I suppose it’s natural to assume that your children will grow up to reflect you as a parent. I don’t think the reverse is true. I don’t think kids grow up believing that everything they will be or become is determined by their parents. Once we flip that switch from being kids to being people, it’s not uncommon for us to blame our parents for all of our negative traits and pat ourselves on the back for overcoming bad parenting to become good people — unless, of course, we are not good people.
I have a feeling that people turn into who they are at any given time through a combination parenting and personal experience. Kids don’t always go bad because their parents suck, nor do kids with sucky parents always turn out bad. Given all that, I have always believed that you can’t raise a certain type of person. You can’t plan out your kid and constantly prod them into being the person you imagined in your head. What you can do is provide a safe, happy place for them to become who they will become. You can model good behavior, and good relationships, and hope they pick up on some of it.
I say all of this to say that I was pretty sure I had it all figured out. I am, and have always been, a pretty amazing father, by current standards. My hope has always been that my kids would become amazing people, thereby validating my ideas about parenting to the extent that I believe my provision of a safe, happy place would be influential in who they would become. Now all of that has been thrown out the window, because I failed to keep one half of my children alive.
Even if Allie becomes a happy, fulfilled person who tackles all of life with an upbeat outlook and a winning smile, I have failed as a parent. I had one job – keep the kids alive – and I failed. I could have been a tyrant. I could have locked them in the basement. I could have skipped town and sent cards once a year on their birthday. If Emmy were still alive, I would be a better father than I am today.
Of course, we can’t presume that I could have changed the circumstances by being a horrible father. I only use this as a comparison – Emmy alive with a bad dad v. Emmy dead with a good dad – to prove a point. No matter how you slice up those two scenarios, Emmy alive is always going to win. End of argument.
Part of the reason I even use the comparison is that I am still mad at the universe for not respecting the only thing that I valued in the entire world – my family. I was going to offer some scenarios that would seem horrible but would still allow me to be happy, but I can think of nothing that comes even close to the magnitude of losing a kid. Losing all our money – who cares? Losing jobs, house, cars, pets – yeah, nothing. What do people value other than family or money? I guess health, body parts, marriages, stuff like that. I’d trade it all to have my kid back. I suppose we all would, so my devotion to my family is not a novel thing, nor was it enough to keep my kid from getting sick.
I guess what I am saying is that I envy the parents who get to sit back and wonder if something they did caused their kid to become a stripper or a pot head. I envy all parents that have not lost a child, and I get extremely angry at parents who take this for granted and treat their kids like shit. I am continually in disbelief that there are parents who neglect or beat their kids without any intervention from the universe, while my kid was perfectly safe and happy and got plucked from us without so much as a Thank You card. There are people who don’t want their kids, but can’t get rid of them. I wanted my kid more than anything in the world, and I couldn’t keep her.
That’s the shit I get to think about every day for the rest of my life.
(Originally published in July 2009. Picture courtesy of LifeTouch. (When your kid dies, they give you the digital file.))
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