I have a gear in my mental engine that is dedicated to anxiously waiting. Seriously, why do I have that setting? Being committed to waiting means I accomplish almost nothing else, as I sit perched in a state of cat-like readiness for something that will happen regardless of my anticipation. Tomorrow morning the wife heads off to the hospital for minor foot surgery. Very, very early in the morning, in fact. and now, of course, I am already tense and prepped to leap into action. There is no action to leap into for at least 9 hours, and most likely, there won’t be any leaping required at all. Will I get a good night’s sleep in the 7 hour window I have available before she leaves and I’m on dad duty? I wouldn’t bet on it.

And the stress of the impending surgery is raising the collective household stress level, though so far the little dude is impervious to it. He’ll get to have a fun day out with his aunt tomorrow, so that will keep him happy and entertained while I sit here and fret the day away until the wife’s out of recovery and ready to get picked up. From that point on, until her foot is back online, I’ll be hefting more of the parenting load, including taking the morning shift. You know the morning shift: it’s the one that can start as early as 5AM, and will involve me trying to calmly get a sleepy and sour boy downstairs without waking up his convalescing mother. I have made the transition to waking up at 6:30 every morning, so 5AM isn’t as massive a gulf as it might have been, but it’s still way too early.

More about my brain machine: it’s all fragile ego and duct tape down here, but things are improving. A lot of the things that I’m trying to do right now require a ridiculous amount of self-confidence. And to be honest, they also require more experience and task-specific knowledge than I have. So when I send off article queries to major newspapers and magazines, I know that I’m punching above my weight. I’m out of my (current) league and it takes a tremendous effort to push myself to keep at it. Feel free to add in something about “leaving your comfort zone” to the mix here, but remember that my comfort zone has historically been really, really tiny. Anyway. This week, I fired off a handful of queries, and I got some valuable, if gruff, feedback from an assistant editor. The feedback didn’t come attached to a contract or anything, but it was helpful stuff. And as it usually does, the proof that I wasn’t perfect in every way sent me into a tiny panic as my self-esteem collapsed, but the recovery time from the deflation was much shorter than past instances. If I can keep stumbling forward like this, I’m going to get to a point where it will take an astounding event to challenge me, and that will be cool.

Neither here nor there, but I’ve got a sense that my professional life has some momentum. I can’t necessarily qualify the sensation as a jubilant one, though. It doesn’t feel like I’m being carried towards a glorious destiny. It feels like I’m caught in a river current that is tugging me down stream to some unknown eddy, or like the first serious lurches of a roller coaster. I think it will turn out to be a fun ride, but I can’t see the next stretch of tracks yet.

I stumbled across a comedy bit by Tim Minchin today (here, if you’re interested. NSFW) and in the course of this hypothetical argument, he asks an interesting question:

Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?

Our physical existence is profoundly complicated and strange enough on its own without including in the unprovable things like ghosts and auras and astrology. But I think it’s not a case of being uninterested or unaware of that complexity. Instead, it’s the  sheer overwhelming mystery of our mundane world that sends us running for the comfort of the unprovable. The average person (and I am one of them) will never fully understand the reasons and motivations for their own actions, much less the actions of others, and that can be frightening. Hugh MacLennan said it much more eloquently than I ever could:

“…there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.”

When you give yourself an out, something to believe in that can’t really be disproven, you find a little pocket of simulated control over your universe. And that’s fine, keep your psychics and your ghost whisperers and your magic crystals, if they bring you solace and peace of mind. But when we meet to discuss the issues facing everyone in the public realm, please bring an amount of respect for evidence, and for the people who have made it their goal to study the science of the situation, and leave your unknowable mysteries at home.

More on the topic of the peculiar enigma that is my mental state. On Tuesday, I had what I would call “a productive day”. I managed to have 2 creative writing sessions in one day, instead of bullrushing through as much as I could in one sitting before being sick of writing and storming away from the table. I polished off on a non-fiction article, did a bunch of volunteer stuff, and slogged through a 5KM treadmill run. Not bad. I also had a strategy session with the wife, talking about the things we should look at starting in the new year, and during that talk, I could feel the insecure part of myself start to fidget, unwilling to accept taking on more challenge. The balance of power in my brain has shifted though, and I had enough ego power to squash that insecure voice and stifle its panicky rejection of the possibility of trying to do something new and scary (specifically, taking university courses).  I’m thrilled that I’m gaining the ability to sit on my panic and anxiety and interrupt my natural inclination to freak out.

It wasn’t all victory and smiles, however. Yesterday (Wednesday) I was the short-tempered growler, easily frustrated and angered by everyone around me. I think it was the panicky idiot part of my psyche getting revenge on me for suppressing it the day before, joining forces with the lazy part of my brain to hold a testosterone-fueled protest against the tyranny of the logical brain. It didn’t help that I spent the morning trying to pry an audio interview file out of my malfunctioning iPhone:tech issues always drive me into a rage.

After flying off the handle at other drivers and speaking tersely to my very forgiving wife a couple of times, I finally recognized the behaviour I was exhibiting, and I explained the situation to the family. The little dude and the wife worked together as a team to help me focus and calm down, and by the end of the night, everyone was sound as a pound. Go team! My family is awesome.

 

I don’t write exclusively about my experiences as a parent here, and I wonder if that makes the title of the blog a little misleading. I would think that most of my audience isn’t here because of the parenting talk, but because of our existing relationships. still, should I consider renaming the blog?

In an abstract way, everything that I do or experience is filtered through the parental lens. Being a dad gives me a set of absolute boundaries and a code of conduct that informs every decision I make, so when I fret over money, jobs, writing, or even politics, my opinion is my dad opinion. I don’t even think I have a non-dad opinion anymore, which is probably for the best. My non-dad opinion would run towards being selfish and retaliatory. My dad opinion always has to consider “How would I want my son treated in the same situation” and because of that I have to dismiss the angry or petty indulgences AKA why I don’t give other drivers the finger.

For a while, I tried to tell myself that all parents made decisions based on their kids, in an effort to humanize people I disagreed with on social and political issues. I would tell myself to remember that “Stephen Harper loves his kids too”, and that did lessen my fury for a bit. But it’s not working for me anymore. Maybe he loves his kids, sure, but he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about the kids below the poverty line, and I can’t let that slide.