Resentment Baggage

Parenting has its highs and its lows.

The highs can be terrific, but the lows at times leave you shaking your head, both at your own inner demons and at the unceasing vagaries the role of Dad assumes within your life.

I don't know if its a universal trait for all fathers, but being a Dad carries with it the occasional realization that, well...while you certainly don't regret the role, you can, at times, resent it.

Being a parent means, at its most basic, that you are always on-duty, 24-7, always in demand and available to cater to the necessities (and the flagrant whims) of your young child and woe betide those that do not... Ignoring your kid can certainly be an occasional tactic, but I find that they invariably make you pay.

It isn't a resentment of the role of being a father. God knows, I find that being a Dad has been the most extraordinary experience of my life, and one of the most fulfilling...and challenging. But still, I find I can still resent the burdens that accompany the joys, without any discontinuity. I can resent the continual imposition on my time, on my priorities, on my privacy, on my personal relationships, on my private time with my wife (Hell, just on privacy in general - just being able to take a ten minute shower or shave without a certain small vagrant banging on the bathroom door demanding to come in...). Kids impose without limit or boundary, and for every crystalline moment of enjoyment you experience with your child, your very probably also experience, at some fleeting point, the wish that they would just go away for five minutes or so....

I probably sound like a selfish curmudgeon but, the reality of parenting is that you let go of many things of value that you were utterly unaware that you had. Like time. Like personal space. Like the shape of your relationship. The arrival of a third party changes utterably the landscape, it is, quite literally a New World found within the old.

Bear in mind, its not necessarily a bad thing...but you can't really know it or sense the parameters until you plunge on through. I had not an inkling of the impact of becoming a father would have on my personal space, beyond the abstract intellectual acknowledgement that a third person would be joining our household ("How will we rearrange the closets?"). It becomes more apparent to you when you find that third person rearranging your every priority, relationship and freedom, or, as my son did on multiple occasions over the holidays, just plain sabotaging my every effort to take my wife out to see the new Lord of the Rings movie....

Resentment is a natural a part of parenting as any other emotion. It becomes another of those unsettling truths about yourself that being a Dad so often forces you to encounter. Damn it, sometimes you just plain resent the little bugger...until he smiles or cries or drags you off to play another game of Pokemon cards and the resentment sloughs off like a shadow in sunshine....

It just can't fester in sunlight you know...

Off to play cards....Go Pikachu, go!

Comments are always welcome. You can reach me at dadchronicles(at)hotmail.com.