you won't see it...if you are running, you will pass by it all so fast that there is no way you can understand it. I can honestly suggest to all of those parents that at this very moment are pulling their hair because their child is doing something incredibly dumb, scary, stupid, offensive, hurtful, and more to take a step back and instead of trying to put a stop to it, which most likely is impossible, take a step back and try to understand why your child is doing these things instead. Don't cop out and compare him to any other child because this one you know very well in your mind and heart is different. Find the reasons one at a time and you will probably will find a way to help them stop. If you can understand them, you can help them, otherwise you will just get frustrated and tired and eventually give up. Next time your child is being totally disrespectful instead of trying to put a stop to it, try to figure out why, what is the root of his emotion that is making him or her behave this way. If you are able to figure it out, you are on your way to becoming a much better parent. This does not come easy. My instinct is to raise my voice, lift up a hand, and sometimes do and say things that I can't even understand why I would do and say in the first place. Unfortunately that is what we might of learned from our parents because it worked with us, which did not have a mental illness. I can tell you with 100% certainty that it will not work with a child that is wired differently. Once you know this, why would you keep running in the wrong direction with your parenting skills. Instead, turn around and start walking back to the root of it all and find a way to connect, to bond, and most of all to make sure they can tell that you love them regardless of how they are and their challenges. I'm not saying it is easy, all I am saying is that it works.
Dad
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Lesson #7 - Communication: It's more than just words.
The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 4).
The greatest challenge I have encountered with my son in the past 12 months is on how to bridge the gap of communication between us. Our generations not only varies in how we express ourselves verbally, but also how we think and act. With such a large disparity in our processing of information, it is no wonder we have found ourselves so many times totally misunderstanding each other. I have learned a great lesson with this connecting with my child challenge, which is that in order for me to understand him, I must listen to much more than just his words.
Lesson #7 - Communication: It's more than just words.
Too many times in the past I found myself rambling something I thought made total sense to me, but made absolutely no sense to my child. In fact, the most common approach to trying to get him to understand would be for me to raise my voice in anger and yell it out. Most of us do this when we are upset, which in retrospect makes absolutely no sense at all. What makes me think that if when I say it in a kind loving way he does not understand me, it would make any more sense when I scream it out? But I am guilty as charged of making this mistake over and over again. The good news is that with the goal of truly understanding my son's world I have slowly but steadily walked away from some of these terribly ineffective habits. This was not an instantaneous decision on my part, in fact it has been a gradual and slow process that in many ways was initiated by him and not me.
Several years back, when we both attended group counseling after he was diagnosed with Intermittent Explosive Disorder, I too recognized in my own behavior many of the traits that were being discussed in group therapy. Almost every time that we got into an argument at the time it would escalate into some kind of violent and aggressive behavior on his part if I too would get so caught up in the moment and would not lower my level of anger too. Very seldom did things really get out of hand if I would not let him get to me emotionally. Mind you, this was very difficult for me to accept because it meant that I had to give in to the reality that I was a trigger to his outbursts. A lot of times during our arguments he would yell so many obscenities and insults that I could rarely stand down and not be hurt by it all, which in turn would get me all wired up and angry too. Angry words would be exchanged and sooner or later he would not be able to control himself and an outburst of violence would occur. What I did not realize before counseling was that his behavior was mostly induced by the way he is wired, and not from a bad habit. My behavior on the other hand was definitely out of habit, which meant that I should and could control it if I set my mind to doing so.
Twelve weeks after we consistently attended the counseling program my son was discharged, not because he was now well, but because they basically said that there was nothing else they could do for him. Sadly, that is the reality of most of these programs which are geared mostly towards checking boxes on a health care checklist instead of truly finding solutions for people with real illnesses and problems. Once an insurance coverage seems to be coming to an end, the providers typically close the case file and send you home to deal with your sickness all on your own. However, all was not a waste since amazingly much of what was taught made a good deal of difference to how my son approached his anger. The first few times that we had arguments after the program was over, it was he that lowered his voice in an almost condescending tone to show me that he did not want to let things escalate again. I was not all that happy in the exact moment that I was being treated as the child by him telling me to calm down and not raise my voice, but eventually I realized that he was totally right. He had learned that when I was upset with him and started to argue, I was his trigger to make things escalate, so he decided to put a stop to the trigger by not feeding from my anger. Once I realized the impact of this amazing breakthrough, I too learned to control myself and not be so quick to escalate my tone of voice in anger, which I am happy to say has worked very well for both of us ever since. This is not to say that we have not had arguments, and that things have not gotten out of hand, but I can safely say now that when it has happened, I was not the trigger anymore. I'd say that we have brought down violent behavior by at least 90%. The other 10% is tied to his alcohol abuse and a very different matter than the previous diagnosis of Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
Once I realized that my son truly wanted to make things better, even if he would not openly say so, I knew that the door was open for us to make positive progress. The challenge then became for me to be able to understand him, to read between the lines, and to find ways to connect. The moment that I accepted that my son was not like other kids, I then decidedly took action to learn more about all the different possible ways I could approach him in order to make a difference in his life. Soon I understood that many of these personality and autistic disorders came bundled with challenging behavior that did not respond to discipline and punishments in the same way that other children respond. I quickly decided to go back and assess every one of my past actions and his responses to them and learned a great deal of what not to do anymore. I learned that agreements were easier for him to accept than rules, and that consequences made more sense than punishment. I now warn him instead of threaten him when he is doing things that I as parent rather he would not do instead. In the end what this all meant was that instead of trying to get him to learn from my mistakes, he had to experience his own for them to be applicable lessons to his life. It is difficult to watch your child fall when you know he is going to fall all along. My role has changed dramatically into that of a loving support role, rather than a teacher and much less an enforcer.
Communication is much more than just words. I have learned to read his body language, to listen attentively to the songs he composes and carefully read the essays he writes. Inside each and every one of them I have found clues to his state of mind. When he is acting out, I try to read between the lines to find out what was the trigger for the behavior at hand. When he seems like he is shutting down I reach out with just one finger instead of my full hand and wait for him to reach back out before I grab him back and bring him up with me. The clothes he wears, his hair, and how he interacts with his friends are all ways of telling me something important. A messy hair means something totally different than a well groomed one, just as much as calm behavior around his friend is much different than wild behavior. I have learned to filter out the nonsense and focus on what matters. Sometimes a joke is just a joke, but sometimes it is a quest for enlightenment. Believe me when I say that a lot of it matters, much more than I originally thought. He is after all an amazing child, with an amazing mind, and I am very grateful to have him in my life...and he needs to know that most of all.
Dad
The greatest challenge I have encountered with my son in the past 12 months is on how to bridge the gap of communication between us. Our generations not only varies in how we express ourselves verbally, but also how we think and act. With such a large disparity in our processing of information, it is no wonder we have found ourselves so many times totally misunderstanding each other. I have learned a great lesson with this connecting with my child challenge, which is that in order for me to understand him, I must listen to much more than just his words.
Lesson #7 - Communication: It's more than just words.
Too many times in the past I found myself rambling something I thought made total sense to me, but made absolutely no sense to my child. In fact, the most common approach to trying to get him to understand would be for me to raise my voice in anger and yell it out. Most of us do this when we are upset, which in retrospect makes absolutely no sense at all. What makes me think that if when I say it in a kind loving way he does not understand me, it would make any more sense when I scream it out? But I am guilty as charged of making this mistake over and over again. The good news is that with the goal of truly understanding my son's world I have slowly but steadily walked away from some of these terribly ineffective habits. This was not an instantaneous decision on my part, in fact it has been a gradual and slow process that in many ways was initiated by him and not me.
Several years back, when we both attended group counseling after he was diagnosed with Intermittent Explosive Disorder, I too recognized in my own behavior many of the traits that were being discussed in group therapy. Almost every time that we got into an argument at the time it would escalate into some kind of violent and aggressive behavior on his part if I too would get so caught up in the moment and would not lower my level of anger too. Very seldom did things really get out of hand if I would not let him get to me emotionally. Mind you, this was very difficult for me to accept because it meant that I had to give in to the reality that I was a trigger to his outbursts. A lot of times during our arguments he would yell so many obscenities and insults that I could rarely stand down and not be hurt by it all, which in turn would get me all wired up and angry too. Angry words would be exchanged and sooner or later he would not be able to control himself and an outburst of violence would occur. What I did not realize before counseling was that his behavior was mostly induced by the way he is wired, and not from a bad habit. My behavior on the other hand was definitely out of habit, which meant that I should and could control it if I set my mind to doing so.
Twelve weeks after we consistently attended the counseling program my son was discharged, not because he was now well, but because they basically said that there was nothing else they could do for him. Sadly, that is the reality of most of these programs which are geared mostly towards checking boxes on a health care checklist instead of truly finding solutions for people with real illnesses and problems. Once an insurance coverage seems to be coming to an end, the providers typically close the case file and send you home to deal with your sickness all on your own. However, all was not a waste since amazingly much of what was taught made a good deal of difference to how my son approached his anger. The first few times that we had arguments after the program was over, it was he that lowered his voice in an almost condescending tone to show me that he did not want to let things escalate again. I was not all that happy in the exact moment that I was being treated as the child by him telling me to calm down and not raise my voice, but eventually I realized that he was totally right. He had learned that when I was upset with him and started to argue, I was his trigger to make things escalate, so he decided to put a stop to the trigger by not feeding from my anger. Once I realized the impact of this amazing breakthrough, I too learned to control myself and not be so quick to escalate my tone of voice in anger, which I am happy to say has worked very well for both of us ever since. This is not to say that we have not had arguments, and that things have not gotten out of hand, but I can safely say now that when it has happened, I was not the trigger anymore. I'd say that we have brought down violent behavior by at least 90%. The other 10% is tied to his alcohol abuse and a very different matter than the previous diagnosis of Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
Once I realized that my son truly wanted to make things better, even if he would not openly say so, I knew that the door was open for us to make positive progress. The challenge then became for me to be able to understand him, to read between the lines, and to find ways to connect. The moment that I accepted that my son was not like other kids, I then decidedly took action to learn more about all the different possible ways I could approach him in order to make a difference in his life. Soon I understood that many of these personality and autistic disorders came bundled with challenging behavior that did not respond to discipline and punishments in the same way that other children respond. I quickly decided to go back and assess every one of my past actions and his responses to them and learned a great deal of what not to do anymore. I learned that agreements were easier for him to accept than rules, and that consequences made more sense than punishment. I now warn him instead of threaten him when he is doing things that I as parent rather he would not do instead. In the end what this all meant was that instead of trying to get him to learn from my mistakes, he had to experience his own for them to be applicable lessons to his life. It is difficult to watch your child fall when you know he is going to fall all along. My role has changed dramatically into that of a loving support role, rather than a teacher and much less an enforcer.
Communication is much more than just words. I have learned to read his body language, to listen attentively to the songs he composes and carefully read the essays he writes. Inside each and every one of them I have found clues to his state of mind. When he is acting out, I try to read between the lines to find out what was the trigger for the behavior at hand. When he seems like he is shutting down I reach out with just one finger instead of my full hand and wait for him to reach back out before I grab him back and bring him up with me. The clothes he wears, his hair, and how he interacts with his friends are all ways of telling me something important. A messy hair means something totally different than a well groomed one, just as much as calm behavior around his friend is much different than wild behavior. I have learned to filter out the nonsense and focus on what matters. Sometimes a joke is just a joke, but sometimes it is a quest for enlightenment. Believe me when I say that a lot of it matters, much more than I originally thought. He is after all an amazing child, with an amazing mind, and I am very grateful to have him in my life...and he needs to know that most of all.
Dad
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Lesson # 8 - He's just a boy.
The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 3).
Day in and day out of exchanging emotional blows with my oldest son is an exhausting task to say the least. At times I have felt that in his mind I am his greatest enemy, while many other times I have come to realize that I am his only true friend. How an individual deals with this emotional roller coaster is something that is strongly tied to his or her level of maturity and life experience. Being the true adult in this relationship has taught me that in order to reach him I must drop down my emotional exchange a few levels so that we can see each other eye to eye. Otherwise it will always seem to him as if I am looking down on him with a superiority complex in hand.
Lesson #8 - He's just a boy.
One of the most difficult tasks that I have encountered with my oldest son is gauging his level of maturity. His talents, abilities, and mental capacity paint a very deceptive picture of his persona. As a little boy, by the time he was only 6 years of age, he was already reading volumes of books that were almost all intended for individuals much older than him. He always behaved like an amazing sponge, ready to suck in not just the few things that were being taught to him, but also everything anyone in the immediate vicinity would have to offer as knowledge. He was definitely born at the right time and place in our technological evolution, taking advantage of everything from books, magazines, computers, and personal knowledge to enhance his own mind. When he decided to learn how to play the guitar, the pace of instructors seemed too slow, too cumbersome for him, so instead he insisted in learning on his own. Just a few months later he was not just playing the acoustic guitar, but also had learned the electric guitar, the banjo, the ukulele, and the bass. Not everyone of those was mastered to the same degree, but the ones that he intended to use to record his own melodies were done so with so much elegance and beauty that it left me dumbfounded when I would hear him play them. On a trip to visit my sister in Plano Texas we had forgotten to bring my digital camera so on the way we stopped at Costco and purchased another to record our 23 hour driving adventure. On our journey he took dozens of pictures which afterwards when I was able to view them, one after the other proved to me how different he saw the world through his eyes compared to mine, and also how masterful his ability to capture the moment truly was indeed. Go back to my earlier posts, take a look at many of the ones I included inside this blog and you will understand what I am talking about.
The more I see what he is capable of, the more amazed I am at his mind. I have listened to some of his own musical compositions and have truly learned to respect his abilities. I have read his essays and can easily understand why his scores are off the chart on any standardized testing given to individuals his age. In retrospect I can really understand now why so many times the scores were not just high scores, but also perfect scores. He has a beautiful mind. However, these abilities and all of these incredibly beautiful talents serve nothing for the purpose of measuring his mental maturity. In other words, when it comes down to it he is just a child. A bearded, long haired, much older looking child, but a child nonetheless. Inside the differently wired mind of my son still lives a boy whom is not even 18 years of age. Too many times I have been tempted to treat him as a grown man, when in fact the truth is that he is just a boy.
During the past 12 months I have learned that in order for me to reach my son and be able to make contact with his intellect and his heart, I have to mix it all up into intelligent conversations with small goals in mind. In other words, I have to talk to him about all those advanced subjects that he loves to talk about, but I must keep in mind that the decision making part of his brain is still developing and growing. His frontal lobe which in time will give him the power to say no to certain things that are not good for him instead of folding to the lure of pleasure is that of a teenage boy, not of a grown man. So yes, we talk about space and time and dark matter and existentialism, but those are just doors to knock on in order to get inside his mind and plant seeds of love and hope and beautiful dreams for the future. This knowledge that even though he is so advanced in so many ways he is still a boy has served me well, but also taken a long time to figure out. I wish I would of known sooner and been more prepared for this incredibly complicated journey. Maybe things did not have to be so hard between us if I would of learned to separate the world of intellect from the world of a child's mind. I have found nothing out there to guide me through this, nothing at all. In retrospect it seems so simple, so easy to understand. Yet while it was all going down, it felt so complicated, so convoluted and hard to see. It is almost as if I was looking through water and could not see the bottom of the glass because it was so full of bubbles or worse turbulence. Still, it was just water, turbulent or not, just water.
I am glad that I have learned this lesson because it will apply to all of the rest of the stages in the lives of my children. No matter how difficult it is for me to see through the turbulent times, I now know that it is just water and that if I take the time to look and listen carefully I should still be able to hear and see the child on the other side. One day soon enough he will no longer be a boy. It really has nothing to do with age and everything to do with life experiences. There is no rush for him to grow up if I understand where he is at in his life. In fact, I am happy with the knowledge that he is just a boy, which means that there is still time to grow, time to mature, and time to become a man.
Dad
Day in and day out of exchanging emotional blows with my oldest son is an exhausting task to say the least. At times I have felt that in his mind I am his greatest enemy, while many other times I have come to realize that I am his only true friend. How an individual deals with this emotional roller coaster is something that is strongly tied to his or her level of maturity and life experience. Being the true adult in this relationship has taught me that in order to reach him I must drop down my emotional exchange a few levels so that we can see each other eye to eye. Otherwise it will always seem to him as if I am looking down on him with a superiority complex in hand.
Lesson #8 - He's just a boy.
One of the most difficult tasks that I have encountered with my oldest son is gauging his level of maturity. His talents, abilities, and mental capacity paint a very deceptive picture of his persona. As a little boy, by the time he was only 6 years of age, he was already reading volumes of books that were almost all intended for individuals much older than him. He always behaved like an amazing sponge, ready to suck in not just the few things that were being taught to him, but also everything anyone in the immediate vicinity would have to offer as knowledge. He was definitely born at the right time and place in our technological evolution, taking advantage of everything from books, magazines, computers, and personal knowledge to enhance his own mind. When he decided to learn how to play the guitar, the pace of instructors seemed too slow, too cumbersome for him, so instead he insisted in learning on his own. Just a few months later he was not just playing the acoustic guitar, but also had learned the electric guitar, the banjo, the ukulele, and the bass. Not everyone of those was mastered to the same degree, but the ones that he intended to use to record his own melodies were done so with so much elegance and beauty that it left me dumbfounded when I would hear him play them. On a trip to visit my sister in Plano Texas we had forgotten to bring my digital camera so on the way we stopped at Costco and purchased another to record our 23 hour driving adventure. On our journey he took dozens of pictures which afterwards when I was able to view them, one after the other proved to me how different he saw the world through his eyes compared to mine, and also how masterful his ability to capture the moment truly was indeed. Go back to my earlier posts, take a look at many of the ones I included inside this blog and you will understand what I am talking about.
The more I see what he is capable of, the more amazed I am at his mind. I have listened to some of his own musical compositions and have truly learned to respect his abilities. I have read his essays and can easily understand why his scores are off the chart on any standardized testing given to individuals his age. In retrospect I can really understand now why so many times the scores were not just high scores, but also perfect scores. He has a beautiful mind. However, these abilities and all of these incredibly beautiful talents serve nothing for the purpose of measuring his mental maturity. In other words, when it comes down to it he is just a child. A bearded, long haired, much older looking child, but a child nonetheless. Inside the differently wired mind of my son still lives a boy whom is not even 18 years of age. Too many times I have been tempted to treat him as a grown man, when in fact the truth is that he is just a boy.
During the past 12 months I have learned that in order for me to reach my son and be able to make contact with his intellect and his heart, I have to mix it all up into intelligent conversations with small goals in mind. In other words, I have to talk to him about all those advanced subjects that he loves to talk about, but I must keep in mind that the decision making part of his brain is still developing and growing. His frontal lobe which in time will give him the power to say no to certain things that are not good for him instead of folding to the lure of pleasure is that of a teenage boy, not of a grown man. So yes, we talk about space and time and dark matter and existentialism, but those are just doors to knock on in order to get inside his mind and plant seeds of love and hope and beautiful dreams for the future. This knowledge that even though he is so advanced in so many ways he is still a boy has served me well, but also taken a long time to figure out. I wish I would of known sooner and been more prepared for this incredibly complicated journey. Maybe things did not have to be so hard between us if I would of learned to separate the world of intellect from the world of a child's mind. I have found nothing out there to guide me through this, nothing at all. In retrospect it seems so simple, so easy to understand. Yet while it was all going down, it felt so complicated, so convoluted and hard to see. It is almost as if I was looking through water and could not see the bottom of the glass because it was so full of bubbles or worse turbulence. Still, it was just water, turbulent or not, just water.
I am glad that I have learned this lesson because it will apply to all of the rest of the stages in the lives of my children. No matter how difficult it is for me to see through the turbulent times, I now know that it is just water and that if I take the time to look and listen carefully I should still be able to hear and see the child on the other side. One day soon enough he will no longer be a boy. It really has nothing to do with age and everything to do with life experiences. There is no rush for him to grow up if I understand where he is at in his life. In fact, I am happy with the knowledge that he is just a boy, which means that there is still time to grow, time to mature, and time to become a man.
Dad
Monday, August 2, 2010
Lesson # 9 - I cannot change him.
The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 2).
For the last 12 months I have been in a constant struggle to keep myself from trying to change my son. Ironically, the best example I have of this being an impossible task is right in front of me every morning as I look at myself in the mirror. I am living proof that nobody can change who you are inside. True change only comes from within, anything else is just an illusion.
Lesson #9 - I cannot change him.
Short of something new and yet to be discovered, every thing in the universe is made out of the same stuff. You, me, the earth, in fact the entire cosmos is all made out of energy, which at times is visible and at others not. The essence of everything you know, including your thoughts, is made out of energy. In our small blue marble of a planet we call Earth, the process of evolution has created an amazing collage of things, some inanimate, others very much alive, which surround our every breath we take. For a stone to attain it's shape and composition, it took millions, sometimes billions of years. The same can be said for all living creatures in our world. A red rose is not just a red rose. Within it are millions of cells that symbiotically have found a way to survive and thrive so that it may in the large scale of things eventually become a rose. This stands true for everything that is alive on Earth. If you wanted to turn a rose into a daisy, nothing short of a miracle would be needed on your part to perform such a task. In fact, even if it could be done, you would first have to destroy the real essence of the rose by converting it into energy, and then afterwards transform that energy back into a daisy. This my dear readers is not much different from what it would take to change your child into a different person. Wanting my son to be different by my standards means having to destroy his real essence in order to do so. There is the lesson, not only am I not capable of changing my son, I truthfully do not want to change him.
True change comes from within. Nobody can make me a better father. In order for me to become a better father I must want to do so from within myself. Nobody can change my son. In order for him to become a good man, he must learn the lessons that make any man a good man and then be willing to adapt from within. My job is not to change him, instead it is to guide him, set an example, and then be there for him when he needs me. Just as the rose will need water and nutrients, so will he need caring and love to see him through all the tests that life will throw at him on his journey to become a man. It is not what you tell them as a parent that really matters, it is what you show them. Telling someone that you are there for them, but then when they need you being miles away to help is not the same as being there in the flesh. Us humans are funny that way, we thrive on real contact with others, and we easily whither when left all alone and what might seem without hope. The love and caring that you give your children cannot be replaced with anything else, and without it they will become totally different individuals.
I have learned during the past 12 months that rather than trying to change my child, I need to accept him for who he is, just the way he is, and feed with love and compassion the good qualities inside him. There are so many reasons to be upset with a challenging teenager, but there are also just as many to be proud of him. To focus on the negative things would simply force me to be upset, frustrated, and angry all the time. What would be the usefulness to having that attitude? I am not advocating to ignore negative behavior, there is a time and place for rewards and this would definitely not be it. However, I have learned to truly appreciate the beauty that is mostly hidden from plain view in the many little things that make my child unique. Even when he is in the midst of a very unfortunate behavior, I can still see through him when I look into his eyes. He is in there, waiting to thrive, to succeed, to be a great man! Nobody wants to do it all wrong. When he is doing it all wrong, there is a reason that might not be justifiable, but still the reason stands. It is my job to understand this reason, to see what it takes to sand down the roughness of his words, to cool down the heat in his burning heart. I cannot imagine anyone else willing to take on this task, so it might as well be me. Not because I have no other choice, but because I want to see him through it all. So again we come full circle, it's all about love.
Dad
For the last 12 months I have been in a constant struggle to keep myself from trying to change my son. Ironically, the best example I have of this being an impossible task is right in front of me every morning as I look at myself in the mirror. I am living proof that nobody can change who you are inside. True change only comes from within, anything else is just an illusion.
Lesson #9 - I cannot change him.
Short of something new and yet to be discovered, every thing in the universe is made out of the same stuff. You, me, the earth, in fact the entire cosmos is all made out of energy, which at times is visible and at others not. The essence of everything you know, including your thoughts, is made out of energy. In our small blue marble of a planet we call Earth, the process of evolution has created an amazing collage of things, some inanimate, others very much alive, which surround our every breath we take. For a stone to attain it's shape and composition, it took millions, sometimes billions of years. The same can be said for all living creatures in our world. A red rose is not just a red rose. Within it are millions of cells that symbiotically have found a way to survive and thrive so that it may in the large scale of things eventually become a rose. This stands true for everything that is alive on Earth. If you wanted to turn a rose into a daisy, nothing short of a miracle would be needed on your part to perform such a task. In fact, even if it could be done, you would first have to destroy the real essence of the rose by converting it into energy, and then afterwards transform that energy back into a daisy. This my dear readers is not much different from what it would take to change your child into a different person. Wanting my son to be different by my standards means having to destroy his real essence in order to do so. There is the lesson, not only am I not capable of changing my son, I truthfully do not want to change him.
True change comes from within. Nobody can make me a better father. In order for me to become a better father I must want to do so from within myself. Nobody can change my son. In order for him to become a good man, he must learn the lessons that make any man a good man and then be willing to adapt from within. My job is not to change him, instead it is to guide him, set an example, and then be there for him when he needs me. Just as the rose will need water and nutrients, so will he need caring and love to see him through all the tests that life will throw at him on his journey to become a man. It is not what you tell them as a parent that really matters, it is what you show them. Telling someone that you are there for them, but then when they need you being miles away to help is not the same as being there in the flesh. Us humans are funny that way, we thrive on real contact with others, and we easily whither when left all alone and what might seem without hope. The love and caring that you give your children cannot be replaced with anything else, and without it they will become totally different individuals.
I have learned during the past 12 months that rather than trying to change my child, I need to accept him for who he is, just the way he is, and feed with love and compassion the good qualities inside him. There are so many reasons to be upset with a challenging teenager, but there are also just as many to be proud of him. To focus on the negative things would simply force me to be upset, frustrated, and angry all the time. What would be the usefulness to having that attitude? I am not advocating to ignore negative behavior, there is a time and place for rewards and this would definitely not be it. However, I have learned to truly appreciate the beauty that is mostly hidden from plain view in the many little things that make my child unique. Even when he is in the midst of a very unfortunate behavior, I can still see through him when I look into his eyes. He is in there, waiting to thrive, to succeed, to be a great man! Nobody wants to do it all wrong. When he is doing it all wrong, there is a reason that might not be justifiable, but still the reason stands. It is my job to understand this reason, to see what it takes to sand down the roughness of his words, to cool down the heat in his burning heart. I cannot imagine anyone else willing to take on this task, so it might as well be me. Not because I have no other choice, but because I want to see him through it all. So again we come full circle, it's all about love.
Dad
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Lesson # 10 - I'm doing this for LOVE.
The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 1).
Almost one year ago I began writing on this blog and sharing my life experiences with you. Over 3,600 visits have logged on to these pages either by chance or on purpose, motivating me to stay true to some simple rules I wrote on my first post of August 10, 2009. These digital pages have served me well as a place to unload, reflect, and most of all force myself to see my life in ways I never originally intended to. Now I feel not just obligated, but intensely compelled to at the least give you what in my mind have been the most important lessons that I have learned in the past twelve months.
Lesson # 10 - I'm only doing this for LOVE.
If you search through the stories contained in all of my 142 posts a common theme surges without forcing itself on you, the reader...I'm doing this for love. I have no hidden agenda, no ulterior motive, and much less any prize to gain by typing the contents of these pages. In fact, I have always feared that the honest words that I seal in the context of my posts might some day come to bite me in the proverbial ass. An angry reader, a self proclaimed seeker of justice, and even my own ex-wife could take offense to my sincere approach to putting it all on the table, as I do here today. However, I have found one single emotion that is in itself more powerful than any fear I might have while typing away, and that emotion is love. This is not an emotion that you can summarize in a two hour movie where the characters fall into and out of love like autumn leaves on a picnic table in the park. Nope, this is the love that only a parent is able to express towards his children without doubt or hesitation. If you are a parent, the kind that would do just about anything for the sake of your children to live normal and happy lives, you understand better than anyone else what I mean.
I have experienced what is surely more than half of my life, probably even two thirds of it by now. It would serve no purpose to have learned every lesson in life's book, if in the end I would of not learned the lesson of loving a child. Out of all of the things that you can put into your parenting toolbox, love is by far the most powerful one of all. Because of love I am the father that I am. This emotion that my parents threw at me freely as a child and still as an adult is the key to surviving the most difficult moments of any one's life. I am lucky, God did me a great deed by giving me the ability to love so consistently unconditionally. Love is in fact not only my sword but also my shield that protects me from the realities of life, which I am not exempt of experiencing, and which are more commonly than not incredibly painful and unavoidable.
What does love do for a parent? It recharges you from the difficult moments that come your way every day. Rarely have I had more than one day at a time without having to deal with something hurtful, frustrating, or worst scary. Yet at all times I feel blessed because the more I struggle, the more I love my children. I've had great teachers in my life. My parents are themselves the greatest symbols of love in my life, just as their parents were to them too. My brother and two sisters are a fountain that never dries out of this nectar so sweet and special that I've needed to survive in life, without them I would of withered a long time ago.
So here I am fully aware that even though sharing with you so many beautiful and other scary moments of my life has served me well with your words of encouragement and caring ways, in the end I can safely say that what I do for my kids, I do because I love them. Maybe someday when I am gone, a hard copy of these last 12 months will fall into their hands as a reminder of how far I had to go in order to learn to be a good father. This is not just about what works or does not work in parenting, this is much more about how love heals and always finds a way to make things right in the end.
Dad
Almost one year ago I began writing on this blog and sharing my life experiences with you. Over 3,600 visits have logged on to these pages either by chance or on purpose, motivating me to stay true to some simple rules I wrote on my first post of August 10, 2009. These digital pages have served me well as a place to unload, reflect, and most of all force myself to see my life in ways I never originally intended to. Now I feel not just obligated, but intensely compelled to at the least give you what in my mind have been the most important lessons that I have learned in the past twelve months.
Lesson # 10 - I'm only doing this for LOVE.
If you search through the stories contained in all of my 142 posts a common theme surges without forcing itself on you, the reader...I'm doing this for love. I have no hidden agenda, no ulterior motive, and much less any prize to gain by typing the contents of these pages. In fact, I have always feared that the honest words that I seal in the context of my posts might some day come to bite me in the proverbial ass. An angry reader, a self proclaimed seeker of justice, and even my own ex-wife could take offense to my sincere approach to putting it all on the table, as I do here today. However, I have found one single emotion that is in itself more powerful than any fear I might have while typing away, and that emotion is love. This is not an emotion that you can summarize in a two hour movie where the characters fall into and out of love like autumn leaves on a picnic table in the park. Nope, this is the love that only a parent is able to express towards his children without doubt or hesitation. If you are a parent, the kind that would do just about anything for the sake of your children to live normal and happy lives, you understand better than anyone else what I mean.
I have experienced what is surely more than half of my life, probably even two thirds of it by now. It would serve no purpose to have learned every lesson in life's book, if in the end I would of not learned the lesson of loving a child. Out of all of the things that you can put into your parenting toolbox, love is by far the most powerful one of all. Because of love I am the father that I am. This emotion that my parents threw at me freely as a child and still as an adult is the key to surviving the most difficult moments of any one's life. I am lucky, God did me a great deed by giving me the ability to love so consistently unconditionally. Love is in fact not only my sword but also my shield that protects me from the realities of life, which I am not exempt of experiencing, and which are more commonly than not incredibly painful and unavoidable.
What does love do for a parent? It recharges you from the difficult moments that come your way every day. Rarely have I had more than one day at a time without having to deal with something hurtful, frustrating, or worst scary. Yet at all times I feel blessed because the more I struggle, the more I love my children. I've had great teachers in my life. My parents are themselves the greatest symbols of love in my life, just as their parents were to them too. My brother and two sisters are a fountain that never dries out of this nectar so sweet and special that I've needed to survive in life, without them I would of withered a long time ago.
So here I am fully aware that even though sharing with you so many beautiful and other scary moments of my life has served me well with your words of encouragement and caring ways, in the end I can safely say that what I do for my kids, I do because I love them. Maybe someday when I am gone, a hard copy of these last 12 months will fall into their hands as a reminder of how far I had to go in order to learn to be a good father. This is not just about what works or does not work in parenting, this is much more about how love heals and always finds a way to make things right in the end.
Dad
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