It occurred to me today that I’ve been missing the user manual… for life.

I have, at multiple times during my life, wished that there was a user manual. For example, right after I got married, I remember wondering to myself what I was supposed to be doing as a new husband, aside from the things that occurred to me to do, naturally, as part of my growing relationship with my wife. I let her choose which side of the bed she wanted to sleep on, and I made sure to compliment her cooking, and I let her choose which parking spot she wanted in the garage; basically, we figured it out, but it would have been great to have a user manual.

Or, right after my first child was born, I remember thinking that I was lost without some kind of set of instructions as to what was expected of me. Who gets up in the middle of the night when the baby cries? How am I supposed to know what the baby wants? How warm should a bottle of formula be? My wife and I had so many questions, and again, we just figured it out.

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During both of these occasions, I remember going to my parents and asking them for advice. And, for whatever reasons they may have had –maybe they didn’t have much advice to give (which I don’t believe), or maybe they thought it was a bad idea to steer me with their device, or maybe they wanted to make me “figure it out” like they’d had to– they were less than forthcoming with the information that I was looking for.

Call me crazy, but I am still harboring a little bit of frustration over those failed exchanges. Surely, despite having done some things wrong and others right, they could have spared what advice they thought had piloted them well through the times when things turned out correctly?

However, I can honestly say that I can see the issue from both sides. If my parents were hoping to make me strong by making me work for the right answers, rather than just giving me the answers, I could see how that approach might have been successful. Who’s to say whether or not I would be the same person that I am today, if I had been given the answers by my parents, or by a user manual of some kind.

But, that argument –that I wouldn’t be who I am today without having had to work for knowledge– goes both ways. Maybe, the “me” I could have been would have been better, if I’d been steered even a little bit with some quality advice. With a user manual, I could have started with a certain set of basic info, and then, having had those initial steps “given to me”, I could have then advanced beyond the basic level of knowledge to more advanced levels.

My wife and I, along the way in our marriage, have read a lot of really great marriage counseling books together, many of them in the environment of a marriage, small group, Bible study that we used to lead. So, the advice that I didn’t get on marriage, initially, I ended up getting somewhere else.

And, as far as my kids are concerned, maybe I haven’t been an awful parent, despite not having any advice –good, bad, or otherwise– to work with. I wonder if I would have done a better job, though, if I’d know a little more, starting out.

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My daughter, early on when I started writing this blog, told me that she was reading them. She’s thirteen. Just recently, I asked if she was still reading them, and she said, “No. Most of them are boring.”

Advice that’s not solicited has a certain stink to it that makes it hard for us to find much value in it. When someone comes and seeks your advice, I guess it would be hard to make a decision at to whether or not to give it.

I often think of families that I know, where the parents have been wonderfully successful in their lives and their children have turned out to be wonderfully successful as well, and I think that maybe there’s a leg-up that some people are getting their hands on.

I also think about the history of humanity, whereby many generations of people have come and gone and I’m not sure how far we’ve gotten, as a species, as a society, for having spent so much time living and dying and leaving our kids to “figure it out”, in the same way that we just “figured it out”.

Have you ever seen the movie or the television show where the parent is set to die and they create some letters/videos/recordings of some kind, to be able to direct and advise their child after their death? Don’t those movies just get you in the feels?!?!

I wonder if my kids will ever read anything that I’ve written some day and get from it something that will help them to get further than I got?