Looking at everyday parenting

My daughter gave me the same exasperated look the other day that my wife once did after I read an issue of

at a dentist’s clinic. I saw Clint Eastwood’s character, Sgt. “Gunny” Highway (in the 1986 war film

) do it to gain insights on how women’s minds ticked and so I thought of checking out for myself what someone once described as “the other team’s playbook.” I started asking my wife all these crazy questions which didn’t really turn out very well. My sweet and innocent 12-year-old, however, wasn’t at all concerned about my awkward attempts to ape Dirty Harry. I was simply asking if anything special happened to her in school that day.  She rolled her eyes and immediately warned her younger brother that I was fishing again for a topic for my column. She pleaded, “Dad, don’t write anything about me, okay?” My son jokingly chimed in that if I wrote something about him, he would erase my computer’s hard drive. Alas, my daughter was right. I again was at a loss for something “interesting” to write about.

I guess that it is but normal to only want to write about exceptional experiences or occurrences. After all, who wants to read stories about our daily grind at the office or our ordinary routines at home? Ahhh yes, the everyday joys of parenting! Waking up early each morning to get the kids all set for school, checking the car pool schedule, helping them with their homework, the never-ending extra-curricular activities, and the occasional refereeing of sibling spats. Unfortunately, there just aren’t really too many so-called “Kodak moments” in a parent’s day to write about. My mental block notwithstanding, I think that this is also why some parents go out of their way to search for those once-in-a-lifetime experiences or long for the next big milestone in their children’s life to happen. Because of the perceived boredom of everyday family life, we sometimes believe that it’s those special moments that define our relationship with our kids. 

Yet in our desire to focus on the extraordinary moments of our children’s lives, we may actually be missing the bigger picture. Literary philosopher Gary Saul Morson proposes that the most important events in life are precisely the most ordinary and everyday ones. He coined the term “prosaics” to describe “… a way of thinking about human events that focuses on the ordinary, messy, quotidian facts of daily life — in short, on the prosaic. Cloaked in their very ordinariness, the prosaic events that truly shape our lives — that truly are our lives — escape our notice.” We do not appreciate them simply because they are so commonplace. He explains, however, that although they may appear inconsequential, because they are “infinitely numerous,” taken together they are far more significant. 

In 2008, Daryl Smith founded an “advertisement-free” magazine that is based on the concept of prosaics called “Seeing the Everyday.” One of the ideas that the magazine espouses is the importance to family development of all of our common mundane daily life interactions at home. For example, Kathleen Slaugh Bahr, PhD writes in another journal that even the humble household chores are powerful life-shaping events because they become “daily rituals of family love and belonging.” She adds, “Family identity is built moment by moment amidst the talking and teasing, the singing and storytelling, and even the quarreling and anguish that may attend such work sessions.”

My attempts to extract a topic from my children proved fruitless. They challenged me to write about their mother, but I told them that doing so could end in divorce. And so we just engaged in silly banter that lasted a little bit past their bedtime and which resulted in some frayed nerves in the end. I decided to just turn off the computer and go to bed early in the hope that some golden nugget would miraculously materialize in my mind before I dozed off. I found myself thinking about work and family finances instead. But just before I drifted into dreamland, my thoughts shifted to where I should pass the next day when I bring my son to baseball practice in Makati; when I could fix his drawer that wouldn’t open and close properly; how to better answer the math question my daughter had asked me earlier; why she seemed to be developing a fever; and a dozen other small everyday family matters that dads contemplate about before they call it a night. I couldn’t wait for the next morning.

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