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What Does Suburban Mean?

Posted on by suburbanfatherhood

I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves.

Harlan Corben

The suburbs were the dream of the 1950’s. A small house, white picket fence, 2.5 children (I always wondered how a half child worked), a dog in the yard, and a car in the driveway. The American war machine had turned off from WWII and people were living their little slice of God, Mom, and Apple Pie (all things American). You built or bought your house, raised your family, retired there while drawing a pension, and eventually passed it on to your kids.

How far we have come.

Today, the suburbs are that great sprawl that is not quite urban, although many places try to assume that identity, but not quite rural. It extends from the very city limits, out until you can no longer commute into the city realistically. People live there because they were born there (in the suburbs that is, a lot more moves is common in the rat race now). Everyone has their 1/4 acre slice of the American dream, from which to gaze enviously at their neighbor’s land and wish it was theirs.

To be suburban today means enrolling your kids in as much as you can, pushing them to succeed, putting on a cheery smile every day, making sure you look your best, and filling up your calendar for the next 3 weeks.

We’ve lost all sense of the American Dream. To boldly go and live where no people had gone before. To carve out life in an area you have to drive for everything, but still account for rush hour. To be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion over the land.

(If none of this sounds familiar, this is at least the suburbs in my area of the country).

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Suburban Pressure

Posted on by suburbanfatherhood

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

Moulin Rouge

Moulin Rouge is an entertaining movie, but quite frankly the notion that all you need is love is not one that carries much weight around here. Love is great, it is one of Maslow’s five basic needs. Love is a powerful force that has sent armies to war, people to jail, and caused people to lay down their lives for another. Perceived love (in the form of arranged marriages) was used to bind countries together.

And yet, it doesn’t pay the mortgage. It doesn’t instantly make my kids a success. And it certainly doesn’t make them behave. You see, it takes more than love, or at least it feels that way. It takes money, skills, time, and all the after school activities you can sign your kids up for to make them a success. This is what is taught in the suburbs. Not explicitly. But implicitly when you talk to people, or look at what their kids are involved in, it feels like the world is always providing something more, something better, for their kids. While mine get the lesser.

All this causes pressure. It puts pressure on both parents in different ways but for those of us who are fathers, it pressures us to work harder to try to provide more and better opportunities. But in that work we lose time and opportunities to be with our children. We teach them that we only show we love them by working harder, not by being with them. We perpetuate the false truths that already swirl in the culture.

Sadly, we too often ignore the role that love plays. We ignore that truly loving someone requires dying to ourselves each and every day. Many are quick to say that they would take a bullet for a family member. But in the words of George Washington (in Hamilton) “Dying is easy, living is harder”. Living each day choosing someone else’s welfare over ours is hard. Answering the question why time and again is hard.

But really, isn’t this how the perfect father would act? With patience, kindness, and a desire to truly be present with his kids? Work may be inevitable, but finding that balance is crucial to creating children who in turn pass on that love to their eventual families. If you’ve seen a true example of this, it’s hard to forget. If you’ve experienced a bad example of this, it’s hard to forget as well.

May we all set good examples for our kids.

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Life is Different

Posted on by suburbanfatherhood

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Albert Einstein

There are many life changing moments when you are a father. There’s the moment you find out the blue lines appeared on the home pregnancy test, the moment you hear the heartbeat for the first time and see you child moving around, the seeming eternity during labor and delivery, and then the biggest of all, when they send you home with a child that’s only been breathing on their own for 24 hours and no detailed instruction books or reset button. It’s a wonder humanity has survived as long as it has!

I can remember each of these moments vividly for both of our children. Yes, by the second it was not “new”, but it was still another step on the journey of suburban fatherhood. For someone like myself who likes to believe they are well prepared for life, it’s a shock to the system, a wake up call that I am so very inadequately prepared for real life. And yet the days continue, the new experiences pile up and decisions have to be made.

It’s these moments that changed me from someone who played video games before going to work, into someone who changes wet beds at 2 am. From someone who destroyed an old copier with a baseball bat into someone who gets pummeled by a toddler who doesn’t want to leave yet. From someone who traveled to play sports to someone who changes hundreds of diapers, and enjoys every minute of it.

It’s ironic that in helping to build the life for a child, I am called to die to so much of what I used to think made up my life. I am growing as much as my children are, in my love for them, in my humility, in my sacrifice, in my understanding of my own journey.

But in growing, I am also failing. Anyone who tries something new makes mistakes, and my parenting is riddled with them. I provoke my children in the name of “teaching” them the right way to live. I react with emotion when they push my buttons instead of remembering how I felt when I was their age. I have thoughts on what activities I want them involved in based on how they impact my schedule. I want to be their ruler, not their loving father.

So what’s the answer? I think it is four-fold:

  • Take deep breaths -> Life is not perfect and I am not perfect. When I find myself getting worked up over facts like that, it’s time to do what I tell our kids to do, “take a deep breath and count to 10”.
  • Find an example to follow -> In this life there are better fathers and worse fathers. Find someone who has walked the path ahead of you and use their counsel. As you look for a perfect example of fatherhood to follow, you may be surprised at what it teaches you about yourself.
  • Find comfort in company -> Don’t try to do it alone. There are many of us on parallel paths, stumbling along. If we come together, perhaps we’ll be able to help each other up when we stumble.
  • Give yourself grace -> American society has been unpacking how your “story” is formed by your parents and experiences for a while now. But remember that no matter what your background, no one mistake is going to mess up your kids forever. We all come from imperfect fathers, and will be imperfect fathers.

Oh, and full disclosure, the picture above is not me, it’s licensed under the creative commons license. But I can 100% sympathize with both the child and the father in this picture.

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