We chatted mainly about why the Freakedout Fathers website was created, and what might stress Dads out (as well as what can be done!).

Enjoy!

http://familylifeaustralia.sermon.net/da/2734463/play

Why not pay her a visit, listen to us chat for half an hour and see if you can find an idea that helps you de-stress a little as a parent.

You can hear the podcast at Help for stressed-out parents.

It was the best of me, it was the worst of me

Every summer, my mom drove me and most of my siblings on the 4-hour journey to Afton, Wyoming. On the way, I daydreamed of the things we would do: fish for trout in his well-stocked pond, milk the cows or torment them with firecrackers, float down the Salt River (which wasn’t salty), hunt for gophers in the wheat fields. One year we had to use the riding lawn mower to drag a dead calf from a corral to the family campground, where we burned it in the fire pit! Dead things and fire! Can you think of a more awesome adventure for a pair of 10-year-old boys? I left Wyoming at the end of every trip jealous of my cousin and angry at my unreasonable mother, who wouldn’t let me live with him despite my clearly reasonable arguments. The greatest thing about my cousin’s farm was that it gave me space to do whatever I wanted.

And the worst thing about my cousin’s farm and the annual trip was that it gave me space to do whatever I wanted. I probably looked forward to the hunts more than anything. If you want to explore who a boy is, put a .22 rifle in his hands. The rifle confers power that he hasn’t experienced before because drowning ants with a toxic brew of household cleaners and pee just didn’t have the same rush, you know? (What? I’m the only one who tried that??) Mixed with the hormonal cocktail swirling through his veins, a gun will teach a boy things about himself that he perhaps cannot learn in any other way.

The deed

One day during a summer visit, I was out in the countryside by myself with my .22. I happened upon a fallen tree, bare of leaves and dry in the early part of summer. Nestled in the branches at about eye level was a nest, and in the nest were three baby robins. They reacted to my shadow by trembling their useless wings, craning their necks up and peeping for food, their beaks open impossibly wide. I wondered to myself…can I kill all three of them with one shot? I lined it up carefully, adjusting the angle and height of the rifle to be just right, and pulled the trigger.

Yes. I learned that I could kill them all with one shot, and so I did, with no more forethought than when emptying my bladder behind a rock. I instantly regretted it. When I checked my handiwork and saw all three forms lumped together on the side of the nest opposite me, I felt a hollowness that haunts me to this day. My sore conscience served up visions of the Mommy robin coming back to the nest to discover her dead brood. She would have a worm in her beak, but would soon drop it. She would sit by them for hours until her genetic instructions kicked in and told her to get on with life.

Something changed that summer. It was the last year my cousin and I took our guns out into the fields, and soon the summer visits stopped altogether. Time put an end to the boyish pleasures, as it must, and I’m left with memories—some are sweet and some are so bitter that I still cringe at the taste.

Some things you don’t learn until you teach them

Raw olives are extremely bitter. If you taste one, you’ll wonder how in the world humans ever discovered they were edible. But with time, proper care, and just the right brine to soak in, olives become a delicious delicacy. So it is with memory.

Twenty years pass and I have a son of my own, “Tommy.” He is 8 or 9 during this summer (he’s 12 now), and we live in southern Arizona, where wildlife is present as soon as we step out our door. Tommy loves to go exploring in the dry river beds and desert areas outside our apartment complex. He brings home snakes, lizards, toads, and tarantulas; we keep them overnight to watch them and then let them go in the morning.

One day he discovers that the areas inside the apartment complex, covered with trees, are good hunting grounds as well. He brings home a baby bird—a feathered but pre-flight sparrow. We keep it for about a week, feeding it a mixture of water and bread from an eye dropper, and soon it responds to Tommy’s shadow by flapping its useless wings, craning its neck while peeping for food, and opening its beak impossibly wide. Tommy gets a kick out of playing mama bird.

We learn that, in the harsh climate of Arizona, parents or siblings will sometimes push the youngest and smallest birds out of the nest to maximize food and the survival chances of the stronger ones. It’s nature’s way of balancing the carrying capacity of an ecosystem.

Nature didn’t count on Tommy. He makes it his personal mission to scour the grounds every day and rescue nestlings that have fallen or been thrown out of their nests. Our living room is an aviary. Baby sparrows, pigeons, mourning doves, and once, a bat, took up residence in shoe boxes and kitchen mixing bowls. We learn of “the Bird Lady,” a wildlife rehabilitator on the east side of town that took such birds in and hand raised them until they were able to survive in the wild on their own.

At least three times a week during that month, we make the 75-minute round trip drive to deliver Tommy’s finds to the person who could care for them. She learns his name, shows him her inventory of birds exotic and common, and he learns a lot about himself—maybe things only caring for helpless hatchlings, despite his natural tendencies to aggression and destruction, can teach him.

His grandparents come to visit and they object to the regular drive and the time involved, which takes him away from them for far too long during their short stay. “You throw those birds in the dumpster and he’ll soon stop bringing them home,” mutters Grandpa. “Two hours each time?” says Grandma, incredulous. “Are birds worth it?”

“It’s not about the birds,” I reply. “It’s about Tommy.” What I didn’t tell them was this: It’s also about me because I remembered the three lifeless forms on the other side of the nest. It’s about me proving to myself that I could be as good at kindness as at cruelty. That I could exercise power to bestow and protect life as well as to take it. All that and more. The memory became less bitter that summer. I still don’t like the images associated with it, but I understand them. And I understand the boy who lived it. He has learned something about the exercise of power and about the ongoing battle with self.

*** 

Joe is the father of five and husband of one with varying degrees of success (his words not mine!). You can read about those degrees and about his (mis)adventures in fatherhood at his blog, Fathered Five.

Service Untitled had a well-written post recently on the topic of appropriate humor in customer service. Well worth the read…

Laughter is also something I love to see happening in families, especially when the parents are allowing the kids to bring some fun into their serious adult world …

For us parents, this can be as simple as staying “present” with your kids and letting their innate comedic genius really touch your soul. Let them finish their comment, get a joke or wisecrack out, pull an absurdly silly face… without interrupting it all to get on with serious stuff.

My kids make me laugh out loud … as often as I let them. And I know that my laughter nurtures both their souls and mine, and I know that the attention I give them builds confidence and security in them also.

It’s funny (no pun intended – ok, I intended it!) – it’s funny how laughter and happiness can be a choice, something we seek, something we tune into. Us Westerners are kinda silly, adopting a postition of distraction in life where we almost dare Fun to break through and touch us. When it actually comes along, we often feel the need to justify it:

“Oh, yes I have to go to the carnival on the weekend; my kids need some quality time.” (How about “I’m going to the Carnival on the weekend with my kids; whoo hoo!!”?)

Meanwhile our kids are absorbed with Fun. They live for it, search for it and when it happens, they lap it up. And if we’ll only let them, they’ll bring us a gift of laughter, of fun, of wonder – enough to revive us and bring us down to earth again…

Deciphering the difference between the promises you do make and the promises you have made in a rash moment helps us to keep in integrity.

Take time out and stop to think if you can follow through with the promises you are making or renegotiate what you said you would do, so that you stay in integrity for yourself and for others.

For the rest of this short and practical article, click here.

• Best Thing I Came Across Off-line: The twister-like phenomenon near my house. By the time I got the camera and snapped off the photo below, it had begun to dissipate. But this is something you don’t see in suburban Melbourne Australia.

• The Week’s Best Quote: “The trick isn’t to live forever. It’s to live with yourself, forever.” (Keith Richards in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 – probably the best thing in the entire 2 & 3/4 hours of the film!)
• The Week’s Most Embarrassing Typo: A friend emailed me and asked me what I thought about this season of the TV show LOST. I thought I’d written in reply “Actually I prefer Heroes”. What I actually typed was, “Actually I prefer Herpes” (sigh)
• The Week’s Heroes: Sal, Mark, Tanz, Steve, Matt and all the other volunteer leaders of Nexus Youth Keysborough where my eldest son is enjoying fun, community and values development. You guys rock!
• The Week’s Arch-Nemesis: It’s a toss-up between two arrogant and greedy Corporate Giants: the oil companies with their soaring petrol prices and my Bank (for so many reasons) 
•  The Week’s Toughest Challenge: Back pain.
• The Week’s Biggest Win: A young lady in one of our training programs making the statement “I’ve remembered who I am” (this young lady has now relaunched a  career plan that suits who she is, rather than mere convenience).

A highlight of a year’s hard work for any kid would have to be winning a trophy. It just so happens that Youngest Son scooped the academic award Highest Achiever for his year level at school.

Looks happy with himself, doesn’t he?

I love the way children so unabashedly celebrate achievements. Sometimes we adults could learn something from this: we often revert to false humility or we recollect our failiures and overlook our successes.

As 2006 draws to a close, what were your highest achievements? I invite you to leave a comment, hold your head up high, and let us know what you consider to be your top 3 achievements/milestones/successes this year past.

And yes, this post was just an excuse to show how proud of Xander I am.

If you are a parent & you’re wondering what are the essential things to focus on for the two-decade longhaul of raising children, this short audio file is for you…

3 Needs

For about thirty years, fathers have been getting a bad reputation via fictional media.

From the self-centred incompetents Homer Simpson & Tim the Toolman to the evil fathers of John Lock (Lost) & Luke Skywalker (you know the black-armoured dude in the Star Wars filums?) to the just plain yobbos like Al Bundy, not to mention the missing fathers from about 20 years of Disney films – these are the role models many of us have had to guide our own fathering by.

When you really take a look at the abundance of these Bad Dad characters, it seems Baby Boomer and Gen X screenwriters really have it in for the role of father.

And so the character of Jonathan Kent in Smallville (above) is a refreshing break with this ‘tradition’. Thoroughly engaged with his son (Clark), in love with his wife (Martha),putting his money where his mouth is,physically strong, acting on his values, holding his clearly-communicated values up to his son and holding Clark to keeping them, protective and wise, imperfect and wounded, charitable and willing to fight when necessary – he may be fictional but that’s the kind of character I can aspire to as a Dad.

And he marks a turn in the tide of father characters as movies like Barnyard revive the concept of the noble Dad, which gives me hope that our generation can revive the practise of it…

And then there’s perhaps the greatest true story of fatherhood on the face of the planet. If you’ve never heard of “Team Hoyt“, it’s time you visited this page which carries both the story as told by Sports Illustrated and an incredibly moving video piece at the bottom of the page. Dick Hoyt is truly a Dad that Dads can aspire to…

I took this snapshot at my kitchen table just now. Xander left this there as he went to school this morning. It epitomises the inner wrestle in boys/men between the Warrior and the Nurturer.

This makes me feel like he’s getting a good balance…