Fatherhood: Year One

It’s seventeen months since I became a father but it’s taken me this long to get my head together enough to write about it, so here goes …..

When I set out to have a baby I had no idea that there was an international conspiracy of parents who are all sworn to uphold the terrible secrets of parenthood. Once sworn in we are duty bound to pretend that all is rosy, make a few anecdotes about lack of sleep and say how wonderful our children are lest we put the continued viability of the human race in jeopardy by telling the awful truth.

I have however decided to break this silence and I think the best way to do it is to tell my own tale. Unlike the few vacuous books concerning fatherhood in bookshops (there’s usually about two stuck in the back somewhere amidst the 50,000 books on motherhood) I want to try and detail the internal processes that went on in my mind as fatherhood unfolded rather than just recount some tale like a story told down the pub couched in football analogies and bravado. This is what the few books I read attempted to do and they were useless to me especially given that I know nothing about football and comparing things to the offside rule just bewildered me even further.

So to kick off (damn thats a football reference isn’t it) I thought I ‘d go right back to the beginning ….

Does Meditation Work

Assessing whether meditation works is really dependent on what you expect it to work at! For me I started daily meditation practise at a time when I found myself in a bit of a rut and felt my life wasn’t actually moving forward. The only way I was trying to break out of this rut was by indulging my desires and becoming more and more self-involved. This seemed to be getting me nowhere and was turning me into someone I really didn’t like.

It was at this point that I chanced upon a buddhist article about the nature of desire and it really hit home to me. So I set out to learn some more about this and rather than being all intellectual about it I thought i’d just start meditating first and see what happened. So I suppose for me I wanted meditation to work at making me into someone who was happier with their life and happier about who they were.