Month: August 2012

What’s my problem?

I have many, actually, but I figured out a major one: as an adolescent and young adult I never established a mentor/mentee relationship with an adult.

There were plenty of teachers, professors and professionals I looked up to but I was just too distant or uninvolved with them, even when one or two of them deliberately reached out to me.

I used a "flaw-O-matic" as if they were used cars, where a single perceived flaw made ignoring them seem justified. "He’s too religious," "Her research is murky and inconsequential," "He doesn’t like me anyway."

Perhaps contributing to this tendency of mine is the fact that someone I love a great deal, a very important and influential person in my life, has a severe flaw (in my eyes) that adds a harmful element of contradiction to my admiration for him. Looking up to a person who nonetheless has beliefs antithetical to my own may have confused me during my transition to adulthood, when beliefs and worldviews became ever more important to me.

I am unjustifiably suspicious sometimes, too, even while recognizing that there are so many great educators and professionals out there. Some of them I have simply admired from afar, not revealing in conversation that I had googled them, read their published papers, read news articles that quoted them, asked others what they thought of them, put in extra effort to impress them, etc.

Yet mentorship is so important. It is how you set your course, how you determine who you want to be.

Acknowledging all this, I resolve to be more deliberate about seeking guidance from an older adult or two whom I respect. I take my familiar yellow legal pad, which is the seeding-ground of my ideas and promises, before me. I write down my plan and date it in black ink.

Later I can look at it and say, undeniably, that I wrote that and made a promise to myself on that day, undeniably because I can read it there. I write it down, and I follow it.

I had a parable-like experience but it had no lesson and no obvious meaning. If I were a pastor I would write a sermon about it:

I walked up to my apartment building and found two men struggling to get a huge couch through the front entrance and up the stairs. One of them shouted, "A little help here?!" I assumed he was talking to me so I rushed to help.

They were going about it all wrong so when the couch inevitably got stuck I told them they should rotate the thing so that it had a chance of getting around the first corner of several. They didn’t seem to take my advice or acknowledge it. Another guy walked over to help. This third man had a white cane. He tried to help, too, but the whole endeavor was going nowhere. My suspicions grew.

Finally an older lady walked up and whispered to me, "All three of them are blind." She then gave them the same advice I did about rotating the couch, but she was more explicit about how they had to do it. Eventually they got it in.

I knew there were two institutes for blind people a block from me where advocacy and training goes on for people who cannot see. They often practice walking around in my neighborhood, very considerately wearing the sunglasses and white cane that reduce the chance of misunderstandings. But I had no way of knowing that the two men struggling with the couch were blind. When I see them around the building, of course, I will know to offer assistance if appropriate. But this particular instance was unexpected.

Again, it was a "three blind men" parable but with no clear moral. Except perhaps to be ready for the unexpected.

When I was in line at Target for some household items the lady in front of me was making small talk with the cashier, a man. She asked if he had any kids. He was smiling, saying how he had one daughter, and she was turning 18 in three weeks. He said he couldn’t wait to “have her outta my hair.” He said he already knew the three words he was going to say to her (I didn’t want to know what they were). He said that once she was 18 he would never have to see her and never have to pay a child support payment again.

I was disgusted. When I turned 18, my parents were driving me to college, paying my cell phone bill, paying for me to fly to visit them, etc. Their devotion to me had undergone no change just because I was an adult. Rather they continued supporting me in ways consistent with the trend of “emerging adulthood” in which the major transitions of early adulthood are spread throughout the third decade of life instead of being more compressed in the early and mid-twenties as they were in the past. My parents still support me in some ways and always will.

So why do some parents, mostly men, feel virtually no obligation to their children while others are completely devoted and responsible? Why do some people act like they are a turtle burying an egg, while others nurture and support their offspring like a mother duck? Why are some parents like maple trees, throwing their whirlybirds into the wind, while other plants produce a single giant seed with a decent chance of survival?

Even if my cashier was immature and ignorant 18 years ago, couldn’t he have taken the next two decades to grow up? Wasn’t there time to change and become friends with his daughter?

I wanted to say, “It’s too bad she couldn’t have had a better father than you.” But of course I didn’t because I knew I was making several assumptions. Maybe the daughter really was a she-devil. Maybe I was taking him as a symbol of a societal problem and imputing other attributes to him in a way that wasn’t fair. Maybe he is pushed and pulled by societal factors that don’t affect me. Maybe his own father was little more than a sperm donor, too.

But looking at other people it’s obvious that there is a huge gap in the depth and duration of parental investment among people in this country. I am really lucky my own parents were determined to be a strong link in the chain of generations.