Surprising Personal Observations in Trying to Be a Good Uncle

This will probably be my most personal post. I have learned quite a bit about myself, but perhaps more so have completely confused myself. For those of you who don't know, the main reason that I am in West Tennessee is that I moved back home to help raise my 11 year old niece. She has no dad involved in her life. I have chosen to take on this role as best as I can.

Perhaps the best way I can explain my thoughts and emotional state with being a father figure is found in the movie Parenthood. There is a clip in the movie where Steve Martin's son says something really good about his dad, and then Steve starts dreaming of his son's college graduation. As his son gives his valedictorian speech, he says, "I couldn't have done any of this without my dad. Stand up dad, your the greatest." Steve then stands to a round of applause. Following this daydream, Steve feels that he mismanages a situation, then he has a daydream of his son standing in the clock tower at his college with an automatic weapon shooting up the whole school. When Steve shows up he asks his son to get down, but his son is crying saying, "You messed up this sitation, dad. You messed up!" And then the son continues to randomly shoot at things. I saw that scene in a lesson on fathering by Steve Wages, and know I understand its humor on a whole new level. My desire is to be the most loving and encouraging and helpful man I can be, but there is this vast underside of rampant fear of messing up.

Right now, Ashley adores me. This is not always going to be the case. What is going to happen when she realizes I am seriously flawed, and I can not provide for her all she wants. I wonder how I'm gonna handle it when she does something incredibly stupid (it will happen, if it hasn't happened to you, you have not successfully grown up yet). What is going to happen when boys really enter the picture, or alcohol, or a myriad of things that ultimatley you can only prepare her for how to handle the possibility, but it will be up to her to make good decisions about. Right now all the boys she likes are in movies or on the TV. I hope this trend lasts until she's in her 20s. She can have a crush on Rupert Grint or Zac Ephron as long as she wants. In fact, maybe I'll go buy her a poster so she can stare longingly at a boy who is completely unreachable. That is much safer. Now mind you, when this started happening, I didn't know what to do or what this weird attraction to movie stars meant. But thanks to the wise advise of a mother of four, she told me this will happen, try to get this phase to hold on as long as possible.

So what I find is that I am full of fear. I understand parents better now. I knew they were scared of how their children would handle this world, and if they would develop their own faith, now I know how it feels. And the most surprising is how this fear sometimes drives me to avoid. The raw feeling says, "Go to a friend house, go play a computer game, go find something to do. You can't say or something wrong if your not there." I have to resist this with everything. But I know I am that is a common emotional call. If you avoid, you can't say something wrong, right? Perhaps that has a lot to do with why men will lose themselves in work or TV or hobbies or whatever. Raising kids is scary, so lose yourself in something easier. On the other side of that is the feeling of guilt. "I'm working too much, I don't have enough time. I don't know what this means. Shouldn't I know how to talk about this situation? Wow, I messed that up." Our schedules are such that there are days where we barely see each other. But I try to have at least one day a week that we are doing something together. I want more, yet part of me dreads it all at the same time. And I probably read way too much into the situation anyway. It's like the story I heard a professor tell. His 5 year old daughter asked where she came from. Him and his wife panicked. What should they tell a 5 year old about marriage and sex? When they gave a very watered down answer, their daughter just stared at them and asked, "No, am I from California or Texas?" But Ashley is at the age where hidden meaning questions really start coming up. I'm terrible at reading into hidden meaning.

But the toughest part is knowing when to talk about certain topics. I have been involved in Ashley's life on a full-time basis for a little over a year. I have seen her change and grow a lot in that year. Truthfully, I don't know what she knows about her dad. She's never known him. She has known me her whole life. I took me 25 years to understand how important I was to her, and how I need to start taking my role as her uncle seriously. But when do I bring up the topics of boys? of sex? of the reality of drugs? I'm not talking about a "drugs are bad" speech, she knows that much, but to really talk about what they can do and how attactive they can seem. How to handle lonliness? She is an only child. What about faith? What I want so desparately for her more than anything else is that she will know God as her true Father. My faith is the most important thing to me, and I want it to be for her too. But how much time do I spend talking about it? I do think I model it more than talk. I rarely study Scripture with her, and now that I think about it, I've never prayed with her. Why is it so difficult to talk to her about faith when I have no trouble talking to headonistic co-workers about it? It's so easy to teach a difficult topic in Luke to an adult class, but it is so hard to remind my own niece that Jesus loves her. I want her to have her own faith, and I know part of that is she will come to different conclusions than I will, as I have my parents, and they have their parents. But if those differences are under the Lordship of Christ, that is fine with me. I just want her to put herself under the Lordship of Christ.

And then there is finding that balance of pushing her to better things without pushing to far. She mentioned wanting to play softball, so I bought her equipment. Softball would be great for her. So when we can, we go out and practice. I am pushing her to go, even when she gets hot, or tired. I won't let her whine. I want her to work at it. This is valuable character building. But where is that limit of pushing too much? I do know I am nowhere close to it, but I don't want to pass it before I even see it. I want her to know that going after something or even working towards something is going to get uncomfortable sometimes. I won't let her just get tired and give up. Of course, it's easy to do this with softball because I enjoy it. She wants to try out for the team. She has never played it before. She won't make it this year. But I want her reaction to be, "Okay, that means I have to work and get better so I can make it next year," not, "I'm not good at this, oh well, I don't care anymore." But at the same time I never want softball to seem more important to me than she is. The tough part is she suffers from the same lack of work ethic that I did as a kid. It took me some time to learn my mediocre work ethic.

And yet, I realize that the most important things I can do is spend time with her and model what it means to be a Christian. I love to take her with me on a drive and get lost in the country and endure her music, and just talk about nothing and be silly and enjoy beautiful houses and fields and trees. I want to find a youth ministry close to home so that she can be a part of my youth group, and I can be a regular part of her life. And most of all, I pray that God will make up for lost time, and heal the invisible heart wounds of not having a father, and that He would use me to help guide her to Him. Parenting is tremedously difficult. I hope I am enough of a man to do it well.

--written to XTC-Skylarking, which Ashley thinks is really weird music. To her all 80s music is weird. To me, almost all her top 40 music sucks. But it isn't because I'm "out of touch" with her music, it's because top 40 really sucks right now. I have had this confirmed by teenagers to make sure I am not just losing touch with kids these days, even though I am, just not in the music department.