The thing about parenthood is that it damages your dignity.
When you hit puberty in middle school, you learn the importance of dignity. Keep your head down, be inconspicuous, wear the right clothes, don't draw attention to yourself and if you do it had better be for the right reasons like you can tackle or sing or drive a cool car and not for the wrong reasons like your mom made you wear the cardigan your aunt bought you.
So we grow, picking and choosing with dignity and developing into a bright, charming, intrepid person with no baggage who can find a mate.
Then we become that fun, happy couple who has all the right taste, does all the right things and makes all the right choices.
And if we choose to have kids even that seems a cool choice at first because everything seems under control. Then we start to lose it.
Soon we have multiple little people with their own strange interests and allies. We're running them here. We're running them there. We're trying to fathom why they're rowdy, why they're coarse, why they're incorrigible, why they don't appreciate our sound judgment.
We wear $11 blue jeans so we can pay for select baseball, buy them laptop with enough memory they can dominate as a gamer, and pay for Rice. Then they knock us for wearing dad pants.
Yeah, layer by layer, parenthood strips away every shred of dignity to the point that you're just happy to be alive and to be able to provide for the ones you know and love.
And that's a good thing. It's like the enlightenment of a Buddhist monk.
Love this.
If we're honest with ourselves, we judge our own parents just as harshly as our kids judge us.
Take my father, for instance. He really excelled at most things. Graduated from OU med school. Took several residences at St Johns in Tulsa, and then settled in as an OBGYN in private practice. Helped bring over 2000 babies into this world (he didn't keep count, but I asked him one time and this was his estimate). The OU medical program had a special emphasis on patient care and actually listening to patients, and he was really good at it - was always known for his bedside manner and spending extra time with patients to better understand their ailments and what to do about them. So, folks in my small-medium sized town (40K pop) knew dad, and all I had to say was that I was Dr. Wilson's son, and doors would open. People loved dad.
Dad was also a fix-it guy. He spent weekends repairing stuff and building stuff. It's a trait he learned from his own father, who was an electrician with OGE, and to some extent he passed all that down to my brother and me. We're both always tinkering with stuff, just like dad and granddad did. One year he even built a boat - fiberglass and all - and that converted our family (including his brothers and their families, who lived in OKC and Houston) into a water skiing outfit. Every summer we'd meet several weekends out at either Tenkiller or Ft Gibson and ski our asses off.
Dad also drove the coolest cars - his first really cool one was a silver Mustang Boss 302, and then later he went through several generations of Z cars. He also sold the boat he built and had other boats, including a cabin cruiser, which created really high wakes to jump when you're skiing - I loved it.
But what my brother and I always remember are his clothing choices. This was the 1970s, and he worked in a leisure suit, with a beeper on the belt. On weekends, he typically wore plaid shorts, black socks, keds, a golf cap (even though he never golfed) and a shirt with his cigarette pack in the front pocket. For such an overall successful and resourceful guy, he dressed like a complete dork.
Anyway, I miss him, big old plaid shorts and all.
