Before I had kids, I heard some advice. Or read it. Or it was a warning. I don’t remember.
The advice was something along the lines of:
When you have kids, they replace you in a sense. You get so tied up with taking care of them that you forget who you are. When the kids are grown and gone, you don’t know who you are anymore.
I’m butchering that but I think you get the idea. Maybe it was advice for couples to not lose sight of each other. I don’t know. It just stuck with me.
Most people know me by my avatar. Or they did. I had a brand! I was somebody!
Seriously though.
My responsibility as a parent and a father is important to me. It is so important that it kind of became a whole-ass thing. For better or worse.
And that’s okay. Until it isn’t.
I don’t post pictures of my kids anymore. Not without their permission. I want to feel bad for doing it when they were younger but I can’t and I’m not. I guess we’re all selfish in some way.
I don’t give talks anymore where I can do “my thing” of putting pictures of them at the end. At some point I lost my identity.
What do you want?
Who are you?
What I am is a lot of things:
- genX
- (good?) father
- (good?) partner
- ally (I hope)
- geek
- metalhead
/giphy it's complicated
All I know is that a fifteen year old picture of a kid in mr potato head glasses and a police reunion tour concert badge who IS me genetically but isn’t me and definitely isn’t even the same kid in the picture anymore was never me.
It was who I needed to be. It was what I wanted to be. It made me who am today and I am who I am today in spite of it.
Humans are weird. We like our taxonomies.
So what :waves hands: all this is? It’s me trying to work my way through questions a tv show asked me a long time ago and do it without sounding like a pretentious asshole.
I think other people call it midlife crisis.