Having two children is, so far as I can tell at this early stage, not so much different from having one. With Bronson being a measly 11 days old it ought to be difficult to judge, but it will be many months before he requires any more anxious attention than he does now. Unlike Rowan, he cannot get about to do such things as stick forks in outlets, leap off of upturned waste-paper baskets, chew twigs of dubious lineage, eat chocolate eggs still covered in foil, or pull down cups full of hot tea. Bronson is still in that phase whereby the greatest worry is that he might sit in his poop too long and irritate his bum-bum - something that, while unpleasant, is not likely to send my heart into bursts of arrhythmia.
Being a parent, so far as my little experience has taught me, is 10 parts patience, 5 parts planning, 10 parts ignorance and 50 parts providence. What I have learned about myself is that I am not as patient as I always flattered myself to be, and for that I am a little disappointed. It seems a life-time of doing it "my way" has poorly prepared me to do it "another way", which is to say that I like my floors to be clean, whereas Rowan likes to decorate the floor with bits of his dinner, which the dogs like to alternately lick and grind in to the tile. I have learned that poop, while not always cute, is also not always not so cute. What you would never do for anyone else, you will do for your children, and you will do so with zombie-like acceptance: stoic yet slightly ecstatic. Stoicism is an important philosophy adopt as a parent because not everything that your child does, or that happens to your child, can be dealt with passionately. There are times when a distanced approach is called for because detachment allows you to assess the issues clinically and combat them in the same way. Too much passion, ill placed, is like fighting in a wild rage: when you hit something you may do it terrifically, but that presumes that you will actually hit something, and that something you hit will be the right thing. When the outcome of something serious hinges, not only on your confronting it, but with how you confront it, clarity of mind is far more effective than pitch of passion. This, of course, does not preclude passion, but insists on its use in only certain circumstances. As with so much else, knowing where to judiciously apply force is more important than applying that force.
I never knew that having a child would be like grafting your younger self to another creature. While I want each son to grow in his way, I also want to be certain that he grows in a way congruent with my view of the world. This is not the same as saying that I want my children to be a facsimile of the person I would have liked to be, but to suggest that I would like them to embody the principles which I now hold dear, in an attempt to better the world as I see it ought to be bettered. I am happy for them to go off and manifest their own destinies so long as more than a vestige of my ethics is cured into the foundation of their drives and desires. They will be a reflection of the person I've been as much as a reflection of the people they are, for you cannot escape your history any more than you can escape your genetics. We are all bound, as by a string, to the past as surely as the waves lapping upon the shore are bound to the ripples that preceded them out in the deepest oceans. Cause-and-effect dominate, not only our physics, but our philosophy, and our philosophy, whether conscious or unconscious, dominates our realities; no choice is truly random, but influenced by a host of phenomena, and our perceptions of those phenomena, based on the teachings in our youth, and those teachings are imparted to us partly by our parents, partly by our peers, partly by the acquaintances with whom we brush elbows, and partly by the random mechanics of the world. It is the totality of everything which unconsciously fuels our great engines of perception, thought, and action.
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