Parental Editing

On Offsets

I’ve struggled a bit writing another post for dadicalized and while I doubt I’ll ever truly figure out why it’s so hard to do the thing I love (write), I suspect I’ve discovered part of the reason. Besides taking on the normal important life stuff (big move, new baby, looking for a new job, etc), it hit me like a sack of bricks recently that I am also taking on a new me. Or I’m starting to at least.

I mean, duh. But the nuance is Baby is just part of becoming a dad. It’s more than a role and responsibilities and a name. I’m becoming a version of myself I genuinely love, but before I have the emotional tools to handle the harder bits.

My big struggle is that I don’t understand what a healthy steady state is.

I’m actually used to things getting harder. I’m used to things getting worse. I am comfortable with everything being on fire.

I am the fire as much as Jim Lahey is the liquor.

As I think back on the past 12 years of my life since I graduated college, I cannot think of a time where there was a true lull in the chaos. Maybe in the 6 weeks between my Army career ended and my MBA began? But that still was a frenzy of moving and FOMO.

Even as the overall trajectory of my life seems to get consistently better and better, I fear I view myself fundamentally as someone who performs best when the chips are down. Well, I don’t fear it. I know it.

I’ve always been proud of that. It helped shape who I am. It helped me understand my role in the world and in my social groups. I step up when others are floundering. I can carry the weight on my back. I got you. Just call me Atlas.

I now realize this may make me seek the harder path.

The emergency path. The “nothing gets done unless it’s on fire and I can rationalize why I need to focus on this specific thing instead of everything else for the next few hours” path. The perfectionist path that I use to fake meaning in my work in the absence of a real problem.

In this case, it appears to me that I am treating these drafts (8 by last count) as more important than they are. These are not missives chiseled in stone. The whole point was for this to be the raw stuff. It’s supposed to be the knotty, complicated mess of feelings that Dads feel at 11pm and 6am and at 3 in the afternoon when you are trying to decide if you need to stop work early to go help out with the disaster unfolding in the next room over. It’s a record of my reality as it unfolds.

I don’t normally write like this. I write and rewrite. I polish. I sit on it and then in an emergency frenzy I push 8 hours of focus into it and voila. It exists.

Here has to be different. I want to capture the energy of when we are close to the thing. These essays are a snapshot of the muddlebrained, sleep-deprived chains of thought that characterize this era of my life.

This is how clockworkly the past 4 months has gone.

I put my son down for a nap or perhaps bedtime. He’ll chaos monkey for a dice roll’s amount of time. Grasping kicking hooting hollering. A real squirmy worm. He’s eating eating eating distracted then eating again. A cat comes in and he giggles at her. Eventually he hits a wall (or I find a better grip and pin his arms in some secret, relaxing technique) and I can rock him to sleep. This last bit is where I can downshift my mind. In the last 15 to 45 minutes of eye-of-the-storm reflection I settle into ideas of what to write about.

Some are good ideas, many are fine, most are real, and a couple are what I wish were real or what I think might happen next or perhaps even genuinely clever and/or a touch insightful. Beautifully, they exist and I get them quickly down into my notes, screen turned down to 15% brightness so as not to disturb the dead weight boy in my arms, and if I am really on it then I write up a draft before bed and there is the problem. I’m rarely really on it.

I sit on the draft because it’s not cleaned up. I don’t clean it up because that’s boring and hard. And when I finally do go to clean it up, I have lost the momentum of the piece and no longer have the spirit to ride it to publishing. And the notes that never became drafts? Default dead.

This succession of false starts and all this agonizing fundamentally misunderstands parenthood.

The guilty secret of parenting is that it is mostly improvisation. You plan with your partner and try to talk about the big stuff ahead of time, maybe get advice from a few friends or family, and you probably read a book or two to prepare, but the act comes sooner than you think.

The actions. The performance?

A child performs their part with perfect authenticity. How could they not? They don’t understand the concept of inauthentic behavior yet.

So they are exactly them and you attempt to become the version of yourself that does the job well. This builds a back and forth that feeds them and you with love and information about each other. Over time, you help baby construct their world model, as well as all of the localized context models we use to make decisions every second of every day of our lives.

But our actions are filled with mistakes and these misinform baby. You’ll toss them onto the couch a little too quickly, maybe you miss catching them as they try to take a few solo steps too soon, and baby tumbles and knocks his head. You can’t quite catch them before they bother the cat slightly too much. You notice a half second too late that baby put something gross in their mouth. They cry.

You cannot edit the bad memory.

It’s done. Despite all of your wanting and instinct, you as parent are not able to directly undo any damage you cause or allow to happen. The memory is now embedded with an update to their world model. This is perhaps the foundational tragic truth of parenthood.

Your levers of control are not finely tuned. They are blunt instruments, honestly still largely the same ones our parents’ parents’ parents used. The only path forward to a better tomorrow is not to fix anything retroactively, but to create new and better memories and models to help offset the bad one.

Editing is an attempt to change instead of offset.

It’s a control freak’s panic response to the ever rippling rebellion of the real.

I just noticed how white my knuckles are on the wheel.

It’s probably time to stop trying to edit how I feel.