Open letter to my brother Peter

Dear Pete,

You, my older brother, asked me an unanswerable question not too long ago. You said that many of your friends are parents, and when they talk about their kids, they will look at you and say, with a trace of pity, “Well, you’re not a parent, so you just wouldn’t understand.” Understandably irked, you asked me, “What is so different about being a parent that they think I can’t understand?”

I found this nearly impossible to answer, and even later I find it near-impossible to articulate.  Parents love to throw around descriptors such as “amazing,” “life-changing,” and “miraculous.” I can see why you found this last one especially obnoxious, and why you replied, “What’s so miraculous about something that happens every four seconds?”

I finally have an answer for you, but it’s pretty long-winded. Stay with me, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Do you remember that exercise at our high school where Seniors had a carry around a ten pound sack of flour for a week to get a better sense of what being a parent would be like? For an entire five days (read: sarcasm), these seventeen year olds had to lug around a heavy dead weight and that was somehow supposed to convey what it feels like to no longer have the assurance of uninterrupted sleep, of having to learn limitless patience, of having to always take the high road, of learning how to love a person that is hitting you or throwing objects all over the house, of spending an hour cooking homemade food only to have that sack of flour yell at the top of their lungs that they don’t like eating your meal (without tasting it, of course). 

Caring for this benevolent sack also fails to convey that these sensations do not substitute for each other—they culminate exponentially. If you are exhausted from a night of worthless broken sleep, the tantrum will only be greater for the flour sack, and more difficult to endure. It all hits you at once, repeatedly.

I don’t have the words to immediately articulate how much it has required me to grow as a person. Nothing has made me feel as angry, impatient, nasty, or enraged as I have with Soren kicking me in a very painful manner, clawing at my face, and screaming at the top of his lungs inches from my ear drums. In these moments, every nerve in me yells that I should fight back, to hurt the person who is hurting me, and to stand up for myself.  

This desire to punish and dominate my child for hurting me is ultimately one based on a patriarchal authoritarian ideal. It was all around us growing up: in our school, our church, and when I was younger, our house. You didn’t really get spanked, but I have vivid memories. The idea is: since I (the parent) am older, I should show my child that I wield power, that I have authority over them (i.e.  the ability to cause them pain). I should demonstrate my authority by punishing them (by spanking them). This is supposed to “show him who’s boss.” And if I don’t want a child who will constantly be undermining my authority, I am supposed to strip my child to the waist and physically hit them in order to show them that hitting is wrong and that I ultimately can cause them more pain that they can cause me.

This display of anger, violence, and dominance is then supposed to teach a child to be submissive, which then will dissipate into reluctant cooperation, and then ultimately, into affection. 

What if this was the model that I followed in all of life? If Lisa is making me angry or telling me that the French fries I just baked are not delicious, do I have the right to punch her? When my neighbors honk their horns repeatedly in order to summon their buddies for a night on the town, should I bash their car window in with a baseball bat to show them that they should respect our privacy? 

When it comes to communication, we don’t treat adults the way we treat children. I’m sure that many parents will disagree with me,  but I have come to reject corporal punishment as discipline. I know this is an entire debate in itself which others may feel free to have with me in person. This is my decision.

This decision has caused me to pay attention to the urge to dominate and to deliberately overthrow it with more powerful emotions: namely, patience and tenderness. Would you believe that tenderness can overthrow anger and desperation? It seems impossible, but try it next time you’re in a fight. I know from experience that naked anger and mind games do not resolve problems. Even in the midst of a heated argument, a voice speaks in the back of my brain: “You will not fight your way into a solution.” Each time I am angry beyond words, I must--thank you, Otis Redding--try a little tenderness.

I do not always have patience with Soren. And when I am patient, it is not a convenient decision. The easy path would be for me to spank him whenever he did something that I didn’t like. I am choosing instead the path that defines a better way of living. I am choosing to create a new reality, that rejects our high school history teacher’s spectacle of yelling and turning red in the face to demonstrate the “Authority of Christ.” I reject the patriarchal ideal of being able to dominate other human beings in order to impose a structure of power. People are more conservative than I am, or more liberal than I am: but why would I punish them for disagreeing with me? It’s easy to just yell at a person and tell them to shut up, but that impulse is ultimately selfish and lazy.

The real miracle of parenting—my first three years, at least—is that it has DEMANDED that I grow up, and that I choose a path towards peace. Before I had a child, I could always choose to behave how I wanted, drop any commitment that I wanted, and speak how I wanted to at any moment to any person. Being a parent, for me, has made me rethink the way I treat others, starting with Soren.

This is a terrifying statement to make publicly, but I have decided that it’s not anything that I wouldn’t say to you, Ben, my best friends, or to Lisa’s parents. Not everyone will agree with me. But we don’t have to agree with a person in order to have a relationship with them.

So for me, Pete, the real miracle of having a child is not the physicality of the action. You’re right—anyone can procreate, and the results of that process are not always “miraculous.” But for me, the miracle of having a child is that I have had to learn, and am continually having to learn, what it means to choose peace. I am learning to transform anger into softness, and to replace my desire to quit with a much more enduring sense of patience. My armor is getting thicker, and my heart is getting larger. I’m learning how to let go of regret and replace that nagging with a focus on the present moment. I may have discovered this in some capacity without becoming a parent, but I never would have achieved the same level of it that I have presently. And I still have many, many years to go.

When I recently told my friend Adam that I had grown up a bit lately, his response was, “I should say so!” That was probably the most rewarding thing I have heard in years.

And yeah, the sleep is awful (still). It’s not always fun. I wish I had more breaks and time with my wife. It gets mundane and monotonous at times. But when I think of the personal growth I have endured and am required to endure, I cannot think of parenthood as anything but “miraculous.”

Hope you’re well.

Your brother,
Leif