Would They Want to Know Me?

Do you ever wonder if the members of your family would have a relationship with you if you weren’t family? I often wonder that very thing. It’s not from a position of do they love me type thing, no it is more from a if we were not family would we be friend’s thing and maybe a little of the feeling that my relationship isn’t built on a father figure thing anymore. My kids are all unique and although there are mannerisms that seem similar, I see different goals, values, parenting styles, and dreams for the future being and making them very individualistic. I started writing a book years ago and I think there are near two hundred pages of an idea I got from a book called a father’s legacy. I began writing it thinking it was important that my kids and generations in the future will know who I was and the legacy that I am going to leave behind many days down the road. But somewhere along the way, I think it turned into a search for me to reconnect with a younger self and try to remember the motivations and feelings I experienced at significant times in my life. What started out as a little narcissistic venture turned into a soul purifying discovery. I wondered many times if I would ever publish it into a book form, not for sale but as a gift to my kids to share with their kids if one was to ever ask about me. I never thought of it as mandatory reading, more as a go-to guide of me. Want to know what I thought of religion, flip a page and its there. Maybe the people I have loved at stages, that for some reason it seems we are supposed to forget about regardless of the fact that they may have a great deal to do with who we are today. For instance, I don’t think Jen would have had much patience for the me a few years before our meeting. But those relationships before her certainly had an impact on me and how circumstances changed how I dealt with much in my life today. I feel the same about her and past relationships she has had, I try subtly to learn more about how the events in times for her changed her and made her the person I was attracted to. A little off subject, but that seems what many are doing about history of this country. There were joyous things in this country’s past, but there were some very darks times as well. If we erase the bad, do we lose the why in who we are as a country? I think so, and is true about us individually. I think writing my feelings down in a format that Jen can read and ponder without reacting in the moment helps her better understand me. My past isn’t pretty, it isn’t bad either, it is just like all experiences, it’s messy. So, the book allows for someone to read about me in my own words of how I saw myself. So many of us, when we die have other people read eulogies and we hear personal accounts of how they saw us and then share personal accounts in witness to the impact we had on them. This is a needed thing for people to begin healing and remember the good in us all. But it is safe to say, it may have nothing to do with the person you really were, only the person they saw, which could be total bullshit as the situation of that relationship may have depended wholly on proper behavior and decorum.

The downside of a tell-all book is that you can knock down a barrier that was there only to be replaced by many more. Maybe the pedestal most fathers sit on doesn’t support any longer when the weight of being human is made a reality. I’ve thought about adding a chapter to my blog from time to time, but that would defeat the purpose of the intended audience of the book. Although it would be for the very target of my audience of subscribers now. I’m still holding out hope that I might have a reader or two come from outside the family. Maybe others have read and just didn’t sign up for notifications. I haven’t hidden the fact that I have a blog site. The other fact about just throwing it out for criticism is that I would like to believe that I have many more experiences that will shape me, and so my final chapter in the book continues to slips to ever higher page numbers as I fill in chapters of my current thoughts, experiences, and testimonies. There is more to more to my story, so I try to keep up and get it in type. The reality is that my book may be something Jen has made into a book or maybe one of my kids and share it then. I laughingly responded to Jen telling me of one of my kids thinking I sounded depressed in my blogs. But it made me wonder, am I. Naw, but I am angry about a lot of things in society and I have little distraction away from it anymore. I write about how I feel or how I see things, hopefully the tide will turn on the influences we are all impacted by, and I can write about things that bring me joy and not be overshadowed by the crap out there. The other thing that happened though in her telling her mom what she thought of me and my mental health was it gave me hope that maybe my narcissistic experiment of self-sharing might have an audience after all. And for that, I’m grateful in knowing she was actually reading my blog and taking it in as to what I say and feel and had an interest to understand who I am. Afterall, isn’t that what any of us wants is just for someone to care enough to have interest in us?