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On being a Dad


Being a Dad


I remember with clarity the moments my two girls entered the world, 2 years and 2 months apart.   Abi kept us (especially my valiant Ina) waiting during a long and difficult labour and Hannah was so quick the midwife just caught her in no more.   When I twice heard those words ‘it’s a girl’ my heart exploded and my mind got bent out of shape.   All I could do was let the overwhelming wave of new life bear me away to destinations unknown.  

Needless to say our lives changed forever and one of the joys is the relationship Ina and I have now with these two adult offspring of ours, 24 and 22 this summer.   They have taken very different paths and grown into two very different young women but I’d like to think they are both ‘making their way by walking’ and living congruently with who they are at this moment in time.   Our role as parents has changed and we learn from them as much as they do from us.   In fact that has gone on for some time…  a lot of being a dad has been about responding to my kids.   I just heard the poet/philosopher James Whyte today talk about the ‘conversational nature of reality’, that boundary where people’s expectations of us and our expectations of them all turn out quite differently.   Including, I suppose, our expectations of ourselves, especially as parents.   While in my head I was working to an idealised parenting template, my children were teaching me the conversational nature of parenting.

As a dad I wanted to have it together, to protect, provide, guide and be the all-round dependable guy who was cool and fun too.   However, whilst I was some of that I also made mistakes, got lazy at times, made some poor decisions, and had the usual ‘dad in the man cave’ moments if things were not going my way.   As the girls grew older though and could articulate their own ideas and perspectives and sometimes just acted them out I was challenged that parenting is of this conversational nature.  The holy trust given to me when these babies rooted down deep in my heart had become my greatest responsibility and I was afraid of losing control of that process.   A few days before Abi’s wedding I had a dream in which I was teaching her to drive and then I was telescoped out of the car and she was in the car on her own which was going faster and faster round country bends and I was desperately trying to catch up but she went out of sight and I woke up with my heart beating as I’d just sprinted 100 metres.   Boy, I had difficulty letting go!    I'm writing this just after dropping Hannah in Dundee where a place at the School of Art is the start of a new chapter for her.    But again I was waking regularly at three in the morning in the lead up to that move!

This loss of control as my girls have gently, but firmly, unhooked my fingers from holding on did not in the end diminish my treasuring of this sacred trust given to every parent.   Trusting them to make their own mistakes ( even big ones) and to flourish in ways that may challenge my assumptions about how the world works has opened my eyes to the conversational covenant that lies at the core of parenting.   It is conversational in that both sides are vested in this relationship and need to be taken seriously and a covenant in that we are committed to one another and also to one another’s freedom.   The future truly is unwritten and we don’t know where the conversation will take us but the covenant gives us security that we are there for each other no matter what.  The alternative is to find our security in idealised notions in which everyone has to abide by unwritten rules and play certain roles to preserve the family unity.

The mutual flourishing of both children and parents can take people in very different directions as we give each other the space to be who we are all becoming…and that of course is a life-long process in that we are always becoming and down all the years we have known and may know each other we retain the capacity to surprise one another.   It’s quite fitting that Father’s Day falls on Trinity Sunday this year as the mutual self giving of the Trinity is the ultimate conversational covenant and model for true family.

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