Change Can Start With You
Being a dad hasn’t always been easy for me. My role models parent-wise as a kid were TV dads like Danny Tanner and Carl Winslow. My parents split when I was five, and I spent the next five years running from domestic violence, and then the next eight after that competing for attention with Molson Canadian and Players Light and whatever was on A&E.
That’s okay though. I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me when they read that. It’s life. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger recently said on Marc Maron’s podcast, “This generation can go in a different direction.” You don’t have to replicate the mistakes your parents or their parents made. The 80s were a different time. You can do differently.
As a child, my days were shaped by fear, abuse, neglect, isolation and going without. I believed for many years that I was a bad person because it was so easy to send me to bed for the night without supper for the slightest mistake. I didn’t have the confidence to ask for anything I needed because I didn’t feel that I deserved it.
My kids deserve differently, and they’re getting it. They know that I am proud of them, I love them, and they have my approval. They know that it’s okay when they make a mistake and have an opportunity to learn from it. They know that no matter how hard they struggle or how alone or overwhelmed or frustrated they feel, I am always there. They know their worth and ask for it.
As someone who spent many years working in bars, kids are like drunk, tiny adults. They wear their feelings on their sleeves and they just want a good time and to be helped to a cab (or race car bed) and tucked in at the end of the night.
No matter where you started, you can end here too. Therapy, journalling, daily exercise all helped me be better. Like Rocky said to end his fourth movie, “If I can change, you can change, everybody can change.”
Jeremy McCall is a married father of 3, a social services case manager, and known as “The Dadfather”, being the founder and Past President of Dad Club London.
