Do you ever wish you could buy your kids the world?

Today is one of those days for me. For various reasons I have allowed myself to be dragged into a silly dark place. A place I shouldn’t be on Father’s Day. I put too much stock in the material. It seems to be the kind of thing you do when you grow up with little…you put too much value on the material.

I know that my kids love me and that this love transcends the material but philosophical knowledge does not always help to take away feelings of inadequacy when the culture around us bombards them with deep desires for the best of the best. I fall prey to it too…I want the same things. 

Sometimes I wish things were simpler. I wish there were no social or cultural pressures weighing upon them but this is not reality. My desire to shelter them from the world for as long as I can conflicts significantly with my inability to meet so many of their perceived needs. I want to explain but I don’t want to weigh them down with my struggles – they will have enough of their own as they move into adulthood. I want their childhood to be weightless. I want it to be joyful.

Why does so much pain and frustration seem to stem from money? The want of it? The perceived need of it? The lack of it? Feelings of bitterness, jealousy, rage, disappointment, fear, and emasculation all wait at the door, each jostling with the other to be the first through to crowd out every good and bright thing and each a child of mammon. 

At the end of the day I know the darkness is a mist that is blown away by the bright warm breezes of the shining dawn but when you are in their midst it can be difficult to see the promise of the risen sun.