Matthew van Maastricht

My dear boy,

I still remember when you were first born and I would give you a bath in the little sink bathtub that we had. And I would wash your hair, and I’d always panic when my fingers would accidentally touch your soft spot. If ever I would feel it, I would stop, look at you, make sure everything was working. It’s silly, really. That would be a huge evolutionary liability if infants were that fragile. I knew that with my mind, but there’s still that gut instinct that wanted to ensure that nothing bad ever happened to you. That’s the parental instinct that drives us to care for our young rather than, say, eat them.

Your skull bones have long since fused together, but I still have that same drive, to try to ensure that nothing bad happens to you. When you began learning to walk, all I wanted to do was to put bubble wrap around the world. We did what we could to try to keep you from getting injured, but you still fell from time to time, and some of those times you got hurt.

But it’s not just physical hurt that I want to protect you from, but also emotional. And you’re in school now, and school is an important part in your development, and at the same time, school can be terrible. You’re in first grade now, so it feels like old hat, I’m grateful that you’ve made it past the initial fears of the depths of day 2 of kindergarten. But so often I feel so powerless.

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You have such a tender heart, and more than anything, I don’t want to see that hardened. Your skin needs to thicken, but I hope your heart always stays tender. Thick skin, tender heart. You are sweet, and loving, and caring. I don’t want you to lose that. And I think that’s why I want to stand guard by you all the time, to push off anyone who might injure that tender heart of yours. But I can’t stand guard by you all the time. And even if I could, it doesn’t benefit anyone.

Just like falling when learning to walk, learning to cope with the rougher parts of life is simply part of living, and there’s no way to grow up without this. There are some who never learn this. They age, but they never really grow up.

That is the most difficult part of parenting so far, the fact that I cannot–and should not–protect you from everything.

In some ways, it reminds me of your first winter here. We moved here in August, when it was warm out, and you were drawn to those big cast iron radiators. We kept trying to keep you from being too comfortable with them, knowing what would happen come winter. And you experienced that first hand, literally. I still remember when we were in your room and I glance over at you, and you had crawled over to the radiator and I leapt to pull you away, but it was too late, you had already touched it and I will never forget the look of confused betrayal on your face. Fortunately, you didn’t touch it too long that it wasn’t really burned, and we tended to you. But you never touched the radiators after that. You weren’t afraid of them, but you also knew better now.

But at the same time, if you never had that experience, you’d never know that the radiators get hot, and you’d never really know how to live with them. It’s one of those things that you have to learn for yourself, no amount of telling would help you understand it, you have to feel it yourself.

And that’s the thing about growing up in general. So much needs to be experienced on your own. I hate how true this is. I think in my own life how many times I had to learn things the hard way, even when there were people trying to help me avoid the hard way. I know my parents tried to get me to avoid the hard way. But I suppose that’s part of the human condition, the need to make one’s own mistakes and to find one’s own way through it. I wish it wasn’t like this.

But please never forget that I’m here for you. While some things need to be experienced on your own, this doesn’t mean that you are alone in it. It can feel so alone sometimes. But, dear boy, you are not alone. And we are here to bandage you up when you feel broken.

And perhaps this is also the point. Maybe deep in our evolutionary makeup we are driven to make our own mistakes in part so that we can depend on one another when we feel broken. And I hope you can also be that kind of person for someone else. After all, we are all connected and we all need each other.

Love,
Your Father