A new perspective #FathersDay
This is the first year that Father’s Day is my day, the day that I celebrate myself. Just a little over two months ago, my son was born. After spending a few days at the hospital watching him grow, I couldn’t help but write my first letter to him:
I am looking at you, thanking GOD for your existence and finding myself wanting so much for you. I want you to be better than me, learn from my mistakes and make your own mistakes to learn from. I want you to love…love life…love your family…love your community…love yourself. The only hate I want you to have in your heart is for injustice. I want you to be humble and strong at the same time. I want so many things for you. But mostly I want you to start being you. I want to watch you discover who you are. I want to pray for you to learn who you are. As you learn who you are I want you to commit steadfastly to being yourself. As I sit here watching you grow day by day, I realize how much I have to learn from you. And always know that I will love you as only a parent can love their child.
Sitting there looking at my son discover this world, I started getting perspective on the world around me in a way that doing community work, being a community organizer or a communicator never taught me.
And for a new father, perspective can be a mother…
For one, I started to truly get the crazy lengths that parents are willing to go to, from robbing banks to crossing borders, just to give their children a better life. I also began to comprehend why some of the most ambitious people I know were willing to give it all away just to be able to watch their children grow older.
But I also gained a new appreciation for how overwhelmed and under-resourced you can feel as a parent. In the first month my son was born, I saw how it really does take a village — an extended family — and a strong community to raise a child. My personal village saved us. And yet it made me that much more angry to see so many families’ villages be broken apart by what I call the “isms” and “ations”: gentrification, mass incarceration, deportation or just the need to move half way across the country to find an occupation.
We often see being overwhelmed as a personal-responsibility thing or a time-management thing. We often see being under-resourced as just a money thing. We don’t see it as a by-product of a society in which people can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods that they grew up in, where looking for a job means moving far away from your family and support network, where institutions that — on paper –are meant to protect communities never reflect on the families that they destroy.
But the perspective I got as a parent wasn’t despair. I found myself filled with a new hope and drive, a new perspective on what it takes to build a better world. Looking at my son, I see the personification of all the reasons that I do what I do and I need him to witness me doing it. When you stare at your child, phrases like “another world is possible” stop being abstract ideas or ideologies (if they ever were). A real, live person that you will raise will either step into a world of love, of truth and justice or one of ignorance, of hate, and of injustice. And the way in which your child learns to walk in that world, to deal with that world or to make that world better has everything to do with you. That is when a new duality, a new double-edged perspective engrains itself in your brain.
That is when you realize that to be a good parent, you must commit yourself to building a better world and to build a better world, you must in order to be a good parent.
Subhash Kateel is an activist who lives in Miami and often comments for his own blog, Let’s Talk About It. Subhash also hosts a weekly talk show on radio also called Let’s Talk About It.
