When Daddy was King

Subject: When daddy was King.

The assumptions we made when we were young, under the protection of our parents was a rare time of assumed safety. Each journey we made with them was unwittingly made in the absolute faith they knew what they were doing and knew where they were going. Our faith in them was total as we trailed along in their wake barely understanding the transactions they were committing to to make the journey safe.
They of course were not filled with the same assurance, they were calculating the odds of probability, that given what we knew, then the best outcome should bring us somewhere nearly to where we wanted to be.

These twin worlds are particularly true in early parenting where the child assumes the subordinate role and the parent the authoritative. The assumptions were enough since the propositions had not been tested and it's only in adolescence that the trust we had is called into question and more often denounced as wrong. A  tug of war begins and  hard words spoken before the young person goes off into the world by themselves to test out for themselves the sense, or nonsense of all that parental teaching.
The clock ticks on and the years roll by. Our lives take many turns as we make a success or failure of our attempt to live according to our beliefs. Sometimes those beliefs are rooted in what we learnt on our parents proverbial knee and sometimes we learn the hard way, through trial  and error.
As we grow older our surety weakens not because we fail to see those markings we  followed throughout our lives but because those marking have become irrelevant in the modern world. It's a unique world we live in today, experience counts for little and most of the things we would count valuable are often challenged or simply found on a 'Do It Yourself Manuel on You Tube'.
The experience of knowing the way is now better handled by a 'route finder' on your smartphone. The knowledge you had which was shared and handed down by your parents is now found as a tutorial on the internet. So the regime which placed a parent first in the pecking order is shrinking fast.
The real shock comes when you realise how feeble and out of touch you have become in navigating your way around the most simplistic problem. The hurdles old age builds for itself is the way we find it difficult to take on and assume as a first point of call the problem solving technique of looking it up on our hand held encyclopaedic source of everything from A to Z, the smartphone.
As we stutter and grope around for answers our siblings have the answers at their finger tips, quick accurate solutions, aided and abetted by a plethora of electronic solutions which we never knew existed.
Everyone is an expert except you. The patriarch, no longer the head,  exists only with the patronage of those who in years gone by so longingly looked up to a Daddy, during in that brief period when he was King.