When I was a new parent many years ago I can remember that feeling of joy.   I felt like I was on top of the world. I was so happy to have this baby in my arms with his ten toes and ten fingers.  My role as a positive parent had begun. I was so nervous. I had to ask the nurse to take the baby. He was so small (at 10 ½ lbs.) that I thought that I would drop him. From the beginning this baby depended on his mother and me for everything.  At times it was overwhelming.  We had to get up in the middle of the night for feedings and changing him many times during the day.  We found those first couple to be very fulfilling.

Things began to change when he started talking.  The first word he learned was “NO”.  That was because we kept saying “NO” to him so that he would stop touching everything he shouldn’t touch.  We knew that he was just repeating what we were saying but at some point he learned what “NO” meant and he started to express his feelings. When there was something he did not want to do he told us “NO”. When there were things he wanted to do he told us “YES”. This was the beginning of him becoming independent.  We were at a crossroad. We were training him to become a self thinker but we wanted him to remain in that dependent state minus the diapers, the bottles, the stroller and that ever increasingly heavy baby bag.

When he started school, it took him a while to get used to his new surroundings. That took about a day. He made his adjustments quickly. He adjusted so well that it seemed that as the closer we got to school the more he would walk ahead of me.  It got so bad that I had to literally take my hug and kiss from him before he lined up with his class to begin his day of learning.

It was at this point that I began to see the real picture.  My child doesn’t need me anymore.  I want you to know that those tears I shed were not crocodile tears.  In my mind I was really hurt. Every time I took him to school he would do that same thing.  Didn’t he know I needed him to revert back to his old dependent state minus the diapers, the bottles, blah, blah, blah.

On one of those days when I returned home, I received a spiritual awakening.  The thought came to me that maybe this wasn’t the end of me being a positive parent. With this new set of experiences it is possible that he would need his mother and I even more.   You can’t imagine the weight that was lifted off of my shoulders.   This meant that could expose him to basketball, baseball, football, my political ideas, the meaning of life …….. Sorry.

I LOVE BEING A DAD!!