Another year as a parent and I'm prompted to reflect on my role as Fathers Day passes
Many years ago I learned that to be a father was more than donating biological material to a child.
I'd had this idea to write a sensational article about the opportunity to donate sperm and even pitched it to the editor of the student newspaper as important because educated donors could raise the IQ in the general population.
She wasn't impressed, telling me that was eugenics, but encouraged me to write the article.
It was interesting experience and a little unsettling when the hospital told me my sperm count wasn't high enough for them to accept my donation.
Then years later when I fell in love with my partner, I convinced her that we should have children.
The results have been amazing but I won't dwell here on our offspring, because I am convinced that it is an important step in personal development.
There's a shift in one's thinking to accommodate others, that leads to letting go of some ego and opening the heart.
There is also a profound shift in revisiting experiences of the child-parent relationship but this time as the parent.
For me that has involved shifting a lot of resentment that developed in my teenage years.
Those experiences where I felt slighted and even neglected took on a scale proportionate to my self-centred young mind.
In more recent years I've been able to look back and reconsider what might have been going on for my parents at those times.
They were separated and doing what they could.
I can see that my father's emotional distance might have reflected his own relationship to his father.
And now I find myself kinda marvelling at how calmly he managed various situations.
