Jeffrey and Me
My son, Jeffrey Robert MacNeil, was born on 17 March 2008. He recently turned three years old and is now sleeping on my bed after an exhausting day of running, jumping, bouncing, hugging, wrestling, making messes, shouting, crying, laughing, talking, eating, and exploring. Jeffrey can do things that will wind me up with frustration and then have me laughing right along with him in the next moment with an unexpected comment or a look on his face. Like most fathers, I like to think that my son is within my small circle of best friends.
Even though my son is still a young toddler, I consider that we have grown together for three years. Even as a tiny baby, he was able to recognize and distinguish me from other men as most children are able to with normal development. Bath time and bedtime story has always been a duty for dad since the day we first brought him home from the hospital. No matter how busy with responsibilities I am when I come home from work, I have with very few exceptions spent time with Jeffrey for those two nightly routines. Even now that he is old enough to bathe without constant supervision, I am always close to the door and am able to hear and respond to him as well as monitor his activities in the tub by the noises he makes.
My current employment keeps me away from home for several weeks to several months at a time. Jeffrey has always known that his father goes away sometimes for a long time, and it seems to have built into our relationship without any apparent faults that cannot be overcome with some creative use of technology to reconnect us, if even for just a few moments.
Our relationship is a typical loving father to son. I am tempted to say that we love each other in some special and unique way that makes our relationship distinct and worthy of attention. On reflection of how most fathers must love their sons and work for their attention and true affection, my relationship to my son must be wonderfully mundane. There is much love in the world.
Looking back over the last three years with my son Jeffrey, I can observe that our relationship has indeed built in stages. I have always loved him, but it is possible to love a stranger out of charity toward humanity as well as loving an individual for the distinct and binding history that intertwine the two.
Causal turning points are events that directly affect the relationship. Finding out that your friend has told you a significant lie might cause you to terminate the relationship. Because the event causes a change in the relationship, it is a causal turning point. On the other hand, receiving and accepting an invitation from a friend to visit his or her family for the first time is a reflective turning point, because it signals that a change has occurred in the definition of the relationship. The invitation and acceptance don’t cause a change, but reflect a change in how you and your friend perceive the relationship (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 2008).Our relationship has grown through both causal and reflective turning points. I recall very distinctly an instance in which my wife was making dinner while I was working on homework on my laptop. I had come home late from work and yet had many obligations to complete before the already waning night was over. When my infant son cried for attention my point of containing my stress finally broke and I tossed my laptop onto the coffee table in front of me and threw my arms up in disgust of the situation. This upset my wife who was also nearing the end of a full day. I had to walk away and in doing so I took time to think about how my life and life style would have to change if I was to be a successful father. I am embarrassed to look back on my reaction to that situation, but I can see in it a distinct causal turning point in our relationship that took us to the next level of intimacy, loyalty, and affection from me to him.
I have a passion for photography that keeps a camera in my hand constantly. With this I have taken many photos of my son from the time he was born until just this afternoon when he was playing on the stairs. These visual reminders often serve as reflective turning points. I can see how his body has matured, interests of mischief have changed, and his interactions with me have become more complex and significant in intelligent exchanges of love, friendship, and everyday learning. These reflective turning points are subtle, and do not evoke as much strong emotion and intense feeling as a few of my causal turning points have. Yet they serve as a more constant flow that remind me to look back over the many adventures and misadventures we have shared together.
I have a set of three black and white photos of my son trying to put his shoes on for the first time hanging on my wall. I see this set of photos each time I go up and down the stairs in my home. I often point these photos out to my son and ask him who is in the photo. He always responds, “Baby Jeffrey.” Even he understands that it is himself, but so different as to need the qualifier baby to denote that it is not the current version of Jeffrey.
The stage we are in affects our interpersonal communication, and our interpersonal communication is the tool we use to move ourselves from stage to stage. Individuals in an intimate stage discuss topics and display nonverbal behaviors that do not appear in the early stages of a relationship. Outsiders usually can tell what stage a relationship is in by observing the interpersonal communication (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 2008).It is not easy to communicate in a meaningful way with a three year old boy. He has amazing ears that can turn off instantly and he can ignore instructions with the best of them. I can see that it is this very difficulty of communicating that brings us together. I must repeat myself many times, show, drag, carry, perform, imitate, entertain, tickle, chase, run, and talk. There is a lot of talking. This adds up to work, and work brings me close to people. This work brings me close to my son.
If you proceed to the intensification stage, you will start to depend on each other for self-confirmation and engage in more risky self-disclosure. You will spend more time together, increase the variety of activities you share, adopt a more personal physical distance, engage in more physical contact, and personalize your language (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 2008).My desire is for our relationship to grow as my son continues to grow. It would be terrible to look back in many years and realize that I had come to a point where we no longer grew together. I can see now already that he is learning about independence and will shortly wish to exercise this more and more.
The “top floor” in the relational high-rise is the intimacy stage. In this stage, the two partners turn to each other for confirmation and acceptance of their self-concepts. Their communication is highly personalized and synchronized. They talk about anything and everything. There is a free flow of information and intimate self-disclosure. . . . The partners share an understanding of each other’s language and nonverbal cues and have a great deal of physical contact. They use fewer words to communicate effectively, and they have a clearer definition of their roles and of the relationship. Reaching this stage takes time—time to build trust, time to share personal information, time to observe each other in various situations, and time to build a commitment and an emotional bond.
Between Jeffrey and me there is a constant rotation of exploration, intensification, and intimacy. This is accomplished through work, games, playing, conflicting, making up, and sharing an ice cream. This rolling cycle in our lives together pulls us apart in one instance and brings us together even closer in the next. One important factor I have to keep in mind as my son matures is that how we connect will mature and grow right along with him. I cannot fairly expect that what I did to connect with a one year old completely dependent Jeffrey with a freedom, ability, and limit testing three year old Jeffrey.
The moment that Jeffrey was born I loved him. I was in the delivery room alongside my wife as she gave birth. After the doctor and midwife, I was next to hold new born Jeffrey for a moment before gently passing him to his mother. As much as I loved Jeffrey starting at that moment, I could tell by way my wife held and looked over Jeffrey just moments after the pain of having given a natural birth she was ahead of me in her intimate connection to Jeffrey. For the last nine months she had done more work, felt more pain, waited through discomfort, changed her wardrobe and daily habits more than I could comprehend. The reward for all that daily work was a bond between the two that would take me much more than nine months to catch up to. As the days went on I saw that continued love between mother and child and I decided that I wanted that too.
Legitimate power is power that is based on respect for a position that a person holds. Teachers, parents, law officers, store managers, and company presidents all have power because of the position they hold relative to other people. When a police officer tells you to pull off to the side of the road, you respond to this enactment of power by obeying the officer’s command.
Referent power is power that comes from our attraction to another person, or the charisma a person possesses. We let people we like influence us. We change our behaviorto meet their demands or desires because we are attracted to them (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 2008).
As a father to son, I often have to use legitimate power to teach my son obedience and self discipline. “I am not going to force you to eat, but you will stay at this table. We sit together at dinner even if you do not want to eat. Just remember, this is your chance. Do not ask for a snack after the rest of us are through eating.” However, just as many other fathers, I hope to engage my son more often with referent power. As he grows up, I hope that he will think of me as a close friend, comrade, playmate, and confidant. An important part of this will be in maintaining his trust by establishing the family rules, enforcing them, and accomplish that in such a way that that no grudges will be held on my part nor past misdeeds brought up to make a momentary point.
I know a lot of grown men that enjoy telling exaggerated stories of what it was like to grow up in their home as a kid. These over the top stories always contain at least a belt, a switch from the tree out back, or a reprimand that can still be recited to this day. Kids like to think their own father is tough, even when it means being tough on them. My wife insists that she is not made to wrestle, tussle, swing, or romp. That is my household duty. I love those times. It helps me to be close. I am not an impressively tough man, nor do I have demeanor that makes other men back away from me in the grocery store. Never the less, I like to do things that help my son to know his father is strong and dependable.
Jeffrey has a lot more milestones to complete in the next few years. Many of those will be set as goals for him to accomplish and set on a time scale. My wife grew up with several significantly younger nieces and nephews around her, so she knows what many of those milestones are and where they should be appropriately set. To tighten the bond with my son I need to get to know what those events are and how to bring them about and encourage him to learn and grow.
You also should strive to understand the needs of those with whom you have relationships. Identifying your best friends’ needs helps you to understand what motivates them as well as to appreciate the basis of power that you might have over them. Changes in their needs will also change your ability to influence them (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 2008).
Author Stephen Covey has often noted the distinction between love as a feeling and love as a verb, or that is to say, an action. Many people begin to lose love as a feeling, the inner emotion and connection, not realizing that they are failing at the same time to perform less with love the verb. To keep a strong connection, love the feeling for my son, Jeffrey, I will have to continue to develop love as a verb: running, cleaning, talking, sharing, chasing, scolding, hugging, wrestling, walking, laughing, and tucking in at night.
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