Thank God for roundabouts. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
“You can do anything you set your mind to.” Raise your hand if you heard that growing up. It was encouragement or backhanded criticism – “you can do it if you try” or “you can do it if you just try.” That “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting; that one word could take you from empowerment to dejection in the blink of an eye. If either version were true, my generation would be populated by an abundance of astronauts and firemen. Maybe today it would be tech bros or social media influencers.
Growing up, I’d have to say putting in the effort was always expected in my family. If you struggled with something, you needed to do whatever was necessary to overcome the obstacle – demonstrate competence – or face the consequences. The consequences were generally never spelled out – the threat was enough to inspire effort. That fear of amorphous consequences was enough to get me through, among other things, AP calculus. Of course, today I couldn’t tell you the difference between a sin and a cotan if my life depended on it. I’m not even sure those are the right terms. Suffice to say, I haven’t been called upon to determine the area under a curve in recent history.
Complicating things, it was instilled in me that competence was expected as a token of one’s manhood. I was expected to, and did, learn how to change a tire, fix plumbing and install a light fixture. I could teach my sons how to ride a bike and how to tell which waves were best for boogey-boarding. I didn’t enjoy being a lawyer, but I stayed at it for almost 40 years. Partly that was because I had no other marketable skills, but also because it satisfied that need to feel competent.
I have to admit, however, that feelings of competence are rarely the norm for me. Instead, I tend to dwell on the mistakes I’ve made in the past, even the distant past. Mistakes are like bad tattoos – every time I look in the mirror, I see them and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Successes vanish, but failures are forever.
Nowhere has this push/pull of competence/incompetence been more pronounced for me than with respect to fatherhood. Often, when my sons were little, I would have an instinct about parenting that came from my own childhood and I would immediately want to do the opposite. Nothing was worse than when I opened my mouth and my mother came out – the “clean plate club” was a real thing. Same with my father’s “walk it off” when one of my sons got hit by a baseball or skinned his knee. It’s hard for me not to assume that I am responsible for whatever my kids’ shortcomings may be – had I been a better, more competent father, my sons would have been perfect.* Nonsensical, yes, but emotions are rarely rational.
So where is this all coming from? Driving in New Zealand. First, there’s the whole wrong side of the road issue. Let’s just say I’m relieved to have been driving mostly on two-lane, quiet country roads where occasional lapses and drifting over to the wrong side hasn’t proved catastrophic. Yet.
More to the point, I’ve always been what can most charitably be called “directionally challenged.” It’s become somewhat of a joke – I can pretty much guarantee that if I think my destination is to the left, it’s inevitably to the right. Don’t even think about the whole north/south/east/west thing. Who am I, Magellan?**
Which brings me back to roundabouts. As I’ve been driving through the countryside, most roads don’t have many turnoffs. But every now and again, New Zealanders, being the friendly and happy people they seem to be, give you the opportunity to go left, go right, go straight, or turn around and go back the way you came. The roundabout gives you options and one of the choices is always right.
I’ve decided that competence doesn’t require you to always pick the right direction. Sometimes the best way to prove your competence is by admitting you’ve made the wrong turn and, in my case, working hard not to let my pride or sense of masculinity keep me from choosing a new way of acting or thinking. There’s an option to go back the way you came at a roundabout that would be nice to have in other areas of life. I hope I have learned from my relationships on how to be a better partner and from my children on how to be a better father, I’ve learned by trial and error, but mostly I’ve learned from the mistakes tattooed in my consciousness.
Making a mistake doesn’t make you incompetent. To the contrary, I’d say mistakes pave the road to competence. Masculinity can’t require perfection. If I can be a better person, partner and father by taking the chance that I’ll pick the wrong turn-off, I’m ready to roll the dice. I’m ok if you think I’m less of a “man’s man” when I pull over and take a look at the map.
Oh, and when I get back home, maybe you’ll see me out driving and give me a little honk and a wave. How will you know it’s me? I’ll be the one waiting for the light to change so I can make a u-turn.
*In fairness, my mother always thought they were perfect – one of the more endearing qualities she possessed.
**This just happened to me tonight in Christchurch. I confidently headed out from my hotel in what I thought was the direction of Victoria Street. After half an hour, I pulled out my phone, went on Google Maps and saw that I had been walking in exactly the wrong direction for almost 2 miles. You can’t make this shit up. The only exception to this rule is New York City where the streets and avenues just make sense to me.
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