SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE

I’m fascinated at the way perspective changes with our place in our personal timeline. I was thinking about my childhood, my adulthood, and my parenthood.

I’ll keep my childhood story relatively short…

My parents divorced when I was around one year old. I grew up living most of the time with my mother and my older brother. This is before the days of “shared custody”.

My father remarried when I was around two years old. Now lest you begin to worry, this is most surely not a wicked-stepmother-story. Quite the contrary, my brother and I were amazingly lucky in that our stepmother treated us with all the love and affection that she could (and would) lavish on her own children.

My brother and I are two years apart in age, and for several years we were the lights of both our mother’s life and that of our father and stepmother. And then our father and stepmother started having children, and my brother and I ended up with two younger sisters. Officially, I suppose they are “half-sisters”. But I never thought of them that way nor did I feel that way about them.

The older of the girls is four years younger than me, and the younger is eight and a half years younger than me. So the full range between all four of us was about ten and a half years. We all loved each other, played and fought as siblings do, even though we only lived together periodically.

Now we leap forward a few years. After graduating from college, I was fortunate enough to meet the love of my life who would become my wife. We married and discussed children. Debbie had always wanted children, and was ready to begin our family as soon as I was ready. But I wasn’t ready – I was self-aware enough (although perhaps barely) to recognize that I was neither mature nor selfless enough to be a parent quite yet.

After waiting about five years, we began – our first child, our daughter Sarah Melinda, was born when Debbie was 27 and I was 29. The next two came out every other year, so that by the time I was 33 we had three children (the next two being a boy – Steven Matthew, always known as “Matthew” – and a girl – Samantha Megan, always known as “Sami”). At that point, we took a bit of a breather.

And now we get to the whole thing about perspective.

Three years and some change after Sami’s birth, Debbie and I had decided to have another child, and went about it with our usual effectiveness. In the late Fall/early Winter of that year, thanks to our unfailing mutual fertility, Debbie became pregnant. We were thrilled, of course, and began the process of sharing the news with family and friends.

I called my father to share the news. You must remember that my father has four children, right?

“Dad? It’s Steven. Guess what? Debbie’s pregnant!”

“Debbie’s pregnant? Again?”

“Yes, Dad. We discussed this a lot, as you know, and decided we were ready for another child. We’re really excited!”

“Well then I’m very happy for you. But I have to ask you something…”

“Okay, Dad. What’s the question?”

“Why would anyone want to have four children?”

At this point, as you can no doubt imagine, I was a bit taken aback. This is, after all, my father who is also the father of my older brother and two younger sisters. Now granted, we haven’t ever all lived together and we are all grown and scattered all over the planet. But at last count, my father did have four children!

“But Dad! You have four children!”

“Yes, son. But that was with two different wives.”

I admit it – I laughed. That was not, perhaps, the best reaction to express to my father, but I couldn’t help myself. I was just startled.

In the years since that event, I’ve had more than one occasion to think about that conversation. I don’t share it to express any judgment about my father. Rather it made me really think about how each of us perceives our world.

In my world, people have families of four or even five children. I have four, have lived with those four children and their mother/my wife for most of my adult life, and it seems a very natural thing to me.

My father lived a different life. He never lived with four children for more than a month or so at a time. While my brother and I spent weekends, holidays, and summers with our dad, that’s not the same as living that way all the time.

And then my father and my sisters’ mother divorced when we were 16, 14, 10, and 6. So from my father’s perspective, even though he was engaged in our lives and remained a loving and involved father, his life did not include living with four children.

I say all of this because it is part of my effort to understand and accept others’ perspectives.

Certainly, if you have decided that being a parent is not for you, then any number of children is going to seem like a lot.

For those of us who do decide to become parents, there are several major transitions we go through to get there:

• In getting married, we learn to become less self-involved and share our love, our emotional and physical space, and our stuff with someone else.
• In having our first child, we learn to expand our world, sharing our love and our space with one of the most selfish and demanding creatures on the face of the planet – a child!
• In having more than one child, we learn that we are, in fact, capable of sharing out our love and attention. In fact, the biggest lesson for me in all of this was that there is an infinite amount of love. It would be easy to think that there’s only so much that each of us has to share, but that would be a mistake.

And so I’ve always claimed that once you pass one, it’s just more.

But that doesn’t always feel right to a couple that has no children or one child or even two. Every child is a significant, major, lifetime commitment.

So let’s get back to perspective. I have four children. A family of four children doesn’t seem all that large to me. In fact, my neighbors also have four children. And several families down the street have three children. Maybe I live in a larger-family ghetto, keeping us isolated so we won’t infect the rest?

Of course, I’ve also known families that have seven or nine or twelve children. And I can imagine the parents in those families asking the question…

“Why would anyone want to have only four children?”

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Perspective is the view of the universe from the place I'm currently standing. No one can be standing in exactly the same spot as me, so no one can exactly share my perspective.

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