As any
parent
(I suppose) could attest, the particular group of
conversations
we have with our
children,
naturally call for an openness, for an honesty, for a
straightno BS reaching into the soul for the bone-searing truth
which
ordinarily
doesn't see the light of day in our everyday
business as
usualconversations.
That assertion may even be understated. It may be closer to the truth
to say this kind of bone-searing openness is actively
precluded from our everyday
business as usualconversations.
Given the overwhelming overpowering experience of
love
I share with
my children,
any impediments to having this
lovepresent
(which is to say the holding back, the not telling
the whole truth),
easily and so very naturally disappear like snowflakes in a
furnace. The bone-searing is worth it. It really is the proof of
"no pain no gain".
One of the greatest
conversations
I have with
my children
(or rather one of the great
conversations
they start with me) are the "Let's ask Daddy"
conversations
- as in "Daddy,
what happened
to you when ... ?" or "Daddy,
how
did you ... ?" or "Daddy,
why
did you ... ?". And it's like a grand stirring up wind has come
into my house and blown open all those closet doors and swept aside
all the drapes revealing truths about myself and my life I've long
forgotten I no longer tell - and which I still hold back. But
they're
my children.
So I can not not tell.
That's the way they get to know me: unfiltered, unwashed,
unembellished, undramatized, and unpolished. It's when I'm sharing
with them the answers to their "Daddy?" questions that they get to
know me as their father. But it's when I'm telling the unfiltered,
unwashed, unembellished, undramatized, and unpolished truth
unflinchingly
while I'm engaged responding to their "Daddy?" questions, that
we (ie all of
my children
and I) get to experience
who I really am.
No man or woman, I assert, can introduce their
children
to the experience of
who they really are
without being willing to
stand
in
who they really are
themselves first. Just answering their "Daddy?" questions is
delightful - but it isn't enough. It's in their experience of me
unflinchingly
meeting the questions fully head on, especially the
truths I'd rather not tell, which test my mettle (not a typo) as a
human being.
It's easy to tell the good stuff, the heroic stuff.
It's what we don't want others to know about us which is harder to
tell. And it's especially in the
conversations
I have with
my children,
when I get to confront that which is harder to tell, and weigh the
choice of telling it anyway. The results are sometimes dramatic,
life altering: it's in having the experience of telling that which
is harder to tell with
my children,
that I get the possibility of being OK with telling it across the
board in life. It is selective telling, after all, which is
diminished
authenticity.
Being around and
speaking
with
my children,
my barriers to being
authentic
disappear - like snowflakes in a furnace.
