Long fuses and unblown gaskets
- John DeSantis
- Dec 18, 2019
- 2 min read
Do you ever wonder where your worst traits came from? Impatience, micromanagement, perfectionism, overt pessimism, unreasonable optimism? Odds are they are a part of your DNA, such as the saying "two peas in a pod," or "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." All of our qualities, for better or worse, became a part of our fabric years ago from our first teachers: our parents.
There's a forked vein in my forehead that pops out whenever I get agitated, once labeled by my friends as "the flux capacitor" for its resemblance to the time travel hardware inside Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine in Back to the Future. This biological wonder is an indicator of the impending end of my inner fuse, my wife can see it in its earliest phases and knows when it appears ready to sprout from my bulbous, shining head. My parents gave me my best qualities. They also installed this inner fuse the same way I'm likely giving a similar inner fuse to my sons with the behavior I display for them on a daily basis.
As parents we have a benefit that our parents didn't, a further generation removed with hindsight. While they had their own hindsight, we have ours and theirs, (hopefully) able to recognize the flaws of the past, but also the best parts of them to try to keep for the next generation. Of course we all end up passing on a few flaws of our own. Keeping all the best parts and building on those while trying to keep our less admirable traits at bay, or at the very least, having an awareness of them is the best we can do. These are what end up as our greatest gifts, the legacy of those who made this all possible.
Our flaws are always there. The same genetics that gave us our admirable qualities also gave us those not so great ones. No one is perfect though, so we do our best to try and make this next batch of babies as pristine as possible. We’ll stumble along the way, showing our stripes when they push our buttons the same way we undoubtedly did to our own parents all those years ago.
Sometimes my 3 year old son’s outbursts resemble mine, only when he has these brief losses of composure he’s an impulsive toddler. When I blow a gasket I’m acting like a short-tempered asshole. We’re all essentially just doing our best to not raise assholes. Focus on trying to keep your fuses long and your gaskets unblown.
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