Marketplace of Ideas Blog

The Peace Corps calls itself “the toughest job you’ll ever love.”

With all due respect to present and past (including my wife) Peace Corps volunteers, the toughest job is not the Peace Corps. Nor is it any job Mike Rowe might profile on Discovery Channel.

The toughest job, beyond any question, is being a parent. And that has nothing to do with your children not appreciating all you do for them, or their expense, or their being difficult with you, or the other parenting stereotypes.

It is the stakes involved, the realization that everything you do will have an impact on someone(s) besides yourself and your spouse. Until they turn 18, you are 100 percent responsible for them; until they leave home, you are mostly responsible for them. And, I’m told, though I have not experienced this yet since my oldest child is 9, a parent’s feeling of responsibility ends essentially at death.

If you make, say, a stupid occupational decision, you individually may be able to survive it, and your spouse may be able to roll with your professional punches, but what about your children? What impact will your being fired and your losing your home have on them? Less melodramatically, words hurt, and while an adult can take something nasty you say and deflect or reflect it, children can’t do that.

Unfortunately, despite all the advice parents, particularly new parents, get, there are no sure formulas for parental success. I’ve known people I considered to be good people whose children were a bigger problem than those parents deserved. I’ve known some people who had a wretched childhood, but managed to overcome it to become productive people.

Being a parent makes you learn about your own parents. My childhood, and my wife’s childhood, were quite drama-free. My in-laws were married for 58 years before my father-in-law's death in 2004, and my parents have been married for 48 years. I lived in the same house from when I was six years old until I moved out, and my wife lived in the same farm house until she left home for college. The most momentous thing that happened to my parents occurred before I was born — the death of my older brother of a brain tumor a month before his second birthday. Other than various momentary disagreements between my parents and their stubborn oldest child (unlike some people, I talked to my parents through my teen years and didn't act as though they didn't exist), various sibling rivalry issues with my youngest brother, and a reasonably hellish middle school experience, I have very few unpleasant memories of my childhood.

Being a parent particularly makes you learn about your parents and their relationship with their parents. My parents took particular pains to not steer me into a particular occupational choice; that was a decision left to myself and my brother, unlike what, from what I'm told, occurred one generation earlier. I know someone who probably could have made a very good entrepreneur, but avoided going into business for himself because his father did go into business for himself, and failed at it. (As you know, this state’s culture does not particularly reward failure.)

I was at Theda Clark Medical Center for a story Wednesday. Theda Clark was where our first son was born, about whom I wrote back in 2000. So naturally I had flashbacks to the day he was born. He now has a younger brother and sister, and this summer it appears, as predicted one year ago, I am spending most of my time at our sons' baseball games. (The Scouting thing picks up steam later this year as well with both of our sons in Cub Scouting.)

One of the more important things parents do, or should do, is to try to not have their own negative qualities show up in their children. (If nothing else, being a parent is an intensely humbling experience, not to mention an opportunity for numerous practices of hypocrisy.) I don’t recall, but I’m sure there were, days where my father came home from work in a surly mood because of something that happened at work. My excuse for yelling is that my children are loud, but that’s a rather lame excuse. I’m not sure where I got the inability to separate my work life from the rest of my life, but my children need to be better at that than I am. I would not describe my father (and he probably wouldn’t either) as particularly patient, and that certainly seems to be genetic. (Much more so than athletic ability, which, as I wrote before, appears to have skipped a generation in my case.)

Parenting requires both patience and tolerance. About a year ago, the rest of my family went to see my mother-in-law, but I could not because of some obligation back in Ripon. Our house chose that weekend to back up all the water that flowed out of the house ordinarily into the sewer through the basement floor drain back into the house. So after spending a weekend with a Shop Vac, a mop and fans (ever tried to not use water?), I was ready to blow up my own house, even if I was still in it.

I came back out of the house having lugged a Shop Vac full of water up the stairs for the umpteenth time, with my blood pressure approaching four digits and my vocabulary full of four-, seven- and 12-letter words, just as they pulled into the driveway … with a puppy. And not any kind of puppy, but a chihuahua, about one-tenth the size of what I consider to be the normal size of a dog.

I did … nothing. I said … nothing of note, other than something incredibly witty like “oh.” Once the pet arrives at the house, the pet is a fait accompli, and even though the dog struck me as one step advanced from a rat on the mammalian evolutionary scale, I chose not to become the enemy of the other four people in the house.

Then there’s the reverse reaction. One Sunday a couple weeks ago, my oldest son started moving the kitchen table during dinner for some reason, and I yelled at him because I thought his moving the table was going to make something on the table fall on the floor. And he had precisely the same reaction I would have had had I been on the receiving end at his age (as I’ve written before, he reminds me of me) — he got up from the table, left his dessert uneaten, and started to get ready for bed, tears filling his eyes. And the internal “YOU JERK!!!” light went off in my head then and is going off now as I’m typing this.

Parenting is a wonderful vehicle for ego-pricking, and a reminder that as good, or as bad, as you may be at your job, the exact reverse is possible at home. And while on the subject of work, where does a child learn work ethic and how to balance work and life first? From his or her parents. Where does a child learn how important school is? From his or her parents.

Husbands learn quickly that something said cannot be unsaid. (Journalists learn the same thing once something reaches print or the airwaves.) I am constantly reminded about the power of example-setting of parents — the old line about how children watch their parents when their parents don’t think they’re noticing what they’re doing — and grading myself poorly. I think of how my parents handled things, and I don't see myself matching that standard either. Parents also cannot undo not being at a school function or their child’s athletic event, even if their children say it doesn’t matter. I strive to be at all my sons’ (and eventually my daughter’s) athletic events because my parents went to all of mine, to watch me … sit on the bench. (As I write this, my son the pitcher has an earned run average of 0.00. Fortunately, that's not his grade school grade point average.) Good parents cannot have just “quality time,” they have to have quantity time. I’m not sure how compatible that is with being in business.

Fortunately for me, so far every new day seems to be an opportunity to hit the Reset button in my relationship with our children. My children are more forgiving of my faults than I probably deserve. I come home at night, and they seem glad to see me, assuming their heads aren’t stuck in an “Avatar” video or “SpongeBob SquarePants.” They act as though they enjoy my reading my melodramatic Casey at the Bat, or two other favorites of theirs, Crossing and Barnyard Dance. (Which is not to be confused with this barnyard dance, which they enjoy too.)

At the beginning of this week, my sons started sleeping in a tent in the back yard, for some reason. Earlier this week, my sons asked me to sleep in that tent with them tonight. I am certain sleeping on my back yard won't be very restful, between the fact that neighborhood birds start chirping around 3 a.m., ambulances and even medical helicopters arrive across the street at potentially all hours, high gas prices have not stopped high-performance (or merely loud) cars from racing past my front door, and it being a weekend, lawnmowers and other equipment will start up around 6:30 a.m.

So am I sleeping there tonight? Weather permitting, and assuming they don't forget they asked me, of course. That's one reason for the creation of coffee and ibuprofen.