Love is a mystery to me. Some might say (though never to my face) it is a defect of my birth as a high-functioning sociopath. I might say it is the disillusionment with romance wrought by inflicting Walt Disney on a child’s tender, sleeve-sitting heart. Whatever the reason, I had to abandon my misunderstanding of love in order to forgive my most natural attractions for loving others. With my robotic personality, however, I could not function without some parameters by which to compute my behavioral patterns.
For this I turned to the Apostle Paul. Although I am not a biblical man, his second letter to the Corinthians checked all the appropriate boxes to explain why so many humans behaved irrationally towards their chosen partners. It was an exhausting list that seemed to box souls into a boundless battle for selfless reconciliation. Love is patient. Love is kind… It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It holds no records of wrongs… It always protects, always trusts, always hopes… All these things seemed foolish to me when applied towards character traits such as dishonesty, manipulation, aggression, narcissism, and a slew of other skills that would make for a great spy or an even better entanglement. Nevertheless, I needed a widely accepted framework and even my atheist friends called their bizarre compromises “love” same as everyone else so… point for Paul.
[Enter: The Kid] Love is still a mystery to me. Whoever says “Oh, I didn’t understand love until I met my children” is full of shit. I didn’t understand love before and I understand it even less now. I’m not a woman so, granted, I can not speak from personal experience but I am 99.99% sure that giving birth is not fucking nirvana. No one suddenly reaches enlightenment when they become a parent; however, I can say from personal experience that the very first time I held my daughter, I felt a force erupt inside me that was deeper and stronger than the feeling of 1,000 butterflies in my stomach. I can’t say what it was, but I know it wasn’t the secrets of the universe. My theory is that the freak-out moment that most women get when they realize they’re pregnant creates an emotional bomb that they then spend xx amount of weeks filling with hormonal energy from all the anxiety, confusion, anger, frustration, curiosity and excitement of creating a life. The unborn baby is then primed with a DNA detonator triggered by the sperm donor. When the child touches its father for the first time, all that energy is immediately transferred in an explosion of paternal instincts. It’s simple science, folks. You think I spent all that time in after-school conferences with Ms Behrens because I was a disciplinary concern? No, clearly it was because she recognized my acute understanding of human biology. But I digress…
Paternal instincts are weird. If instincts are a survival guide, then it could be considered self-love in its purest form. But if that’s the case, why the hell does my existence suddenly depend on keeping this aimless sponge of a creature alive long enough to supplant me? The logic is flawed, but the effect is real. Paternal instincts exist against all reason, same as love, but I recognize the two as separate identities within the self. Some people have no parental instincts. Perhaps the mother did not experience enough self-loathing in her pregnancy to trigger an explosion of emotional energy transference after birth. Perhaps the parent has a hedonistic heart and is unable to deny his or her baser instincts. Or perhaps they embrace a more Darwinian parental philosophy, which, cards on the table, seems entirely appealing to me more often than I will ever admit. Fortunately for my spawn, my paternal instincts are to protect, inspire and encourage. Unfortunately for her, I don’t know how to do that and love her at the same time.
I know what you’re thinking. What the fuck, Q? Did you really just say that? Um, yes, what of it? I still love my kid, of course, but that experience often irritates the intentions of my paternal instincts. For example, you might say I am overprotective simply because I want to know exactly what my child is doing and with whom at all times. If I don’t know, then I am overcome with anxiety and apprehension until I can set eyes on her again. Now the parameters by which I am supposed to love say that it is okay for her to have freedom, and secrets, and privacy, and independence–my trust, basically. So I allow her these unearned graces, but I don’t like it, and according to the parameters by which I am supposed to love, that is also okay. My paternal instincts seek to pull her closer to myself, wanting to share my hobbies with her and vice-versa, so as to mutually inspire and encourage each other. But the Kid finds my hobbies to be arduous, time-consuming tasks, either too dull or too mentally-exhausting to ever be enjoyable. And I find her hobbies to be far too whimsical and chaotic to invest such large swathes of my time. Love says I should try anyway, and I do, and I fail, which Love says shouldn’t happen, but it does…not…compute.
So yea, like I said, I don’t know how to love this Kid and follow my paternal instincts at the same time. I must make a split-second decision on which path to follow at every junction of interaction. This method tends to work out in her favor 8 times out of 10 because I diverge down the Lane of Love. Flawed though the framework might be, it’s better than the game of pinball that is paternal instinct. Where do these balls even come from? Why do I feel like they’re attacking me? Where do they go once the game is over? Why does this stupid thing never go where the hell you want it to go? How come two seconds into the game you abandon all plans and frantically attempt to hit the ball on a hopeless prayer that it can bounce anywhere it wants just please, please, please don’t end up in the gutter?!
..Now I’ve ruined pinball for myself. And Love is still a mystery to me. This is not what I intended when I woke up to write this morning.