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EVERY FATHER'S DAY, I ask my children how I can become a better father in the next 12 months. It's a contender for the Most Useful Thing I've learned in my life (from the family counsellor, Frank Dolly, via a Q&A I did for the Sunday Express one Father's Day). Every year, so far, my little ones have been good enough (or, truth be told, innocent enough) to assure me I need no improvement whatever - I guess the PlayStations and the unlimited sweeties are working - but I know better.
I'd love it if, when they are themselves adults, my children thought they should be exactly like me as a parent - but I know that, no matter how good and
patient and selfless I am, I will fail them, somehow: it is a necessary step to finding themselves that they should lose their mother & father; so you can't be a good parent, only a good-enough one.
Even with that understanding, though, most parents are dreadful at the job, particularly in the Caribbean, where, to take the most glaring illustration of that incompetence, the incidence of incest is shockingly high (but never discussed in polite society - where a lot of it happens).
Bad parenting isn't limited to the contemporary Caribbean; it's been going on everywhere, forever. You can trace the lineage of the big-shot business tycoon who humiliates his own adult sons almost to tears in public all the way back to Abraham, who mutilated his firstborn son to please a god clearly in desperate need of anger-management class. Even the so-called holy books are filled with psychology textbook examples of shocking parental decisions. Indeed, the most important tenet of Christianity - that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to suffer and die that mankind might be redeemed for all eternity - is a choice that would have God the Father hauled before child welfare social workers in any liberal democracy.
Luckily for all of the very bad parents down through time, though, all children have always been immensely stupid and trusting. This is the reason I've protected my own children from religious instruction. I don't mind what adults choose to believe - well, I do mind, particularly the belief that a man pushing 60 could marry a nine-year-old child, but they have a United Nations declared right to, so I try not to let it get to me - but the defenceless minds of small children should not be warped, even in a way that previously-themselves-warped-in-childhood adults approve of.
Your children worship you naturally. You have to really work hard, as a parent, to get them to stop thinking you're not wonderful. Even as you age and fall apart physically, you retain immense power over your offspring - as is proved by the same septuagenarian business tycoon snarling at his 50-year-old sons, who themselves have adult sons to snarl at, all man Jack working for the Big Daddy. If I wished to, I could reduce my children to tears every day. I could become a king in my own family and rule with absolute authority, the mere mention of my name causing lips to tremble in terror (except for the republic of my wife).
My own parents' vision of family life was hugely different from mine. If my father were alive today, for example, he would be furious if I didn't spend Father's Day - or Christmas Day, or Divali, or Eid, or every Sunday - with him.
But any supposed "family" day within that family was spent in front of the TV. Not one word would pass between us that wasn't volunteered by me. My father might possibly talk to my brothers, who worked for him, about business; otherwise, hardly a word was spoken by anyone that did not relate directly to what was on TV. Imagining myself advising my father, this coming Father's Day, how he could go about becoming a better father in the coming year, is like imagining Mr Manning listening to Mr Rowley attentively.
You grow older and, if you do not think about it, you do what your parents did. I do not need to visit my siblings' homes to know that Fathers' Day there will be the same as it was at our parents' house: everybody pressed together obligatorily, but no one speaking to (or caring very much about) one another. I venture to think most "successful" families in the Caribbean and the world are the same.
The former English Poet Laureate, Philip Larkin, considering just this, wrote the glorious "This Be the Verse", which is short enough to type out and save you clicking on a link (that might not work, anyway, seeing as I'd be the one trying to make it happen).
They fuck you up, your mum & dad
They may not mean to, but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
So.
Last week I suggested that it would be better for Mr Manning's palace to be knocked down than new Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar move into it - especially since she chose to promise she would not. I'm not in Trinidad myself and did not know President Max Richards was living in his own house and not the servants' quarters of the collapsing President's House - but it makes no difference to what I put forward.
God knows these orphaned islands are crying out for a responsible parent and I can't be alone in recognizing History is giving Kamla the chance to become the Mother of the Nation.
But, for that to happen, it is necessary for the childlike voters of Trinidad & Tobago to grow up. Any option at all is better than the easy one of acquiescing in Kamla moving into the palace. Trinidadians and Tobagonians will have to stand up for what they should be able to see is right. I chose a completely different form of family life from the one in which I was raised. If you met my children and my siblings, you wouldn't have to ask which approach was better. My own hope is that, by the time my own children have children, Trinidad & Tobago will be a place where no one will seriously argue that its chief servant should occupy a residence that would repel any grownup with an iota of taste or a notion of citizenship.
BC Pires has a will of his own
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Telling us they are fortunate to be blessed with parents such as us. Reminding us in a way, while adults produce children,that children can also produce adults.
Kahlil Gibran
stating ting they are fortunate to haver parents as their mother and myself.