i dont know why ive been thinking about this, but i have.
if i ever become a father (hopefully i will), i want to be a proactive father. i want to be there for my kids as much as i can. if i have to attend a parent teacher conference but i have work that interferes with it, ill cancel work in order to go to school for my kids. if my kids have decide to do sports of take up music, ill show up at every game and every concert they play in. ill be there for career day, no matter what job i hold.
i wonder if these wants have anything to do with a reflection of my own experiences growing up with a father who always had to work. i dont blame him. i know he had to work to support the family. even when i was young, i understood this and was there to help him at our store during the weekends, unpacking boxes, price tagging everything and working at the counter. in no way am i saying that i wasnt jealous when other kids parents would come visit them during meetings, because i was.there were always 'mandatory' meetings during school (you know what im talking about. every school had that shit). i would always walk to school by myself to get to these meetings because my parents were not going to be home till 11pm and certainly didnt have time to leave work and come to these bullshit meetings. usually, it was me and a few black kids whose parents never showed up to anything we did. we would just sit and chill in the back while we watched the other kids and their parents enjoy themselves. im sure that the kids who had their parents there thought we were the lucky ones, but they really had no idea how lucky they were.
fatherhood. what does fatherhood actually entail? the fatherhood i got from my dad was not very...loving, in a western sense. im not trying to insult my dad here, dont get it twisted. if you know anything about the traditional asian fatherhood style, then you know what im talking about. all the shit they gave you when you were young seems to make sense when you are older. i look back on the punishments and beatings and shit and realize that im grateful for all that. back then, i hated it. i didnt understand it. why is my father like this when little white boys are walking around hugging and kissing their dads and shit? truthfully, it does seem like a brutal way to raise a kid, but it works. there are cases of this going bad though. you can see it all over the asian american community. kids who got the same treatment as me, but couldnt accept it and ended up tramautized by it more than helped by it, having all this angst against their parents. anyway, im not ashamed of how i was raised. even though my dad wasnt the most loving of fathers, i learned a lot from him, which made me who i am today. if he didnt beat some sense into me while i was a kid, who knows how i could have ended up?
i dont think i answer any questions that i brought up. haha. anyway. its probably a bit too early for me to be thinking about fatherhood and parenthood. but yea. i think i can be a good dad.
(did i scare anyone? haha.)
(and no, i didnt knock up anyone.)
4 comments:
i think it's amazing that you thought of this now, in the sense that most guys your age would probably not be thinking about Fatherhood. i think you'll be a great dad some day.
i sincerely agree.
and...while i don't completely identify with you on the asian-parents thing---especially since it applies more to asian dads to their sons---i feel like i understand some of it, simply b/c i grew up in a korean-american culture. it's...sort of complicated. but i totally agree, some sons can't take it and they end up all twisted. somehow with you, you just kept learning and dealin with things. and so here you are. =)
i'm feelin you my korean-american brotha. i think about fatherhood all the time, too. i wonder if i'll be a good dad or if i'll take on too many of the traits of my parents (not taking anything away from them). i wonder if i'll go too much opposite of my parents as well. i too wished my dad were more loving and less strict, but it's all good.
many worries at too young of an age?
i think it's really amazing that you know what you want from your life jason, and you have a clear sense of going about it.
my resentment to marriage/commitment perhaps come from my inability to internalize what i want to be and do in my life. to be honest, i get scared thinking about motherhood. but i know that at one point i will want to be a mother, because i think it's the most natural and wonderful process that life can offer. but for now, i just have to work on knowing myself more, and let myself grow to be someone good enough to be a mother.
but jason, you of all people will make a great father. maybe too loving at times, but i am very jealous of phote chung at the moment, of all the jason love he'll steal from all of us. :D
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