The Perfect Parent

The Perfect Parent

I've never been a parent, only been someone's child. I have seen my siblings and friends consumed with worry and stress over their kids. Not having any kids myself I will never experience the agony and ecstasy of parenthood. I like to think I would have been a good parent but there's also a nagging doubt about whether I really have what it takes.

I was lucky to have two parents who loved each other and were there for me my entire childhood. I grew up in a very secure loving environment. I had ample food and shelter. It was a small family, my Dad was an only child and my Mom had but one sister who never married. All the family lived close by. My parents, while on the strict side were loving, supportive, and engaged in our lives (my sister, my brother, and me). We were baby boomers. We were growing up in suburbia. We had time on our hands. So we tested our parents and misbehaved at times but we never got into any real trouble.

I loved sports as did my Dad. My friends and I played some sort of sport just about everyday, weather permitting. We played the sport that was in season and in the 50's & 60's that was baseball in the spring and summer, football in the fall, basketball in the winter. Baseball was my favorite. My Dad would play baseball with me when he could. I was fast, the fastest kid in the neighborhood. I had good hands, could catch well. These served me well in football and helped in baseball too but basketball was easily my best sport. I went to a big high school, about 3000 students. Tryouts for the teams had something north of 100 kids trying out. I tried out for the junior varsity for all 3 sports and was cut in all three. I was too small/light for football (120 lbs). Just not quite good enough for baseball. I ended up being one of the last guys cut. But basketball I was good at. Good enough to make the team except I didn't. I didn't even make the 1^st cut. I had been the high scorer of my grade school team and had been playing weekend schoolyard ball with the star of the varsity. I had 2 problems. The 1^st one was I had a knee injury my freshman year so I did not play freshman ball and hence the coaches had no info on me. My 2^nd problem was I was not super aggressive and too willing to pass. In tryouts I would pass the ball but it would never be passed to me even if I was wide open under the basket. I never really got to show off one of my strengths which was I was a pretty good shot. Now I would not have been good enough to start but I was as good as a number of the fellows who made the team. I played hard and hustled. Upon being cut I was heart-broken. I went home and shot some baskets in the backyard and then just sat on our hill. My Dad got home and came out and sat with me. We talked a little and then after a while went in for dinner.

The next day the varsity star player I had been playing with found out about my being cut He was surprised. He evidently talked with the varsity coach who later found me and talked to me explaining how with so many kids trying out it's easy to miss someone and asked me to come back out. I had already moved on. I was thinking I probably would not be playing all that much I would probably be better playing in the church and city leagues where I could play all the time. I thanked him but did not take him up on his offer. I did not want to make the team that way and it really was for the best anyway. So, I played intramural ball at school and our team won the league championship. I played church league, we weren't good but I played a lot. I also played a little in a city league. And, I had all my afternoons free, no practice. So it turned out just fine.

When I graduated from high school in 1967 there was a lot going on in our country. There was the on-going civil rights movement. There was the war in Vietnam. We were not that far removed from the Kennedy and MLK assassinations. There was the on-going cold war. And, the “counter-culture” and the “New Left” were on the rise. The country was divided on a number of issues. I was young and idealistic. I was concerned with civil rights. I was against the war and the draft. I was rebelling against consumerism, or so I thought. I was off to college, trying to define who I was and ready to make a stand for my values and beliefs. At some point this as well as some other things resulted in significant friction between my parents and myself. In fact, enough friction that we hardly spoke for a couple of years.

I relocated to the west coast and really never returned home. Eventually the relationship with my parents was repaired and we became much closer. At 28 I decided that I would write a diary for a year and give it to my parents. My intention was to give them a more intimate picture of me as an adult, seeing that they had not seen much of me the last 9 years or so. So I wrote the diary that included day to day thoughts and also takes or views about various events from my childhood.

One of the events I wrote about in my diary was the day I got cut from the school basketball team. How my Father was the perfect Father. He sat by me. Supported me but he didn't tell me I should have done something different, didn't say anything negative about the coaches or their tryout methods. He didn't try to fix it. He just sat there with me and listened. He was empathetic but mostly quiet, no fatherly advice. He just let me work it out for myself and let me know he was there for me. I was no longer 3 or 7 needing or wanting someone to fix things for me. It was exactly what I wanted and needed at that time. He was the perfect Dad that day. It's a favorite memory of mine about him.

After my Dad read that entry in the diary he told me that he remembered the night because it was a night he felt like a failure as a parent. He knew I deserved to make the team and there was nothing he could do. He felt utterly helpless and inadequate. Life is so weird. He could not have been any better as a Dad in that situation. He was the perfect parent, yet he felt like failure.

Yikes! Being a parent is tough...