Feeling like a fraud

|
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A while back I was chosen as the keynote speaker at a parenting conference in New England. The search committee must have assumed that because I’ve written extensively about a life informed by seven children, I must be skilled in the art of fatherhood.

I didn’t let on that I could no more claim to be an expert parent than I could profess to be an expert mechanic, despite owning a lot of cars.

As the day of the conference approached I couldn’t keep the smirk off my face, the same one I wore as a 23-year-old new dad bopping across campus in Wisconsin, baby in one arm, book bag with Cliffs Notes in the other, pretending to know what I was doing. Since then I have navigated the decades of fatherhood in the dark, sliding fingers along gooey walls, hyperextended toes seeking out plastic toys and wet presents left by the dog. I can say without smirking that I have been a daily presence in my children’s lives from their births through first steps, scraped knees, soccer games, principal’s calls, graduations, marriages, and 14 grandchildren. But I smirk every time I hear that I’m a master dad.

Nor is this fakery limited to parenting. Despite being a career educator, I still enter classrooms and faculty meetings wondering who knows that I’m a dunce at diagramming sentences. Or that I find Proust boring. Or that I don’t understand a single paragraph of “Finnegans Wake.”

Twenty-six years ago, while teaching high school, the burly ex-football coach-turned-principal motioned me into his office. My heart seized. As I shuffled through his door he was holding an open copy of The New York Times Magazine. “Did you read this?” he barked, pointing at a column by a successful financier who confessed he was not nearly as savvy about business matters as everyone assumed. He felt like an impostor.

I nodded and smirked.

Duffy lowered his voice to a George C. Scott gravelly whisper, “Do you feel like a fraud, Lewis?”

I nodded again, heart thudding, as Duffy flashed a broad smile. “Me, too! Every day I walk into this office pretending to be a principal!”

And two decades later at that parenting conference, where I brazenly offered theories for various family problems easily solved by a good night’s sleep or a trip to the ice cream parlor, I kept waiting for my wife and kids to bust through the doors, waving arms and screaming “Don’t listen to him! He’s a phony!”

After 40 years, frankly, I’m not sure how much longer I can keep up the charade.

You've read 3 of 3 free articles. Subscribe to continue.
QR Code to Feeling like a fraud
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/The-Home-Forum/2009/1229/Feeling-like-a-fraud
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe
CSM logo

Why is Christian Science in our name?

Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that.

The Church publishes the Monitor because it sees good journalism as vital to progress in the world. Since 1908, we’ve aimed “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind,” as our founder, Mary Baker Eddy, put it.

Here, you’ll find award-winning journalism not driven by commercial influences – a news organization that takes seriously its mission to uplift the world by seeking solutions and finding reasons for credible hope.

Explore values journalism About us