Laughing, skating, and dads

My street is a funny place. A place where laughs are shared with careless abandon, skateboards provide meaningful transport, and wine is drunk in groups at the side of the road! A strange and unusual place to live!

According to my calculations, our small stretch of road comprises 24 houses in which 27 children lay their heads at night. And there is at least one more on the way! This incredible piece of arithmetic genius excludes all of the bigger kids, the ones with real leather wallets and the coolest toys. To say there is plenty of action on our street would be putting things mildly. Always somebody to play with and some or other set of wheels to be ridden, kids paradise!

Friday night saw 5 dads on skateboards and multitudes of children enjoying the pleasures of well greased ball bearings on axels. Dads are fully involved in the play, including special moves like lie on the road as fast as possible from coasting on board, and lets test how hot these chillies really are! Luckily for the dads, cold beer provides welcome relief from our sillier antics and refreshes far better than Oros. Last night our impromptu gathering ended at the half pipe at my house. Strangely, the only injury being one big kid with a few new dents in his ankle.

I like the fact that as dads, we are involved in the play with our children. I like that they can see us trying to push ourselves, and having fun with each other. Most of our relationships with our children are serious and it is good to be able to get down to their level and just enjoy time spent doing silly things.

Three of the children belong to a new neighbour who just moved in. When he walked away from my house with three skateboards under his arms, only one of which was his sons, I knew he would be fitting right in!

Fathers and sons

Saturday found my mom, Luke and I hiking in the mountains near our home. We chatted along the way and Luke surprised me with some of his technical knowledge about the weathering of rocks. Something that we had discussed almost two years previously on another adventure. I was amazed that he had taken that information in and that it had stuck.

On our way down the mountain, Luke kept slipping on the loose stones. His slip sliding approach was mainly as a result of his inexperience, choosing the wrong places to step, moving his weight at the wrong times, etc.

My first instinct was to explain all of these technical details to him, so that he could immediately get it right. And then an epiphany struck! I keep trying to pass on my life’s experience, knowledge, and wisdom to my children and expect them to take it all in and be perfect from then on. Strangely, it just does not work that way. Besides the fact that I am not perfect either!

I got to thinking about my role as a father. Surely it is not for me to be the perfect know it all, but rather the gentle guide. I imagine that there is time for both roles, but my focus should be on the latter. Unfortunately, in my bid to give as much as possible to my children, I have spent far too much as the information dispenser. I certainly did not learn everything from my parents. Much of my learning has been from experience, surely I need to provide those opportunities to my children and let them learn in a safe environment. Surely they don’t need to hear me droning on all of the time...

So Luke and I took a winter swim in an icy mountain pool, well beyond chilly, but far more important than another information sharing session!

I had an interesting insight.

One of the reasons that I resigned was to spend more time with my children. Looking at my new life with a pair of critical eyes, I discovered that I was not spending all that more quality time with my kids. That did not make sense to me at all. Here I was doing what I wanted to do, which should have included plenty of quality time with my boys and yet it was not happening.

Instead I have filled my time with great activities, all of which I want to do. Hmmm, and there is still not enough time to do everything! Like the all important time that I need and want to spend with the boys!

So you see it does not matter how much time you have, fatherhood or parenthood is still a choice that one has to make. Children need as much time as possible and more. As a parent, it is our role to sacrifice ourselves in order to provide that time. Time we would dearly love to spend on the things we want to do.

When I was working as hard and time intensively as I was, I needed to get very creative on how I fitted children time into my life. Every spare light moment was spent with them in the garden playing sport and the dark moments playing games inside. Now I see them all of the time and there is no longer that desperate need to fill my time with their best interests. Instead I am always available, which is rather a different thing. I watch them play sport at school, I eat all meals with them, and I attend their functions and parties. I am there, but I am not really interacting on the level that I would like. A level at which they have a dad who is active in their lives and who is their biggest and greatest role model and supporter.

I suppose that I have to constantly re-evaluate my choices and make sure that they are helping me achieve the end points I want. Not only my fatherhood choices but all the others as well. When critical evaluation tells me that I am off track, it is time to check out those choices again, and again!

Fatherhood is a choice. Children need as much time as possible with their dad. I want to be that dad! Time for some adjustments to make it happen.

I am enthralled and exuberated! Neurons in my brain are firing at unprecedented speeds. Thoughts coalescing, growing and then diverging again. Many of them! Synapses are firing with force and energy. There is a new idea in the old grey matter and it is causing mayhem. This idea feels right and worthy and even worth while. Perhaps I am at the start of something wonderful and beautiful. Something that will grow into a reason for my being. Perhaps this idea is worthless and will fizzle and die in time. There is risk but there is possibly huge reward. A reward so big that I am wondering if I am the right person to try and grasp it. I know I should be, must be, but am I?

Last year, a friend and I took our two boys on a boy’s weekend. The idea was to spend good time with our sons on their own. Added to that we wanted them to experience something completely alien to their way of life, to their experience, and to their accumulated base of knowledge. We were going to have fun! We camped in Augrabies Falls, we saw the Sishen Iron Ore Mine, and toured the Kimberley Big Hole. I loved watching my sons face light up and his eyes grow big as he saw and experienced stuff that blew his mind. The time we spent together was precious beyond measure.

This morning saw me on the road doing a short run (Two Oceans is soon). I then dropped the kids off at school and joined a mate for breakfast. Waffles and ice cream, mmmmmm. More exciting than the syrup high, far more fascinating than the news or weather was the idea!

I have long been concerned about the moral fibre of society. My kind of role model seems to be non existent although role models of all varietals are everywhere. I do not want to abandon the upbringing of my children to their school teachers and their friends and their parents. I do want to do all that I can do to assist my sons to grow into decent, loving and good human beings. I want to try and build a relationship with my sons that will help them through their difficult teenage years. I also want to provide them with a network of local role models that they can go to when in need and learn from at any other time. Until today, I had no idea how to get this right. Truly speaking, I still don’t, but there is an idea!

My friend suggested that we create a group of like minded dads and their sons. The mental, spiritual and emotional well being of our children must be one of our highest priorities. We then invest time and energy into creating experiences for our children that revolve around specific issues that they are experiencing or specific values that we would like them to attain. We would include some new rituals / traditions to make this an exclusive and special experience, something that they will look back on and remember with pride and joy. We will hike, we will camp, we will play games and we will solve some cleverly crafted puzzles all directed at building special father / son relationships and instilling deep values into their little spirits.

This is going to take a lot of effort and time, but the outcome is so important, it is worth the investment of my life. My description does not explain exactly what we are going to do, that will all evolve with time. Nonetheless it is all about quality father and son time in a world that is madly busy. It is about sharing the real joy of life with our children.

The idea is just an idea. Either way the investment will mature in a couple of years and the return will be priceless.....