What I Hope You Learn From Watching Me

You watch me more closely than I realized you would.

Not in any obvious way. Most of the time, you seem magnificently unconcerned with what I am doing. You have your own projects: a book that needs reading, a stuffed animal that requires medical attention, an object on a shelf that has suddenly become essential to your happiness.

Then, every so often, you do something exactly the way I do it.

You repeat a phrase I use. You stand in a particular way. You pretend to make coffee. You pick up something that looks vaguely like a phone and hold it with the solemn concentration of a person answering an important email.

The last one is not especially flattering.

Parents spend a lot of time thinking about what to teach their children. We want you to be kind, confident, curious, resilient. We want you to work hard but not define yourself entirely through work, to care what other people think but not too much, to be independent while somehow still calling us regularly.

It is an ambitious curriculum.

I am beginning to suspect that relatively little of it will be taught through instruction.

You will learn how adults treat waiters by watching us order dinner. You will learn what we think about strangers from the way we talk about them after they leave. You will learn whether work is interesting or miserable by listening to us discuss our days. You will learn what marriage looks like from thousands of small exchanges between your mother and me, most of which neither of us will realize you noticed.

You will also learn how I treat myself.

This is the part I had thought about least.

If I make a mistake and spend the rest of the evening angry about it, you are watching. If I say I am too busy to do something and then spend twenty minutes looking at my phone, you are watching that too. If I take care of my body, keep friendships, read things, stay curious and make room for the people I love, those things will probably tell you more about what I value than any speech I eventually give you.

This is an intimidating way to think about parenting, so I try not to think about it constantly.

You do not need a perfect example. This is fortunate because one will not be available.

There will be plenty I get wrong in front of you. You will hear me lose patience. You will see me distracted when I should be listening. I will make promises about being somewhere at a certain time and occasionally arrive late. Someday you will be old enough to identify my shortcomings with a precision currently reserved for spotting airplanes.

I hope you see what happens next too.

I hope you see me apologize when I owe someone an apology. I hope you see me change my mind when I am wrong. I hope you see that being a grown-up is not the state of having everything figured out. It is mostly the state of being responsible for what you do when you haven't.

There are things I hope you take from me. A sense of humor would be nice. Curiosity. The belief that most interesting things are worth trying at least once. A healthy skepticism toward anyone who takes himself too seriously.

There are other things I hope you improve upon.

That is part of the arrangement too.

For now, you are little, and your imitation is mostly charming. You put on my shoes and walk badly around the apartment. You wear my hat until it falls over your eyes. You pretend to leave for work and return approximately eight seconds later, which is a commuting schedule I strongly support.

Someday you will stop imitating me so openly. You will decide for yourself which parts of your parents are worth keeping and which should be discarded. This is exactly what you should do.

Until then, I am trying to remember something I wish somebody had explained before you arrived.

I am not only raising you when I am talking to you.

You are watching the rest of it too.