For the record, I probably shouldn’t be writing this at this hour, as I’m lying in bed with my computer, but there’s a football game still going on, so here goes.
I wanted to return to the subject of dating and children, specifically, what I said in my last post about wanting to have children, or more specifically, my feeling that I don’t have the skills to raise them. Since I wrote that, it got me to thinking…
There are a lot of children out there who don’t have home, and I’m sure a lot of them would tell me, Derek, you would be a better dad than no dad. Yes, I guess that is true. And two, I know there are a lot of dads, and parents period, who fake there way through it. No parent knows want to do at times.
So if there was a child who came into my life, like the way Michael Oher came into the life of Tuohy family, what would I do? First of all, I guess I would take the kid in, because of course there wouldn’t be a choice. If there was one thing I would try to do for that child, it would be to make sure I could enable him or her to make the choices he or she wanted to make. And I would like to think I’d try my hardest to get my own act together, for the child’s sake and to set an example.
As I said before, this is a real struggle for me, because I think we would all like to believe that we would be good parents if given the chance. I know I want to say that. But I just don’t think it’s my gift.
I listen to Issues, ETC. a lot, and one of the topics a while back was Colleen Carroll Campbell (an excellent conservative columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) talked about people who actively celebrate their “non-parenthood” and that they will eventually have some emptiness in their lives in the place that children were. I do have to ask myself: what am I giving up children for? Is it just because I tell myself I don’t have the skills, or because I want to fill my life up with more football games, comedy repeats, or forlorning novels by Anne Tyler? Really, what if I could implant the church on my own offspring, and let that seed grow? What if I spent time volunteering with children and learning about them? What then?
These are all question worthy of discussion, but now it’s after 11, and it looks like Stanford is going to kick a field goal to win. Since I can’t even begin to answer these, I’ll just watch Stanford run the clock down, and purposefully leave you hanging for later.
