Hands-on parenting

Last night we got together with family for the evening, and at some point the conversation came around to our dad and his tool collection. Someone to recently use those tools reported that some of them were downright scary to use, having been repaired, modified, and worn out. While I didn’t remember them being like that, I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

My dad was a product of his time, and he was…my dad. Born to poor dry-farmers (both my parents were raised on farms during the depression and WWII), he grew up learning to make do or do without. One didn’t throw out an otherwise functional circular saw just because the wiring had been nicked and exposed in a few spots. You put some electrical tape over them and you moved on–carefully. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of his tools were older than I am. Living cheaply was how my parents were raised, and it’s how they were able to raise us.

My dad was also something of a tinkerer. That may have been a side-effect of the frugality aspect, but he was never afraid to try things. If the university he worked for was throwing away some old fencing foils and badminton raquets he was able to see the potential and made us the world’s best marshmallow-roasting sticks. Rather than spend a lot of money to get a router table he just made his own. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. I’d never use it, because I have no idea how it all went together, but he knew, and he made it work. He renovated our house, a freak of architectural design in its original form, into something a little more functional. He helped us build tree houses, zip-lines (WAAAAY before zip-lines were cool), and archery bows from fiberglass flag sticks and raquet-string.

He was braver with his patch-jobs and experiments than I’m inclined to be, but then none of us were ever injured, and he himself died of natural causes, so I suspect he knew what he was doing much more than we gave him credit for.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m regularly reminded of my father’s impact on me, and it’s worth mentioning again (and again). I may be more cautious about things than he was, but his example leads me to at least try. I spent the last couple weekends mounting shelves in various rooms in our house. I didn’t have to call a handy-man. I didn’t even have to call my brother. I just did it, and it appears I did okay. And while I might have been able to do the whole project more cheaply buying it all from Ikea, we have our shelves exactly the way we we want them.

Raised by my father, I don’t consider this a big deal. This is what a man is supposed to do. This is what I teach my children to do. But now and then I’m reminded that not everyone is automatically taught these things. Yesterday I also spent some time with someone from our church helping them hang a mirror. The man I partner with for these visits and I knew immediately what to do and had it done in short order. I don’t fault the guy for not knowing how to do it himself. I was just reminded that we can no longer assume that everyone knows how to do these sorts of things. He knows now, and as I told him, there’s nothing like home ownership to teach you all sorts of skills. It’s amazing the number of skills I’ve learned simply because I don’t want to have to pay hundreds of dollars to get someone else to do it.

Not that I’m all that skilled, either. I’ve inherited a child’s cabinet built for my mother by her grandfather from the wood of a shipping crate. The workmanship blows the doors off of anything I’ve done. And my brother has built things that I can only marvel at. If the world goes to all to heck and we return to a barter economy he’s well-positioned to become the village carpenter. Maybe he’ll need an apprentice.

But I digress. This is about my father and what he taught me. I don’t recall him sitting me down and formally teaching me any of this, except for one time when he made me replace a faucet. I learned a lot by watching, and by helping. But perhaps the most important lesson was one he may not have even realized he was teaching, which is to not be afraid to try. Oh sure, we grew up wary of Dad and his experiments. But the older I get the more I suspect a lot of that was due more to what we didn’t know. I suspect he had a much better idea what he was doing than we realized. I suspect my kids are already developing a similar assessment of me and my improvisations.

Though a great deal of my handyman skill has been attained since I married and became a homeowner, and though my father never formally set out to teach me hardly any of it, I still credit him for raising me to believe it can be done, and that it’s worth a try.

My father has been gone for a while now, and it’s one of my many regrets that I never thanked him for teaching me to not be afraid to try. And while I’m of the belief that I’ll see him again and have that opportunity, it’ll still likely be a long time in coming yet. I do plan on having a nice long talk with him someday and thanking him for a lot of things. This is just the tip of the iceberg of all the things he taught me, and probably all the things I realize he taught me are only the part visible above the surface. Parents have a much bigger influence on their children than any of us ever really comprehend. What I am beginning to understand is that in the lottery of parents, I came out pretty darn well.