If you can't handle me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best was not in fact Marilyn Monroe's quip but it's a declaration that enjoys increasing impact in our times of self-actualisation and aggressive authenticity. It is the misfortune of many children that they see too much of their parents' worst and too little of their best.
I thought, absurdly, before becoming a father that I was inching towards some basic level of self-knowledge. The kind of man that I was and why. How wrong I was. Forget the mirror in Snow White, if you want to know yourself just have kids. Be warned, however, that you are very likely to find that you are not the fairest of them all.
Just as adversity provides the truest test of character having a child reveals you for who you really are. Are you patient? Are you hard working? Are you compassionate? Are you fun? In my case the answers being no, no, no and, just for the sake of consistency, no. In many respects the world of work represents a blank canvas upon which you get to choose, or at the very least have some agency over, how you depict yourself. Not so parenting.
When your baby is born a remorseless spotlight switches on and there is no hiding place, there's no covering up your weak spots or delegating the dull bits. That is unless you're prepared to pay, (and pay, and pay).
The more you pay for childcare the more you gain in terms of time, sanity and sleep. But just as if you paid someone to sit your driving test for you if you pass the buck while handing over the pounds you may just find that while you have your parenting licence you haven't the faintest idea what makes your child work and when their engine packs up on the side of the road you can only stand helplessly watching steam billow from the bonnet.
I have found that, in many respects, I'm not the father I hoped or thought I would be, which amounts to discovering I'm not so much the man I wished I was. This domestic voyage of discovery is apt in some parents, particularly fathers I might suggest, to conjure some rather difficult feelings. Little wonder it is then that some seek to suppress those feelings by throwing money at the problem or by running away.
But the thing about feelings is that if you don't sit with them you will find that they sit on you, not today, not tomorrow but some day when it's least convenient. I have, without doubt, learned more about myself in the last 4 years that I have in all 40 that I have lived. That I have enjoyed the lesson about as much as I enjoyed learning the past tense in Ancient Greek is not really the point.
If we're not tested we never discover what we're capable of but worse than that we never really find out who we are.
