Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

I’m watching a bit of a documentary on Channel 4 by and about Derren Brown. He’s visiting his parents and his old school and revisiting elements of himself (in an old swimming pool…). We don’t spend our lives continually looking back, or going back, to places and people in our childhoods, but as soon as we do it’s amazing how forceful and fast (in every sense) the impact in our self-understanding.

Back to the plot, the third life event to write about is “A turning point”, or “an event, or episode where you experienced, either at the time or at a later point, a significant change in your understanding of yourself. In retrospect, you see this as a pivotal point in your life.”

My (second) wife uses the word “cooked” to describe people when they achieve a level of maturity in life. I don’t think she means just “no longer childish”, but also “being adult”, although what that means is another interesting discussion.  I like to think of cooked in terms of the development, over time and in time, of the ability to put aside (subsume?) one’s child-like or juvenile first reaction to a situation in favour of (it’s about choices you make) one that freely and without need for outside validation encompasses the appropriate virtue for that situation.

By middle age, a lot more women are cooked than men, apparently.

The moment of birth of my first child was the cooking moment for me, the one where there was a clear fold in time where what had gone before would not be like what was going to come ahead. I both knew it at the time, and didn’t know, and it is not about who or how my eldest turned out to be.  

She was born in a Budapest hospital we had chosen because fathers were allowed to be present at the birth, in winter in Budapest in 1989, just as the European order was changing. The Berlin Wall was history (making it and being it) and the Romanians were about to come to bloody blows with their lunatic dictator, but at 3.50 p.m. I was given a responsibility to hold and for a moment a bubble formed around me that I don’t think anything short of a meteorite strike on the maternity ward could have burst. 

What changed about myself? If I pursue an earlier thread, on similarity and difference, in my relation with the world around me I had become similar (part of the group “parent”) and I had become different (no-one else had a baby quite like mine). In both ways I had another layer of “identifiability”. Then when I think about it a second time I consider some the contexts that framed the tableau in the hospital – gender, ethnicity, linguistics, economics… and so on.

And when I think about it, now, a third time, I find that there was an emergent virtue, love, which chimes with Erikson’s early adult stage. I had something to care for and, and others now had identities which depended on me.