Championship Fathering is one movement in the US that aims to help dads become the “father that your children need.” While I certainly support their goals, one thing that caught my attention was their comparison of fathering to a championship. How I wish that it was truly like a basketball championship where it’s a two-out-of-three series (or maybe even a best-of-seven affair)! It would then give us dads the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and do better for our children. And even if we still failed in the end, at least we had several chances to make it work. There would be no opportunity, as some athletes sometimes do, to hide behind excuses like “I was not at 100% healthy” or “The referee made a mistake.”
A playground equivalent of such a god-like power is the “do-over” as in “let’s just do it again.” While I think it’s a universal concept among children, “do-over” is an American term. It is perhaps more known in Filipino culture as “not counted,” or “replay” (another term that might be more understandable to Filipino politicians is “recount”). In any case, the do-over is meant to be the proverbial magic wand to bring about a truce when children’s passions are running high and they cannot sincerely reach agreement on a call. After enough heated discussion, the kids will just agree to a do-over. If the event being re-done was particularly important and the do-over dramatically changes the original outcome, a second do-over may be invoked, thereby essentially making it a two-out-of-three. As one commentator noted, it thereby ensures that “the universal forces of fair play” are “righteously maintained.” Wouldn’t it really be great if we could somehow also apply this divine do-over ability to fatherhood, motherhood, friendships, careers, and to the rest of our day-to-day lives? More so if we can do it in such a way wherein everyone, except us, really thinks and feels that it’s not a do-over but is all happening for the first time?
Unfortunately, unless you are part of the cast of Lost, Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, or other similar films, there are probably insurmountable scientific (and even existential) barriers to being able to roll back the hands of time and change your past. Be that as it may, this is precisely what author Robin Hemley tried to sort of do in his funny and insightful memoir Do-Over! As the book cover itself states, it’s a do-over, “In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom and other embarrassments.” Hemley explains that our regrets greatly influence what we think of ourselves and that as far as regrets go, he has a “Santa Claus bagful.” And so he decided to invoke a do-over of his most embarrassing and shameful moments, most of which occurred in his childhood. He listed 10 things that he wanted to re-do. A sampling includes: his kindergarten years (where he was terrorized by his teacher who also told him that he would grow up to become a “thug”); his elementary school play (where in the angelic role of the Heavenly Messenger, he completely ruined a crucial scene); his sixth grade (where he was mercilessly bullied); his high school prom (where he did not have the guts to ask his crush to the dance and so just watched it from outside the cafeteria instead); his Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT (which he never took because he rejected the notion that standardized tests could predict his future); and his high school exchange student program in Japan (where he constantly fought with some teachers and quit the program early). As you can imagine, it was a very unique experience not just for him but also for his fellow classmates and teachers. I doubt, for instance, that there are a lot of kindergarten students who are picked up from school by their wife rather than their mom! Interestingly, however, after some adjustment period, they actually treated him no differently. But since Hemley is certainly not a kid anymore, it made a lot of their conversations and interactions quite humorous. It also made his commentaries, coming as such from someone who had been there before and who now had decades of life-experience to draw upon, all the more discerning and bittersweet.
Yet I suppose that we do not need to go to the extent of reliving our past as Hemley did in order to erase some of our painful childhood memories. We do not need to break the laws of physics and go back in time in order to correct some of our regrets. Instead, we can try to do things over here and now. One thing that I’ve realized is that much of what I am now doing and have done over the past six years have actually been to try to compensate for some of the things I had done (or not done) in my past. Being human, I can’t say that I’ve succeeded with flying colors. There are some things, too, that I have not yet even had the courage to try to rectify. But perhaps the universe is, in fact, much more generous with second chances than we had thought. Maybe it knows that one-shot deals are only for gods. That is why for the rest of us, it gave us a lifetime of second chances instead. And although no one really knows when life will end, we can choose to approach every single day that we wake up in the morning as a God-given opportunity to do things over.
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Do-Over! by Robin Hemley is available in all National Book Store branches. He is the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Interestingly, he is married to a Filipina and is currently on a Guggenheim fellowship in the Philippines with his family.
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