Children are all different. Being Vasya’s father is one thing, Varya’s father is another, Vera’s father is a third, Nadia’s father is a fourth. Being the father of all four of them together is a paradoxical task in general. It’s the same as trying to put together the word “HAPPINESS” from the letters “A”, “P”, “F” and “O”.
Image forever
I only know that the day comes when you remember the child and then you can do nothing with this image imprinted in the brain. Here Vasya is four years old. Early spring. We live in the country and go to the station to meet my mother, who is returning from a business trip. Vasya is in a sheepskin coat, but without mittens, because the sun is already warming up. Vasya’s hand is in my hand, small and tender. He says something about a huge dump truck that his mother promised to bring him as a gift … And that’s all! Never again in my life will I be able to do anything with this image of a child. Here he is already 24 years old, here he is a head taller than me and weighs 120 kilograms, here he has a 46-gauge leg and a bushy beard. Here he is calling from a German university, saying that he fell off his bicycle and broke his arm. But when he calls, I imagine a four-year-old kid who fell off his bike and broke his arm. Alone in a foreign country. And I begin to help him not as one should help a hefty uncle, but as a four-year-old baby.
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- My child is studying abroad
He has little use for my help. He cannot take my advice. My love for him is expressed inadequately and clumsily. Because I help, give advice and express love to a four-year-old boy. And absolutely nothing can be done about this knuckle of my psyche.
blood covenant
I also know that if you want to be a carefree father who enjoys playing with his baby for five minutes before dinner, but who gets sick at the sight of baby poop, you should never be at the birth. If a man is present at the birth, then at this moment a bloody covenant is concluded between the child and the father of the child.
First, you imbue the child with unnatural respect. Watching that red-faced snot spread your mother’s bones and you understand that it’s cooler than running a cross-country marathon, cooler than surviving 12 rounds against Mike Tyson, cooler than surviving a war, cooler than all the male achievements in the world that you never even dreamed of.
Secondly, a child born before your eyes once and for all loses the opportunity to be in your eyes a boy in a suit or a girl in a dress and bows. Even when the girl is in a dress and with bows, the father, who was present at the birth, knows about the girl that she is muscles and bones, mucus and blood, screaming and laughter – and loves all this much more than dresses and bows.
Thirdly, the fear of death is gone. If you saw the birth of your child, the fear of death goes away in an unexpected way. When he leaves, it turns out that he was like an old pain that he was used to and now noticed, simply because it was gone. The fear of death does not go away because one has achieved enlightenment, has seen a ladder to heaven or the face of God in a burning bush. The fear of dying goes away, because it is replaced by a much greater fear – not to die on time, not to die before this purple-red little man with an umbilical cord to his knees, who smears his mother’s breast with mucus and blood in order to eat, drink and live.
A side effect of all these experiences is for the father a perfect tolerance for the physiological manifestations of the child. Smeared food, poop, snot, vomiting cease to be an unpleasant side effect of parental happiness, but become an essential element of your collusion with the child, according to which collusion he will live as a physical body, and you will protect this physical body.
“Daughters-mothers. 3rd extra? Caroline Eljacheff, Natalie Einisch
The relationship between daughter and father is extremely important. But how does their mother influence them? Psychoanalyst and sociologist reveal the secret essence of family ties (By the way, IOI, 2006).
“The role of the father in the mental development of the child” Oleg Kalina, Alla Kholmogorova
Encouragement of independence, knowledge… What else does a father do that a mother can’t? Research and advice to both parents (Forum, 2011).
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- “Fathers lost their bearings”
Powerless Day
Until the day of powerlessness comes. And it comes necessarily for every conscious father with each of his children. I’m not talking about all sorts of sore throats, scarlet fever, rotaviruses and other more serious diseases, from which God had mercy on me. But besides them, one day at a well-maintained dacha, your five-year-old boy flattens his finger with a completely harmless deck chair. Once, at a well-maintained ski resort, your seven-year-old girl flies off the track, and you watch helplessly as she falls off a cliff, and you don’t know what is under the cliff – two meters high and a soft snowdrift or 200 meters of rocky abyss. One day in a well-maintained maternity ward, your newborn girl falls out of her mother’s birth canal white as paper, lifeless, with her umbilical cord tightly tightened around her neck, and flops down on the obstetric table with a disgusting “shmak” sound.
This is the day of impotence. You did everything you could. You foresaw every little thing. You spared no expense. You bought the best sun lounger, hired the best ski instructor and the best obstetrician. You yourself were there, next to the child, when the misfortune happened to him, but you could not do anything.
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- Daddy’s daughter: what is father’s love capable of
In my experience, the first day of impotence does not teach a man anything. On his first day of impotence, a man recklessly vows to himself never again to allow impotence. And that’s an idiotic oath. It is all the more difficult to survive the second day of impotence, because he knew, because he swore never to allow it again, because even a second ago everything could have been changed. But nothing can be changed, and at the end of the second day of impotence, a liter of whiskey, drunk in one of your sips, has no effect.
Only the third day of impotence makes one seriously reconsider one’s life attitudes. Here, too, one can’t do without a liter of whiskey, but this time you start to seriously delve into yourself and find that you have been waiting for gratitude from children all your life, while it is fundamentally not necessary to wait for gratitude.
Children are separate. You can do your best to take care of their health, but they, dogs, still have the right to get sick. You can seriously care about their education, but they, dogs, retain the right to grow up to be perfect boobies. You can do your best to arrange a holiday for them, but they, dogs, have every right to be sad, bored and even despair at your holiday. You can selflessly love them, but – here we pour a full glass of whiskey with a slide and drink it in one gulp – they even have the right to die.
Letter for you
This is roughly how I imagine conscious fatherhood. Armed with it, you can rejoice at your children. Play noisy games with the kids, but carefully realizing that you perceive the child inadequately, that the image of the child in your head is stronger than the child himself. Tell your teenage daughter about the allegory of love by Agnolo Bronzino and receive in return her precious confession of unhappy love, but realizing that you are powerless against this nightmare and you just need to wait it out. To talk with the eldest son about Baudrillard and mathematical analysis, realizing that you will somehow figure it out with Baudrillard’s drag, but never with irrational numbers.
Take care of them, but do not expect gratitude from them. If this succeeds, then one day you receive a letter. The letter looks like a small thin paper strip with a colored tip. I don’t know why women prefer not to say directly, but rather to accidentally forget a positive pregnancy test in a bathroom in plain sight. I don’t know why they do it.
But they do.