If life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car
And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are
--Meat Loaf
The incomparable Mr Loaf, power tenor in such rock opera classics as Paradise by the Dashboard Light and I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That), occasionally acheives something deceptively profound in his lyrics. I think so, anyway.
My life could change in as little as a couple of months. It could take longer, possibly a lot longer; and there's still a chance that Family and Children's Services may decide placing children with us would be a disservice. The probability of that depends on who you ask. Eva says there's nothing to worry about. I'm not quite so sanguine. And Tom, emissary from that bewildering continent called Sewshullwurkur, is not exactly scrutable on the subject.
The chief concern emanating from Sewshullwurkur is that I will physically discipline my adopted children, as I was once (for the first eight years of my life) physically disciplined. At any rate, this is the only concern Tom has alluded to aloud.
It's not a valid concern. There have been probably two or three occasions in my life when I have gone beyond anger into rage. At one of those points, stipulated, I knocked a kid out with one punch, doubtless surprising him, certainly frightening his friends, and outright shocking me. The accused pleads self-defense: had I not launched that pre-emptive strike, I could well have been the one on the floor ten or thirty seconds later.
That kid was a stranger to me. That in itself doesn't mitigate my attack--I'm of the mind that his wanting to bash my skull in rather does. He probably awoke with a headache and a newly formed conviction not to underestimate stick-figure geeks. That one punch might have saved some poor nerd's life, down the line.
The other rare times a red haze has decended over my vision, I was in the company of a person I knew and loved. I'll spare you the details of those encounters...some things are entirely too personal even for a man as open as I am. Suffice it to say that in one of them, a woman repeatedly punched me without provocation; in the other, another woman hit me with verbal jabs in rapid succession that packed every bit the power of punches.
Neither of those woman was touched in response. In both cases, I staggered away unable to think coherently, but possessed of a single overwhelming imperative that pounded in time with my pulse: DON'T HIT BACK.
Yes, I was physically punished as a kid, as was my mother before me and doubtless her father before her. I know that in the current social climate I'm supposed to acknowledge that this turned me into a potential, if not an actual, monster. That's crap, and a moment's thought will convince most anyone why: if it were true, there'd be quite a large proportion of monsters walking around. Post hoc, prompter hoc was a logical fallacy in ancient Rome, and it still is.
But being spanked didn't teach me much of value, nor did the pronouncements that accompanied each whack on the butt:
"This hurts me more than it hurts you!"
Oh, really? Tell you what, I'll trade you then!"
And in my case, being spanked was even less of a deterrent. After my mother spanked me, oftentimes she'd be so wracked with guilt that dinner out or a new toy would follow. So misbehaviour became a sure-fire attention-getting device: endure the pain and reap the gain.
That's not something I want my kids to learn.
The whole purpose of having kids, for us, is to teach them and learn from them and set them free in the world knowing they'll make a difference. What difference is entirely up to them. Hitting them won't accomplish any of this.
This is the kind of thing I do: mine the past for clues to the present and thus the future. As something life-altering approaches, I tend to retreat into my past. Fear plays a bit of a role here, I'll admit: but I don't rush headlong into the past in an effort to avoid the future. Instead, I simply look back along the highway to see where I've come from. It shows me where I am, and reaffirms I'm on the right highway.
In this mood, objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.
The last time I was here in the past was the night before I got married. Three or four hours went by in the real world; three or four actual lifetimes went by in my mind, along with a whole host of imagined alternate lifetimes. The imagined paths--what if I'd actually had the guts to take her broad hints at face value and ask Audrey out?--were fun to tread, but they lacked the signposts I could clearly see behind me and ahead of me: "Ken--THIS WAY!" I looked back through the valleys of mistakes made and lessons learned, gradually understanding that on some level of higher consciousness, I had put everyone in my life to better realize who I am. Seen in this light, you not only forgive people their trespasses, you comprehend there's no such thing as trespasses and therefore nothing to forgive. Whatever you thought at the time.
Kids like me. Always have. I'm not sure why. Well, part of it is probably that I treat them like people. I try not to talk down to them and I make a real effort to engage. My cousin, back when she was about eight, used to beg for my ghost stories. Years later, at her wedding, she told me that she still remembered a couple of them and the sleepless nights she endured because of them. That felt like high praise to me.
At large gatherings, I'm always the adult most likely to go out and throw/kick a ball around with the kids, at least for the ten or fifteen minutes it takes to warm them up and thoroughly exhaust me. That's kind of funny, actually. For a large portion of my life I was apt to dismiss all manner of things as childish and unworthy of my attention. (I was shut of cartoons at about ten.) But confronted with adults in large groups, I'd quickly scuttle back into Kidland.
You learn things there. You learn that children have three major wants: to be recognized as children, treated like adults, and loved for themselves. Balancing the first two while maintaining, unconditionally, the third will be the challenge of being a parent. It'a a challenge I think I'm up to.
My feelings about kids haven't changed much over the years. There's a sense of duty, almost overpowering at times. But miixed with that is a very welcome sense of fun and frivolity that I didn't permit myself when I was that age. I conclude that, at least in this respect, I'm fairly normal. That's a relief.
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