A Prayer for My Children

"My babe so beautiful ! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes !"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight" (1798)

"May she become a flourishing hidden tree

That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,

And have no business but dispensing round

Their magnanimities of sound,

Nor but in merriment begin a chase,

Nor but in merriment a quarrel.

O may she live like some green laurel

Rooted in one dear perpetual place."

William Butler Yeats, "A Prayer for My Daughter" (1919)

Every night, we tell Josh and Emma a story before we put them to bed. Last night, during my dramatic telling of an encounter in a fishing pond between Harry the Hippo, Zoe the Zebra and Ally the Alligator, Josh had the perspicuity to point out that zebras don't really play in the water with fish, unlike alligators and hippos. So I had to reframe the story a little, to suit his sensibilities.

A little over three years ago, I became a somewhat startled, overwhelmed and clueless father of a tiny, helpless infant. Just as we became accustomed to his antics and habits, we reprised the entire experience, this time with a girl who, as it has turned out, has a very different temperament from her brother.

Why do we become parents? Why do so many people put themselves through an experience that many who do not have children probably view as a form of purgatory? That, of course, is a question that the Singapore government has wrestled with for some time, resorting to outright monetary incentives to induce couples to have children. It's a question some of my friends have asked too, because it's all too easy to recognise and enumerate the apparent downsides of having children. You lose (a lot of) disposable income, time, leisure, social and professional opportunities. Your time no longer becomes your own. Your sense of the world must expand to constantly reference the needs of a helpless infant who needs you constantly, incessantly and often, irritatingly.

But we still have children, and we love them so.

My own, admittedly limited, experience with fatherhood has provided me with an important hint to why we need parenthood. My own instincts will always tend towards selfishness and self-centredness. (Notice the self-centric nature of the list of "complaints" about parenthood I noted earlier.) My own sense of the world will largely and dominantly encompass just my own frame of reference. And unless something extraordinary and otherworldly happens to me, I will remain stuck in a limiting way of understanding the world. My heart would remain small. My sense of the world would remain limited.

Parenthood, like a calling to a sacred ministry or responsibility, challenges these instincts. That's why it's difficult, and so rewarding, at the same time.

I am grateful to my children for showing me that my heart was bigger than I had thought previously. When they demonstrate good behaviour, or show off their beguiling sides, it's easy to love them. But it is the times when they challenge my sanity or patience that I understand how my own behaviour must seem so vexing and disappointing to my Father. And it is at those times when I need to tap into deeper reserves of love, like an oil prospector reaching deeper into unknown strata but with a key difference: I know my search will not prove fruitless.

So perhaps we need to celebrate our children. We have Mother's Day and Father's Day. Admittedly, Father's Day goes by much more quietly than Mother's Day (I think the number of Mother's Day cards outnumbers the Father's Day cards four-to-one.) Perhaps those days should also become celebrations of how our children transform us, so that we can become people with lives of some transcendant purpose.

And so, we will continue our stories of Harry the Hippo, Duncan the Dolphin, Zoe the Zebra, Ally the Alligator and the assorted other animals that have captured our children's imagination. And we will continue to clean up the mess after their meals or playtime or bathtime. And we will continue to wonder about the people they will become in the future. They will learn "far other lore" from us. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Hartley Coleridge, our children will have a far different experience of the world from us. And that's our great hope. As we continue to tap deeper into surprising reserves of love and patience that we did not know even existed, we provide the fuel and sustenance for a new generation that hopefully, will bless the world in ways that we could not have done.