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The Trade of Being a Father |
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Written by José Aurelio Paz|
Sunday, 17 June 2012 14:42
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 Being a father is a trade and not a profession. One never graduates. It is not a matter of reading a few books and get through the exams. Only the patience and perseverance of the daily hammering on the anvil of loveshapes,the jewel in the rough that is a child.
It is not to draw a blueprint of exquisite accuracies. Or solving an equation inversely proportional to what we give. Nor is it to make a piggy bank or a bank account out of a boy or a girl to use it tomorrow when our strength and our means of support fail.
Being a parent is staying up late, with the same passion, on the magnifying glass of the watchmaker, when there is fever or when there is a problem in providing the children with the correct life experience. It is not to calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle.
It is to convey rectitude and modesty the way we wet biscuits in the coffee each morning.
It is to tremble with joy and agony at the same time, bittersweet in that mixture where it is impossible to distinguish the exact point where one ends and the other begins. It is to become a pupil dazzled by the vagaries and surprises. It is to set the clocks that fill our pockets every morning and start to repair with the same enthusiasm the broken time.
Parenting is not simple to love a son or a daughter. It is to give everything for nothing, so when they listen a little voice calling them some day they may feel that life has changed and there will not be no more deep sleep, and that ever after they will be thinking of providing the little voice with another sweet. It does not gives you power over a boy or a girl. It just gives you that authority earned, beyond monetary support, with the passion of the example.
I say that being a father is something to be lived and not to be explained, learning something new every day. It is to know that the world gets into one's mind and one's heart goes out of its cavity as when a horse gets moved and shaken on discovering, all of a sudden, the vastness of the prairie. |
