The Fruit – On Becoming A Father

It's impolite to suggest, every choice you've made will genetically affect your children. Not an ideal icebreaker, but it's true nonetheless. You know, all those beers, fears, and things you didn't do that you knew you should. Fortune for the wicked and damned, many of these things don't need to be an afterthought.

You can begin to act as if you won't live forever. You can begin to act like a future parent. A mother or a father, for all that the lack of attention they are given, they are the givers of life on planet earth. Nothing new about that, nothing has changed aside from sophistry wrapped in utopian belief.

Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, I've never bothered bothering someone in pursuit of personal persuasions of belief, I just hope you'd leave me alone to my persuasions too. But let's consider life before the birth control pill. Generations of men and women had a simple understanding of change and rhythm, their lives in initiated chapters that filled a book called life. As children were born, the adults are to become adultified, assuming those with good upbringings did better than average with outliers struggling, even failing, which is how the breaks are, and simultaneously those with shit upbringings did poorly, with the outliers struggling, but choosing ultimately to radically change their conditioning for the better, them's the breaks there's no straight path.

I learned this after my first was born. My wife and I always knew we wanted kids. But we married young and decided to secure and live a life worth telling our kids about before we were ready.

Then the world we had known was about to change forever in March of 2020, despite this, we had already planned to start a family, but then as Covid happened (and the reaction to Covid), we knew bringing our daughter into this world was a necessary and bold act in the face of uncertainty and moral chaos, the strong I believe Shepard, not waste away for a moment no one was or ever promised.

If you grew up in NYC in the 90's, you know there are promises in the hood you can't cash. It's always the snake oil peddler in the end and the weak that fall for the mountebank's fake goods. Realism sets in, hope is something that must be molded by sweat, not the mind alone.

Years before 2020, I had begun the process of tapping into our epigenetic potential to re-hardwire some of my wild youth. I had a very tumultuous upbringing. I was born in Brooklyn in a small apartment with two siblings, and by the ripe age of only 1-years old, I was sent to Pakistan for two years so that my parents could save money to leave our Brooklyn apartment for a small and modest home on Long Island. When I returned, I didn't remember my own mother or father. This lead me to a harmful lifestyle, as I didn't feel the bond was cultivated enough to bare the austerity of South Asian parents—my Grandmother was my first mother, and I had become accustomed to her loving essence.

New York raised me when my parents no longer could, as a method of escaping and finding a family everywhere I looked, I eventually met some amazing people that guided me toward reading. I delved into Freud and Jung, Vonnegut, and Mark Twainism's, edgy cinema found in the East Village, writing poetry, and playing music all over NYC. I even became a Buddhist, but at my heart I was a Punk Rocker, the music just never came out punk.

But I picked myself up from inner chaos and was capable of growing up enough as a man to attract and maintain a wonderful relationship with my wife of ten years. In so many ways, she and I have a spiritual bond that is unspoken; we mirror each other because our healing journeys brought us to one another. During her pregnancy, there were some scares, both the normal kind and of the uncertain kind, almost all pregnancies involve faith. I believe many people, regardless of how hardened, witness a miracle that humbles them.

Why your choices matter. We used to have children when we were young. We used to have children. How could you deeply change if you don't have the responsibility of keeping your new life safe? Of mending your old ways when a new life is calling you to be new? How will you answer the call to become anew if you don't start today walking into the now?

All men grow up fast when they have children. All women grow up fast when they give birth and bear children. We hope to grow and change. I've never subscribed a panacea in my life to anything, you should know by now I was once a broken dreamer, but it is the dream that gives hope, and it's healing that makes that hope real. A realist and a dreamer can co-exist. If you've lived a good enough life, they absolutely can co-exist, like two starstruck strangers looking for hope, and finding transformation is the only way they can ebb with life instead of against it. This is the current that brings both currency and new life fruit to eat.

Make change, change is good. It's how you be a good man. It's how to give others the fruit.