I am someone who speaks my mind and try to be as real a person as I can be. From young, I have always detested people who put up a front and 说一套，做一套。My close friends know me as someone who is 'What you see is what you get'. If I like you, you will know it. If I don't like you, you will know it too. I do not like to play mind games deceiving people into seeing me for what I am not.
True or False?
To start this blog, I set out to be as honest as I can be. I started picking up a pen to begin journaling again. I wanted to see if my thoughts are coherent enough to be published in a blog, and helpful enough to encourage others. There was no pressure then as to how the outcome will be. I wrote freely without hesitation and was able to accumulate sufficient posts. My wife is the first person I showed the journal to and with her support, this blog is published.
Then I began to panic.
Now that you are reading it, I felt a deep sense of responsibility and pressure to want to make sure you get something out of this by the time you reach the end of each post. Yesterday I had my first BRAIN BLOCK as I can't seem to put the thoughts together coherently. I was writing but I know the words are not representative of what I wanted to bring across. I find myself searching for words and thoughts online and wanted some parenting website to corroborate what I was writing. I felt inadequate... I felt demoralized... I felt pressured....
Today I reflected on the energy-sapping-whining-in-self-pity experience yesterday and made a decision on how this blog is going to be.
Before we started out as parents, we did read a lot of parenting books and spoke to many different parents and learned through observation. But if you ask me today what school of thought or what parenting philosophy I subscribe to or which literature review I am backing my experiences on, SORRY, I can't tell you. Google can.
What I can offer will be my honest sharing of my experiences and perspectives as a father. We try our best to be responsible nurturing parents and we learn from others, learn from experiences and learn from mistakes. We will share our positive experiences and successes, as well as our sad stories and mishandling of issues. We are still learning-on-the-job as our kids grow and develop different temperaments. We are still creating new routines, new memories and new learning experiences. And we will be honest in sharing them with you.
What you see is what you get.
Hope it suffices.