On Father’s Day
Programming Note: As a reminder, every Sunday, I write pieces that are predominantly based on personal experiences which may or may not be loosely connected with investing. If you are reading MBI Deep Dives everyday, I think it would be rather useful for my readers to understand my personal lens a bit better since that presumably affects (at least in some capacity) the way I analyze businesses as well.
I actually forgot about today being Father’s day until my wife reminded me last night. While growing up in Bangladesh, Father’s day or Mother’s day just wasn’t a thing we used to celebrate. However, that started to change the moment Facebook became popular in Bangladesh and even all of our parents started using Facebook by mid to late 2010s.
Every Father’s and Mother’s day, my Facebook feed is typically flooded with my friends uploading photos with their respective parent and caption it with emotions that you hardly ever get to express to your parent. In Bangladesh, you don’t quite say to your parent how much you love them (and vice versa). Of course, once it became a trend, your parents almost expect you to upload a photo and explain with captions how much they mean to you.
Nonetheless, I still quite enjoy scrolling through my Facebook feed on these special days. I don’t have the data, but I do sense lot more people post on Mother’s day than they do on Father’s day. Even the static pictures often say a lot more than we think. The photos on Mother’s day imbues a sense of warmth and love whereas father’s day photos hint more towards a sense of admiration and respect. While admiration or respect have positive connotations, I cannot help but feeling a sense of distance many kids may feel about their fathers. Who knows maybe it’s just me as I do have a difficult relationship with my father. I will spare my father from being litigated in front of thousands of people on Father’s day and I am indeed still appreciative of the toil it must have taken to provide for the family.
Now that I myself am a father of a 18-month old son, I do wonder a lot about the far more prevalence of kids having difficult relationships with their father than their mother. It’s hard to generalize the source of such tension in these relationships, but if I am forced to generalize, I think fathers tend to be lot more prescriptive about the world of tomorrow and can be particularly prone to want to engineer their children’s lives. Mothers, on the other hand, tend to be relatively more comfortable in playing the role of shepherd.
I have always thought one of the mistakes of parenting is the desire to be a precise director of their children’s lives. For myriad reasons, fathers can suffer from the illusion of knowledge that they know where the world is going and how the children should steer themselves to fit in that world. Of course, the truth is few of us have any clue whatsoever what the world will look like when our kids will go out there to make a dent in the world in a couple of decades (or sooner/later depending on your context).
One thing that is perhaps far more useful than many of us appreciate is simply stories of our ancestors. I don’t need my father to impart his illusion of knowledge in how to navigate the world of tomorrow, rather I would love to know the stories of the past how he or my forefathers responded to the challenges in their own times. My sneaky suspicion is that the way I may be prone to responding to life’s challenges can be eerily similar to how my ancestors did in their own times even though details around such circumstances are likely to be completely different to each other. If your ancestors had a gambling problem, you should think twice before taking margin loans or loading up on options today. If my forefathers had difficulty in forming fruitful partnership in running a business, I should think long and hard before partnering with someone else.
Unfortunately, as they say, “past is a foreign country”. In most cases, the stories we tell our children end up being too embellished to be useful for them. Perhaps you don’t want your children to picture their great grandparents or grandparents as alcoholic or someone with gambling habit. People perhaps would rather want to propagate the stories of greatness in their lineage even if they’re largely apocryphal in nature.
On this father’s day, I am promising myself to tell my son in the years ahead mostly stories about what happened in my life so far and restrict myself as much as possible from prognosticating where my life, his life, or the world at large is heading. As a father, I want the past to be more familiar to my son and would like him to know that the future is perhaps more foreign to me than it is to him.
Perhaps everyone reading this piece has already read Kahlil Gibran’s seminal poem on Children. I first read it when I was a freshman in college and I promised myself to remember these words when I become a father one day:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
There is a profound saying that “we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”. To borrow implies a return…a passing of the torch. My son doesn't need me to pave a road over the grass or tell him exactly where the trail ends. He just needs to know where he came from. Perhaps my only job is to hand him the keys with a steady hand, and the confidence that he is hopefully equipped to navigate the foreign country of tomorrow on his own terms.
Happy Father’s Day!
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