Paternity I

Ehmmm… Ok.

I wonder how everything is going to be. Will I be a good father? Will I experience paternity as a stimulating blessing or, rather, as a twisting torment?

I guess that those questions are pointing somehow to something abstract I am dealing with lately. I am expecting my first child to arrive into the world next February, and, the more I am thinking about it, the more I am realizing how many ideas that I don’t really approve or agree with (or have any idea of) were attached to my brain without me noticing it.

This whole idea of the family, of the good mother and the good father really scares me.

I think it is all a very smart invention to keep us longing for something we don’t even know what it is (as kitty wonders here, is good parents’ score really kept anywhere?) and working unnecessarily long days in order to give our children “the best”, since that’s what good parents do and everyone knows it.

Bad parents, on the other hand, go, without passing through the Judgement Day, directly to Hell. Everyone knows that also.

I don’t know… maybe it all comes from the fact that my own parents sacrificed so much for me and my siblings that I can’t avoid feeling guilty and sorry for them. I would have preferred that they didn’t cease being the persons they were just to become that abstract entity (meaning “my parents”) with who I use to lived all those years.

I think that “a father” or “a mother” are just blank inventions. Those concepts don’t really mean anything concrete to me, as a going-to-be-father, that’s it. Our children are no more than persons that happen to come to the world just where you happened to be. You are just the first person they get in contact with (and probably the first also with who they will get their complexes and traumas!), but nothing else. No sacred meaning for me. I feel sorry, but that’s the way it is.

And please, don’t misread me. It doesn’t mean that I am not going to feel attached to my child, or that I am not willing to love him and to welcome him into the world, or to walk hand in hand showing him around, sharing what I have got about what life is so far, etc… I just hope to build a relationship with him as I build any other relationship to any other human being.

I am afraid of loosing my child before it is born, of not being able to get to know him afterwards, creating between me and him an abyss of guilts and remorses, of forced feelings, all of this, by becoming already “his father”.

~ by toxina on November 1, 2006.