Why you should aim to be an average dad
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It’s not often we are told to aim for average but for fathers, it can be the key to our sanity.
The biggest impact my divorce had on me as a father was that I would no longer get “accidental” time with my girls. I would never just walk into the house and see them there. The only way I would get to see them would be as the result of a lot of planning, travel and expense and that brought with it a huge pressure to make every moment count.
There is a positive side to this, of course, and, for sure, being a “deliberate” dad is the key to success when you are a non-resident parent. However the flip side to this is that it can feel like a huge disaster if your time with your kids doesn’t go as well as you wanted it to.
I remember one of my early visits to my girls in Holland. We had had a really good time but then, in the car, on the way back, they started fighting and I had to raise my voice to get them to stop. They did stop but somehow the mood was spoiled. I tried my best to get us back to a good place but it didn’t really work and all too soon we were at their mum’s house and I had to head back to the ferry.
I felt absolutely terrible and I would have given anything for a bit more time to sort things out but, as it was, I knew I would not see them, face to face, for another three weeks. I was still brooding about it as I drove onto the ferry for the journey home.
As the ship sails out of the river Maas into the English channel, it passes a signal tower, way out at the end of a breakwater, and that was always the point where I felt I was passing out of the girl’s world and back into my own.
I was staring out of my cabin porthole, at this tower, that night, when it suddenly struck me:
“My success as a dad is not determined by my worst visit with them or my best. It is the average of all the time I spend with them that matters.”
In his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, Stephen Covey talks about the concept of an emotional bank account between you and the people who are close to you. As long as you are paying in more than you are spending, all will be well.
I came to see that my time with my girls operated like that. The key is to keep banking experiences and memories and the resulting balance will cover those few occasions when things don’t go well.
As it was, when I FaceTime’d my girls, the next Tuesday, and started to apologise that things hadn’t ended well on the Sunday, all I got was two blank faces.
They had moved on - so I did too.