The Lydster: Don’t learn this from daddy

It’s a dissection of myself as much as anything,

As a followup to a question I answered in this blog months ago, someone, probably Chris, asked: Is there anything you don’t want her to learn from you? – the “her”, of course, being the Daughter.

I sent myself an email to remind me to write about it, but it got buried in other messages. As for the answer:

I don’t want her to find her sad place, or at least not to stay there for too long. I don’t want her to let the bastards keep her down.

I don’t want her to use food as a drug.

I don’t want her to be too proud or stubborn to ask for help.

I want her to be more tidy, not because it matters so much to me, but because it’ll matter to people she’ll encounter – roommates, friends and romantic entanglements.

I want her to drive a car with confidence and competence.

I want her to try to avoid senioritis, which I surely had in both high school and college.

I think I want her to find out what she wants to do in life sooner, but I’m not sure. The journey can have value in and of itself. AND work in the 21st century continues to be so different, she’ll probably have several jobs anyway.

I want her to travel much more than I have.

I want her to start saving for retirement earlier than I did.

I hope she can find a faith community that she is comfortable with in her twenties.

i’m sure there’s more, but that’s enough. That question is tough because, ultimately, it’s a dissection of myself as much as anything, and it’s a bit brutalizing, to tell the truth.

But as I’ve noted before, she does already have, for good or ill, a lot of my sensibilities. This parenting thing is every bit as difficult as I thought it’d be.

Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

2 thoughts on “The Lydster: Don’t learn this from daddy”

  1. All very reasonable. Our children, we hope, won’t have our bad habits. The tricky part, of course, is hoping they don’t see them.

  2. That is pretty honest.

    To be fair:

    I don’t want any daughter of mine to find out if she’s okay to like herself today by stepping on a bathroom scale

    I want her to learn that it’s okay not to be perfect

    I want her to tough like me but not secretly angry like me

    I want her to learn to really try to understand the feelings of others before her 30s

    And so much more (but this is your blog, not mine)

    I

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