Este un tahdong yan ti puniyon na minagahet na hu diskubre gi i mapopoksai-ña i haggå-hu.

I’ve realized there is only one certainty in raising a child. If I was writing a book about how to raise children, maybe I would argue there is more than one, but for the purpose of this post, let’s says there is only one.

As a parent, a universe of uncertainty awaits both you and your children. There is a literal universe of possibilities out there and over the course of your life and the lives of your children, different possibilities will be strung together to create your legacy as a parent and the path which your children take.

Now in that universe of possibility, contrary to what you might hope, anything goes. Your child may let you down, it may surprise you, it may accomplish all the things you never did, or leave your bucket list untouched on the ground near your grave. They may love you alot, they may hate you, admire you, look up to you, honor you, spit on your name or curse the day you were ever born or allowed to breed.

But no matter what you do, how well-intended of a parent you are, or have loving and nurturing you are, you will scar your child. You will do something to them which will traumatize them, which will become a primal force in whatever formations their identity takes for the rest of their lives. If you don’t love them enough, if you love them too much, anything you do, the smallest or largest thing will become a wound in the life of that child. Something which they will always refer back to when thinking about who they are, how they got to a certain point in their life.

For alot of people, that may make you feel hopeless. It may make you feel like since there is nothing you can do which is completely right, all you can really do is something wrong. That even giving your child too much love, or supporting them too much can backfire, can still be something that they end up holding against you, or detesting you.

But for me, this knowledge actually has a freeing quality. It makes me truly feel like I am a parent. It ends up releasing the abstract responsibility which so many people put onto others when raising a child, and puts it squarely on me.

On the one hand it means that the things I do matter, in a negative traumatizing sense. I will do things which cause my child to be horribly scarred, even up to the point where they may never recover, but carry that psychological scar in their psyche until they die or become penniless from therapy. It means that if they never find love, can never maintain a steady job, or never seem to find happiness, it might potentially be my fault. It might be because of that one time I said that one thing to them, that one time I treated them like that, that one time I let them listen to that one song that I shouldn’t have.

But the upside to this, is that, you also get to take credit for the good things. If your children are wonderful and successful, then it is because you scarred them the right way. You did something to them that stayed with them, in a good sense. You were a role model, you taught them something at the exact right moment that it wouldn’t just go in one ear and out the other, but rather was something that percolated in their consciousness. It became a rock, a fixed point in the starry skies which is the map of the potential for their lives, which they could always refer to, in order to find their way.

So everyday as I’m raising Sumåhi and interacting with her, I’m constantly thinking about these issues. What will scar her less? What will scar her in the right way? If she asks a question that she won’t understand or that she probably shouldn’t know yet, do I just answer it or not? Do I tell her things like “wait until you’re older?” Do I soften it for her? Do I just make something up?

For instance, should I tell her about things like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus? Should I not tell her? Or should I completely go nuts and just make up new legendary fictional figures, such as the Kelaguan Bunny (don’t even want to think about what the hell this would be) and Si Tun Juan Santos Claus?

As I’ve written about before on this blog, my girl Sumåhi loves watching Youtube, and so that website is a regular place where these questions rattle around in my mind. Should she or shouldn’t she watch this video? If she watches a bunch of epic fail videos, will that teach her that it’s okay to fail, so long as it’s in a hysterical way? Will it teach her that laughing at other peoples’ horrible misfortunes is okay so long as they weren’t seriously maimed and didn’t lose any limbs?

Recently, another sort of fork in the parenting road appeared before me, and you could call it a sort of Justin Bieber decision that I soon need to make. Sumåhi really enjoys watching two videos right now, which are very similar. The first is the magåhet na video for the song “Baby” by Justin Bieber. The other is a parody of that video also called “Baby” made by the popular Youtube artist Dave Days. Sumåhi always asks to watch them by requesting that she “egga’ i kumakanta na boi,” or the singing boy.

I could just keep on letting her watch both videos, but I feel like this is one of those moments where scarring in the right way will either cost a lot later in terms of repairing her trauma or pay plenty of dividends later in terms of helping her grow and evolve. When I watch those two videos, I pour over them, thinking of all the different tiny and large messages that are being communicated and which ones might embed their way into Sumåhi’s mind. What would one video teach her that the other wouldn’t? Which would influence her in a better way?

So if you had to pick one of these videos to scar your child with, which would it be? Or do you think I she force her to play outside more?