“Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,
And fathers live transmitted in their sons;”
Erasmus Darwin
Now Erasmus was talking about something else but I’m wondering how true this statement (taken out of context) may be. Having observed and given much thought to the lives of my friends in context of their own parents, and certainly in my own case, it seems to me that most people live their father’s life (or the life their father always dreamed of living).
I love my parents and admire them both for many things but I’m definitely living a life my father would like to have lived had he been given (taken?) the chances/opportunities I have. I see it in many aspects of my own life and his.
Or perhaps I’m selectively choosing data that applies to my theory? Don’t know.
Interesting to think about though…
What’s your take on the subject? Does it vary by gender? (Not too much from what I’ve observed.)
I’m most certainly not living my father’s life nor his dream life, but then again me and my father are as different as two people who spent twenty years in the same household could possibly be.
I’ll have to echo Priceguy here. I strive every day to be as much unlike my father as it is possible to be. To do less, I would have failed as a human being.
I try to be as good a person as my dad was, as honest, patient, as hopeful. He worked to return anger with love, or “kill 'em with kindness”, as he said. He told his people that he expected great things from them because they were great and talented people, and they believed they could do it because he told them they could, and they worked to deliver the goods.
If I end up being as good a man as he was, I’ll be satisfied.
Well, I’m definitely not living my mother’s life, that’s for sure. We are very different from each other and I don’t think she’d want my life at all, and I sure wouldn’t want hers.
DH isn’t living his father’s life either - that would be impossible as the man died when he was only 37 years old and his sons grew up without him. Who knows what he’d have done had he lived.
I find myself in a lot of similar situations that I saw my father go through.
He got hurt mid-way through his career and had to start all over again. Same thing happened to me.Same injury even. Along with that comes a few years of just living in limbo, being lonely, confused and bored. He spent a lot of time with us when we were young because of this and I find myself very close to my kids also.
A lot of problems I tend to have I’ve seen him deal with before and it can be an eerie feeling because he’s not really a happy guy now. But our personalities are very unlike each others so I guess there’s some hope there for me.
He did grow up in an orphanage and I think his biggest goal was to have a close family and to pass that on to his kids, which he has. Things eventually fell apart in his marriage and some of his relationships with us are strained but it still got us where we needed to be. I think that’s a great accomplishment and look up to him for that.
My parents didn’t live like I do. He would have hated it. She has now toned it down to “gets on her nerves”, but that’s only because she keeps her heart in her wallet and she’s realized that my “roaming jobs” mean more money than a “stable job” close to home.
If I implied that my father was a bad person, I want to strongly deny this implication; he mosty certainly is not. We just have next to nothing in common.
Sorry, Priceguy, I didn’t mean to mischaracterize your dad, or your comment. What I was echoing was the bit about how there are hardly two people more unalike than me and my father. My apologies if it seemed otherwise.
Yes, I’m definitely living a life my father would have liked to live. In my youth, he had multiple coniption fits when I tried to follow him into a military and police career track.
Illustrative quote: “Staties don’t just salute their captain, they dance around him…and no son of mine is going to dance for one of those bastards.”
As a side note, I’ve always wondered whether the dancing was like savages around a pagan idol or more like the production number from Fred Astaire’s movie Top Hat.
While my FIL is happy that Mr. Lissar is content, Mr. Lissar’s life is definitely not what my FIL dreamed of living. I’m pretty sure he hoped his son wouldn’t get married really young, and their lives and career philosophies are so dramatically different that my FIL can only dimly comprehend why his son would choose the impoverished life of a martial arts teacher instead of the security and money of a stable office job.
And much as I love my mother, if I’m living her life I will be surprised and alarmed.
I suppose if my dad hadn’t had an unfortunate penchant for embezzlement while he was in the Irish Free State Army in the 1930s and 40s, resulting in a spell in Mountjoy prison, he might somehow have ended up at University and done rather better for himself.
He certainly violently cautioned my brother and me at the age of about 7 that if we did not do well at school we would end up with all the other Irish building labourers standing outside Woolworths on Kilburn High Road at 5 o’clock in the morning waiting to be picked up by the sub-contractors - something he thankfully never did himself.
I doubt whether I would be able to cope with all the smoking and drinking he did, and certainly hope to get beyond the age at which he died - 63.
I don’t think that my I’m living my father’s life but I don’t think it would be bad. My Dad has had a pretty good life. He took a leave of absence from his job when he was 24 to take advantage of cheap passage on a ship to see the U.S. for a year or so, wound up staying for thirty, getting married and having a good career. He and mom did pretty well financially here before his job took him back home. They live in a really comfortable style which I doubt I could replicate here.
My father is a family man through and through with no hobbies or friends outside the family. His children and grandchildren and now greatgrandchild give him all the entertainment he ever could want. My mother is his sweetheart and best friend. He’s never been on a big vacation that didn’t involve family. Most of his earnings have been spent toward his family’s education, cars, houses and vacations. He has spent over 50 years in the tiny town we all grew up in.
I love my father very much, but my life has been very different by choice. My husband is my sweetheart and best friend but we both have hobbies and friends come to dinner and nearly all vacations are just the two of us. Trips with the kids or other family members don’t count!
My life is very unlike my father’s superficially, but when I look at the basic values of family, morality, commitment to goals and so forth, my life owes much to his example.
He was a standup guy who met life headon with no complaints. I only hope that I will be able to be seen the same when the dust settles. Love ya Dad, wherever you are in this universe.
My Father was a living legend, but he had his flaws. One month short of his forty-second birthday he got drunk and went south in the north bound lane of A1A. I quit drinking nineteen years ago this past April and I’ve witnessed forty-three years myself. It did take five years to see that I was going to die like Dad, though.
The older I get the more similarities I see between my father and I. Throughout his life he has worked a wide range of jobs from muralist to skin mag photographer to Corpsman to real estate agent to caterer. When I was younger, I thought that it was impossible to do that many different professions. Now, I am starting to see how you can end up in so many different places. Like my father, I love to travel and we have both managed to see some incredible sights on very limited budgets. My father was also the only person in my entire family who was happy when I took off from school last fall to travel. He told me that he used to worry about me stressing out too much over an over planned future. My father showed me the importance of deviation and I appreciate that. It is strange though, because my other siblings (6) characterize him as an unfocused absentee parent who constantly fails in his duties to provide for his kids. I never want my children to think that way about me. One out of seven is not the greatest of odds when it comes to your children but it is a start.
