Wednesday, October 02, 2002

I'm inclined to agree with David. I have long felt that cynicism is very much aligned with my world view. Granted, I am indeed highly skeptical.

I did a bit of research and found the following from New Advent:

The founder of the school was Antisthenes, an Athenian who was born about 436 B.C., and was a pupil of Socrates. The best known among his followers are Diogenes of Sinope, Crates, Menedemus, and Menippus. Antisthenes himself seems to have been a serious thinker and a writer of ability. In his theory of knowledge he advocated individualistic sensism as opposed to Plato's intellectualistic theory of ideas; that is to say, he taught that the sense-perceived individual alone exists and that there are no universal objects of knowledge. In ethics he maintained that virtue is the only good and that pleasure is always and under all conditions an evil. Self-control, he said, is the essence of virtue, and a wise man will learn above all things to despise material needs and the artificial comforts in which worldly men find happiness.

I don't know this sounds pretty ascetic. Not exactly how I am inclined after all. But when I look up the word in the dictionary I find one of the definitions to be as follows:

Cynic: A member of a sect of ancient Greek philosophers who believed virtue to be the only good and self-control to be the only means of achieving virtue.

Now that definately strikes me as true. I am completely enamoured of self-control. It strikes me as the first step towards taking responsibility for your life.

Today I exchanged notes with someone whose ex-wife was bi-polar. She took herself off her medicine and he had to deal with ending the relationship and protecting the kids from her illness. One of the things he said was how difficult it was to make the decision finally to turn his back and move on.

It was the same for me. Turning my back on the life I had with L was the most difficult thing I've ever done. I needed to do it, I know now, not because I needed to move on (I did), but because her illness made the end of our marriage not an "if" but a "when". The very act of steeling myself to sever our ties was so important to gaining the strength to handle what came next.

There was a period, after the court, the accusation against me of sexual abuse, and finally our moving to a new place away from her predations when K would cry at night for her mother. It only lasted for a couple of months. Her friends at school all had moms. K would get asked by other parents about her mom. At night I would lay in bed with her and hold her while she cried and wailed for her mother. At this point we didn't have any idea where L had taken off to. Even if I had wanted to bring L back into K's life she was nowhere to be found. And so she wailed and screamed for her mommy. Laying there with her was so difficult I wanted to run away. I feared being the bad guy. The one K could look at and blame for what had happened. I blamed myself.

In the midst of that I realized that the reason I could be there and suvive that was because I had finally turned my back on the marriage. If I had still a hope, faint to be sure, but a hope nevertheless that the marriage could somehow be reconstructed then surely I would have broken under the pain which K was spewing into our lives on those nights.

Fortunately this only lasted for a few weeks. But I learned an enormous amount about parenting from this. K desperately needed to let that out. She needed to be heard.
11:00:38 PM    comment []

Someday you will no doubt thank me for being such a pain. Of course I could be wrong.
8:42:34 PM    comment []

The above statistics are gathered from The National Fathers' Resource Center
8:11:43 PM    comment []

Here is a link to verify that html will work as well.
8:00:02 PM    comment []