Imposter Dad Syndrome

Do children ever get buyer's remorse? 

I imagine some sort of transactional situation where an unborn is sitting with a catalog deciding how they will enter into the world -- having some preference of who they will become and how they will live out their days in what will ultimately become their paradise. They select their attributes and engage in what you and I call being. 

The caveat is that we must first enter our world under the tutelage of our caretakers. We don't get to choose our parents, and vice versa; it is all one big lottery system. 

"Right now at this moment, tell me something: Is this, my dad?" The first conscious thought I picture going through my son's still-developing mind. "Because I think we made a mistake." The visual of a customer complaint streams into view, a sort of a cosmic Yelp review, asking the engineers to review history logs to determine if there hasn't been an egregious mistake created somewhere on the timeline of human conception. "I need you to check to make sure that this is my dad." Thus, completing the 1-star cosmic Yelp review.

"That is not happening. No." Will be his realization, as I awkwardly strap him into the car seat for the first time, sweating beads of fear and insecurity -- drenching the bald surfaces of an already receding hairline. The biggest truth that comes with fatherhood is that you are never really ready for it. It comes like a blunt object that has little remorse for what sort of prep course you sacrificed a whole Saturday morning for. 

It's the basic most biological interpretation of "imposter syndrome" that anyone on this planet will ever experience. No one knows what they are doing, but that doesn't matter at that moment when you pick up your child for the first time. They stare at you in complete submission and helplessness to the world outside. And it is solely your purpose to make sure you rise to the task, regardless of whatever shortcomings that may have set you back on the race of life accomplishments. 

While those who will breathe the sigh of relief of withholding every bearing children, I will say good for them; this is not a role for the faint of heart. It is thankless and ending -- at times you may feel like a pariah, shamed forever expressing your helplessness because the suffrage of parenthood was "YOUR CHOICE." There can be no sympathy for a path decided. The congratulations end at the moment of birth. 

Yet I stand in the conviction that this was the path for me and I could not have imagined it any other way. At this moment in my young fatherhood, I look bare, raw, thinned, but that is the true form of beauty that will soon reveal itself to the world. 

Right now they do not see. Right now they only see pain.

Pain is purpose. 

 

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Floating Junk Around Us

Seeing the movie Gravity for the first time was an amazing experience. It was a Friday night in woodland hills and David was about to meet his good friend Christina. They met in the parking lot outside of the AMC and decided it would be fun to smoke a bowl before going in.

“I haven’t smoked in such a long time.” Christina was a friend, but not in the traditional sense of how hanging out with friends led to expectations onto their poor backs. No. Christina existed in a circle of friends where they spend weekends partying in a couple of Pasadena and Alhambra night clubs -- hoping to find that little sweet time that will make the entire shitty week at our jobs worth it. 

“I just want to feel like I’m in space.” David didn’t know what he was talking about after his first pull, but he knew, in about twenty minutes, he was going to be put on the edge of his $20-a-ticket recliner leather seat. The CGI was incredible and all he could think about was how hot Sandra Bullock looked in her dark green spandex floating in zero gravity. The movie was an incredible thing because it made David think about what it meant to be human, especially one that existed in an extremely alien and incredibly hostile environment. The movie displayed a scary attention to detail that had his 29-year-old, heavily under the influenced self stuck without even a water bottle to ease the suffering of dry cotton mouth.

    After they finished the movie they stumbled out of the theater –it was past 1AM. There was fog in the air from the California winter breeze. David's car was covered in fresh due. They both laughed about this feeling as if they were hanging above the Earth’s ozone, literally flying through orbit. “Did she really ride a fire extinguisher home?” Christina puffed out a plumb of smoke from fresh bowl David just packed when they returned to the car. That was the part that brought David out of the movie, but he stopped caring about that. In fact, he didn’t pay too much mind to what existed beyond that point, only that he was with a good friend at that moment in time. 

    “I know. After watching that movie, no air, no sound, it's almost as if we were under water the whole time.” David started feeling confident in himself. “Like compressed you know. Does it feel more scary to you, to be underwater? Like, you’re trapped in there and no one can hear you scream.”

    “Well you can’t be in too much trouble with a fire extinguisher.” Christina had a sarcastic sense of humor that David always enjoyed. She just didn’t care and his attempt at showing some sense didn’t change that for a second. “It’s just crazy to think about all that stuff that floats above us.”

    “What do you mean?” David asked.

    “Those satellite thingies that orbit the earth. Its crazy how they circle us. Right now at this very moment.”

    David's head was getting heavy. He wanted to go home –to a small room he was renting in a house in Winnetka. “Yeah, that’s what satellites do. Right? Haven’t you seen a single spy movie?” 

Christina wasn’t really staring at David at this point. She just sat there in the passenger seat –twisting her dark hair between her fingertips –just staring out the moon roof right into the night sky. “We all depend on those things, huh? Just floating up there, around us like some communications wizard.” 

“I think I about lost you at this point.”

“Look at us. Some fragile creature needing all this…this…floating junk around us –crashing into each other.”

Crashing into Earth, that’s all David really saw in it. But he didn’t want to be a downer about the whole existential thing. Its like were some catalyst for destruction, like some flying missile into a stream of helplessly orbiting satellites. All that crap doesn’t really matter to him right now. David just started to notice Christina in a whole new and refreshing light –a shade of excitement from this new possible emotion. He knew socially it would be disruptive to his circles socially if they got involved, but the primitive thrill was too tempting to ignore. 

The end of the night came at around 3am in the morning. They let their heads clear and sober by the time Christina said she was leaving. They had a good conversation, about life and tragedy –maybe even an embarrassing moment or two. 

“Do you need me to walk you to your car?” David tried to pull up as close as he can. 

“No I’m alright. Don’t want you to get cold.”

“What are you doing next Saturday?”

“I have a date.”

“Already back in the market?

She already closed the door behind her. She gave David a smile and wave as she got into her car. He didn’t know what came over him, but for that single moment she was the most beautiful person in the world -- not talking about in a romantic, sexual preference, but in a tone that speaks to what it means to be alive and in the moment. The way the streetlight bounced off her eyes as she walked away that night. 

David knew that would be the last time she would enter his life. 

It’s almost as if people are all free falling within the spaces of one another -- floating like wandering strangers, waiting to be discovered -- gasping for air. She was becoming reborn, disappearing from his conscious life, falling back into memory, just as the image of Sandra Bullock as she glides out of her space suit – transforming, fetal, as if reborn in zero gravity.

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I Am Told, Therefore I Become

“Don't feel sorry for me. I did plenty of that. All the way growing up.” 

  

The reason why I've been reflecting on this subject is because Im trying to get a better understanding of who I am as an adult and how I am going to be as a parent and how not to continue the same failings that Ive experienced.

 

I wonder why I've struggled so much to get ahead of this world and why I feel so unsatisfied and I come to the realization that I've been hampered in a lot of my self development.

 

In school I've always been categorized as remedial, even having to take English as a second language when I was as young as kindergarten.

 

In high school i was immediately enrolled in "transitioning" courses --basically classes for under-performing students. I’ve never been considered for AP courses and, for the most part, held back a grade during my time in high school.

 

Then afterwards I went to community college instead of just shooting for higher --had terrible scores on my SATs.

 

So what I’m trying to say is that while it appears that I’m not performing well, it happens to be the system that tells me that I'm inefficient; therefore, as an adult, im always struggling to take a risk and really shoot for excellence.

 

I can tell myself to change my mentality, but it is near impossible to do that without understanding the lifetime of living in a world that told me that I am less than average.

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Walking With Nothing, Hoping for Everything

I don't know how much left I have in me. I'm locked away with barely enough sunlight. I'm a man that didn't experience much of a life and now thrown into complete isolation while becoming a father. 

What are we left with if not the true authentic self? 

Every person needs to have a good shit story just to be able to break ice with people: "I just had to take a hot shit. You know those wet, peanut butter ones -- this shit has stickiness to it. I have to run the water so my wife doesn't have to hear the toilet splash -- It's steaming in there but then I realized there's no fuckin' toilet paper. So I'm trying to be quiet so to not wake the baby. Now I'm walking with nothing but my bare naked ass, stepping over strollers and toys and shit, feeling like I have a hot brownie shoved up my ass!"

Again, what are we left with if not the truest form of humanity?

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This is My Story

I want to take this opening statement to better articulate what has been troubling me. I felt the need to write this down because my natural reaction to the question "how are you?" is always met with a quick "I'm fine." Now I know in most social settings, divulging all of your emotional weakness is most likely not the best place to do so. But there needs to be times to just lay it out there with no judgement.

First and foremost, my default emotion tends to be anger. One moment in my childhood, during a family visit to my aunt's in New York, I blew up in ferocious anger against one of my younger cousins, then preceded into a shouting match with my grandmother. No harm was done in the aftermath, yet I remember my mom telling me afterwards that my aunt observed in me that I carried around a tremendous amount of anger.

Now, my mother and I never really addressed this episode ever again. We did what we do with almost every other emotionally dynamic episode, we compartmentalized it. We never bothered to follow the breadcrumbs of that incident. Never once inquired in an open and honest conversation about what was the root cause of this anger. 

I love my mother to this day and would never try and take away that love for anything. Growing up she was a strict disciplinarian, and, as well as my father, ruled over their house hold with a belt if we ever got too far out of line. My father is a Pandora's box of emotional trauma to say the least. He immigrated from Mexico in his early 20s with no more than a high school education. I love him very much, but to say that he was emotionally underdeveloped is an understatement. For most of my childhood, he was diagnosed with chronic depression -- prescribed a litany of anti-depressants -- he let the cloud and fog dictate his personality and his ultimate relationship towards his children.

With that, I wish to share probably the most defining moment in my journey into adolescence. I call it defining because I remember this day as the moment my innocence for life died. 

One afternoon after school my father enter by bedroom appearing distraught. He seemed angered and, what I remember distinctly, on the verge of tears. I'm not sure how it happened but I knew that my parents were fighting again (which is strange in hindsight because my mother was still at work). 

I remember I was about 10 or 11 years old and I was in my bed watching tv. Then I remember my father walking in and started apologizing to me and what a failure he had become. He wanted to be more but that he couldn't be around us anymore. 

I remember distinctly my reaction to this and it was cold detachment. I didn't beg or plea or wonder why he was doing what he was doing, just that if he needed to do this then goodbye. I remember shedding a tear but that was it. I was already compartmentalizing the moment while it was happening. 

I don't even know what he said to my brother and sister because I didn't follow him out my bedroom door. My mom came home later that afternoon and I told her what happened. Her response was almost colder and with less emotion than mine. 

And that was it. For that day.

Then the next day came. I arrived home from school when my mother finished a phone call. She told me it was my Dad's sister. She just informed Mom that Tijuana PD had found my father in a park bench, about a mile from his car. Barely breathing, passed out with nothing on him but a few empty bottles of his medication. He was lucky that he only suffered a few days in a clinic in San Yasidro with pneumonia.

Mom that night made the long, lonely drive from our hometown north of Los Angeles to San Diego. And she made this drive without any of her children for support. She came back home and entered the house ahead of Dad. She wanted to warn us about who we were about to see and to be supportive. I did as I was told. When I saw him I remember him still wearing his nightgown and robes from the hospital. He looked so fragile and weak. He went to his bedroom to go immediately to sleep.

Mom then gathered my brother and I in my bedroom (my sister was with the sitter). She broke down in front of us and began criticizing us for not making the drive down to see our dad in the hospital and how terrible she felt making that drive to pick up her husband after what appeared to be a failed suicide.

All I remember of my response was that I was upset that he walked out on us and couldn't make any understanding why he did what he did. My brother started to cry about his fear of death and that this was the closest he'd been to seeing it first hand. I'd like to say that we found catharsis in that conversation but it was most likely boxed away again to never be spoken of. And as far as Dad goes, he's alive today, but the Father that I knew who walked out of that bedroom never returned home.

My final thought is this: I am a father now and I have an opportunity to write a different story for my son. However, in order to do this I have to know myself first; that requires uncovering more of these boxes stored deep in the past; it requires a deeper level of compassion and self love that I don't ever think I allowed myself to feel then and now. The self-loathing and hatred that almost feels as if it stems out of nowhere can all be attributed to this connection towards isolation and abandonment. I had to teach myself then that people will leave you and you will have to protect yourself at all costs. But this only self harms and will continue the destructive cycle onto my own children. 

My wife has been instrumental in teaching me a new way of viewing my own personal turmoil, my erratic emotions, and most importantly, my purpose in life. She has introduced me to the concept of grief and how it takes many forms (not just the literal death & loss of a loved one). I expressed how I felt as if on that fateful day I lost the only dad I ever knew, and through that experience, I have been grieving ever since and just never knew it. 

Here's to grounding myself in a new path towards freedom and happiness, and the ability to finally allow myself to heal again. Because it is not in the highs of life that we find meaning and worth, but in the deepest, most painful memories. It is in these Pandora boxes that the whole self is truly discovered.

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