Feeling like a fraud
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鈥檝e written extensively about a life informed by seven children, I must be skilled in the art of fatherhood.
I didn鈥檛 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鈥檛 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鈥檚 lives from their births through first steps, scraped knees, soccer games, principal鈥檚 calls, graduations, marriages, and 14 grandchildren. But I smirk every time I hear that I鈥檓 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鈥檓 a dunce at diagramming sentences. Or that I find Proust boring. Or that I don鈥檛 understand a single paragraph of 鈥淔innegans Wake.鈥�
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. 鈥淒id you read this?鈥� 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, 鈥淒o you feel like a fraud, Lewis?鈥�
I nodded again, heart thudding, as Duffy flashed a broad smile. 鈥淢e, too! Every day I walk into this office pretending to be a principal!鈥�
And two decades later at that parenting conference, where I brazenly offered theories for various family problems easily solved by a good night鈥檚 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 鈥淒on鈥檛 listen to him! He鈥檚 a phony!鈥�
After 40 years, frankly, I鈥檓 not sure how much longer I can keep up the charade.
