2025
About 35 years ago, give or take, I was in between degrees and needed money. So I took a year long position as a bilingual receptionist at an office of the government of Ontario in Toronto. I think it was the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board, which no longer exists. I really enjoyed that job, as it afforded me a lot of free time to write and think, while just answering the phone and greeting random bureaucrats.
(As an aside, I would get panic attacks whenever I picked up the phone and the caller was French. I was functionally bilingual, but had very little confidence in my French skills. Today, I know even less French and work full-time in a much higher stake bilingual position… and still have little panic attacks when a colleague speaks French in a meeting. Thank Zod, today I have AI translation and interpretation tools to help me along!)
Some months into my receptionist position, it became clear to the organization’s Director that I was being wasted at reception. So he created a specialized researcher position for me. The receptionist who replaced me was a fellow named Jon Donald, whom I enjoyed immensely. One day I will write more about Jon Donald, as he deserves his own discussion. But I missed the care-free and socially interactive reception role.
Anyway, the office was filled with economists. One was a charming Bangladeshi man named Ashraf, who took an avuncular interest in me. He would visit my desk often, take me to lunch, and discuss with me the issues of both the day and of history. I learned some economics from him, some intriguing bits of world history, and even some personal wisdom.
Ashraf was a very interesting man. He was in his early 40s when I knew him. But back in the early 70s he was either a teenager or very young adult. Either way, due to his education, he had been selected by his community in rural Bangladesh (West Pakistan at the time) to be a Brigadier General during the conflict that birthed the nation of Bangladesh. If you’re unfamiliar with that bit of history, Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan in 1971, leading to an armed conflict between the Pakistani military and the uprisers, who fought guerilla style.
Ashraf told me intriguing stories of the time. He and his men would sneak into India to get paramilitary training from the British, but would have to avoid traveling along the coast because the Pakistanis had naval support from the Americans. It was an odd situation where the British and the Americans were sort of, kind of, fighting a cold war against each other. Ashraf was adamant that he never killed anyone, but rather would take prisoners and transport them to India for processing.
I’m sure there are people reading this who will disagree about the sequence or details of events. At the time, I was not savvy enough about Asian history to interrogate any of Ashraf’s story’s details. But I have no reason to doubt any of his claims.
Among the habits that he found difficult to shake was of being a paranoid guerilla. Whenever we walked into a restaurant together, he would always take note of the exits, and would always sit with his back to a wall, facing the door. He even reflexively checked under chairs and tables. He said they were habits he wasn’t in a rush to lose, since they had kept him alive during his years as a guerilla. For a while, I picked up the same habits. I’m still loathe to sit in a public place when by back is not to a wall; and I am still always aware of all the exits and, weirdly, all of the tough looking men who might pose a problem if I needed to get out quickly. I know, I know, it’s not healthy behaviour.
But one particular nugget of wisdom that Ashraf shared has always lingered with me. I think his father had recently died. He said to me, “One day a woman will say to you that she loves you. And she will probably mean it. And you will believe her. And she will believe herself. But the only people in the world who will truly love you are your parents.”
I thought about that claim a lot over the decades. By that point in my life, I had experienced romantic love and its confusing loss. My young brain had always struggled to rationalize romantic love within the only context I had ever known love, that of family. That there might exist hierarchies of intensity and veracity of love was a question I had not before considered. Yes, I loved my siblings but I adored my parents. In every thought experiment involving loss or sacrifice, I always weighed hypotheticals against whether it would compromise my love of my parents.
It wasn’t until I got a dog many years later that I thought I understood the other kind of love, that of parent for child. Note that I say I thought I understood. I didn’t really.
Stand-up comedians had warned me. Both Joe Rogan and Jim Jefferies had included in their routines something about how people with pets think they understand love. And yes, that kind of love is true and genuine and real and not to be minimized. But they said it’s wrong to compare that love to the love that a parent has for his or her child, because the latter is immeasurable and shocking.
When my son was born, it was during the worst of COVID. I had to listen to his birth over the phone, as I waited in the car in the parking lot. Then, when I got the go ahead, I was allowed into the building, past two COVID infection checkpoints, and finally to the room where my spouse had just had a living person emerge from her body.
They handed him to me.
I didn’t know what to do. I held him for an eternity, and felt mostly nothing… except dread.
Look, a mother has nine months of physiological and emotional preparation time. She feels her body change, and communes chemically and possibly psychically with the being being gestated within her. A father has the same preparation time; but it’s not as guttural, not as instinctive. It’s entirely something of the intellect. As Seth Meyers said, “one day you’re not a father, and the next day you are.”
A couple of days into fatherhood, I wrote in my journal about my absence of feeling. I had my son sleeping on one side of me, and my dog on the other. And I adored my dog. I would look to my dog to remind me of what fatherly love was supposed to feel like.
It took another day or two… I remember the exact moment, in fact… for the avalanche of fatherly love to overcome me. I walked into my son’s nursery and looked at him in his crib. He looked up at me, the first face he saw that morning, and smiled the most perfect explosive smile. That’s when I fell in love.
And I remembered Ashraf’s words. I would never love anything as much as I love this boy. It is all consuming.
Someone once described parenthood to me as having your heart running around outside your body. That’s accurate.
Someone else described it as a constant state of mourning. You mourn the disappearance of your newborn. But you don’t have time to do so, because you have a brand new toddler to love. Then you mourn the disappearance of your toddler, because now you have a little pre-schooler to love. Then you mourn the vanishing of your pre-schooler. But you’ve no time for that grief, because a little sassy-talking kid has taken his place, and you’re madly in love with him.
This has certainly been my experience. In those brief and rare moments of quiet, I find myself wondering where my baby went. But I’m too engrossed with my fascinating and all-consuming smart-ass nearly-5-year-old to wonder about it too much. And I am acutely aware that this pattern will continue and will accelerate until I’m suddenly an old and lonely empty nester.
But it will have been worth it.
Indeed, I feel an extraordinary sense of gratitude that I have someone to commit all my energies and feeling. Sure, I have my other family and my spouse. But there is a special liberty in having someone for whom I would sacrifice everything and burn down the world. Love is liberty.
And that was the longest introduction I’ve ever written to the true topic of this post. As you may (or may not) know, I reserve the first blog post of the year for gratitude. I am grateful for all the love in my life. As I grow older, I recognize how fleeting and rare and precious and fragile it is. Never take it for granted. Never reproach a loved one for the time you must spend with them. You won’t miss that TV show, that extra hour of sleep, that sporting event, or that party from which your needy loved one might be keeping you. But you will miss them.
I write this in a somber state. Usually, I begin each year filled with optimism, usually undeserving. Perhaps that’s why this year I waited over a month before the inaugural 2025 post. It’s difficult to summon optimism these days. There’s a crazy person in charge of the most powerful nation on Earth, and he’s coming for our stuff and our futures. Oligarchs threaten to take over the world, with conspiracy theorists starting to sound increasingly sane, especially with takes like this. Artificial intelligence threatens to upend our economies and our lives, making my son’s economic future highly uncertain. Measurable qualities of the human animal –morality, intelligence, literacy– are in evident decline. Human society is increasingly disappointing.
But I will attempt to summon some optimism herein. Where can I find some? Well, probably ironically at the centre of the human heart. Despite the loud bellicosity of the worst of us, the most brazen of whom appear to be in ascendancy, the majority remain, while underpowered, nevertheless essentially good.
I have good neighbours and good friends. And I’m sure you do, too. The sum total of all of our good neighbours and good friends outnumbers the mass of those who have lost their way, yet who weirdly seem to have a lot of power at the moment. I have to have faith in the arc of human goodness, that ultimately its social mindedness and innate recognition of the value of greater peace and cooperation will win out.
Yes, it’s a blind faith. The alternative is a faith that the UFOs will save us. But that’s another topic.
So, my friends, happily much belated New Year. Remember that you love someone and that someone loves you. Make your decisions with them in mind. Err on the side of compassion and forgiveness. But don’t hesitate to slap a Nazi if one presents himself to you.
