Common as marital infidelity is, parental infidelity, breach of faith with regard to children, is even more common.
Worship of babies, envy of babies and cruelty towards babies and children are all of a piece. Actual devotion involves embrace of limitations.
We begin our careers as parents as very young children,
We must recognize the essential equality in matters of destiny and difficulty between ourselves and our children, even our very young children.
A parent is for a child like a roof, useful as protection against the rain but also, at a certain point, as the child gains height and scope, capable of becoming a terrible impediment.
When we imagine our children, we are apt to leave out the crucial ingredient, their decisive separateness.
Our children appear to us in the course of their growth as a series of revelations, each one coming upon us at the crossroads of a particular intimate separation.
One child is, in the course of growing up, a multitude of children, so that a parent’s job is to find a rhythm of letting go and taking hold that accommodates the necessary changes and helps the child compose them into an internal process of ongoing self availability through internal rearrangements, harmonic and dissonant. Parent and child both are involved in everyday ways in grieving the one who was in order to be able to know the one who is and so to prepare that way for the one who is coming to be.
The living we wish to spare our children is an essential part of the life we have given them.
Parenthood requires of us that we reinvent ourselves as we gaze into the mirror of our children’s vulnerability.
We stand by in silent helpless disamy as our children learn about history and its horrors.
We much more often display our fears before our children than admit to them what they are seeing and feeling.
For our children, we stand first for life and then for death.
We feel ethologically determined promptings to protect and care for our young. This falls far short of specific care for them as individuals with their own core propensities and projects to be realized in a cultural medium. Specific care depends on our abilities as parents to diversify and respond in our imaginations.
Too much of what passses for parental love is greedy solicitude for the child’s welfare as a future source of imagined gratification for the parent’s infantile wishes. Parents of this disposition, unconscious of their own ongoing neediness, remain reliably oblivious to the supposedly beloved child’s current appropriate childish needs. Such parents may, in time, develop into grandparents who exhibitionistically, almost cannibalistically, adore their grandchildren.
When we fulfill the long cherished wish of providing for our children what we ourselves missed terribly because we did not get it, there is, compound with the satisfaction, the knowledge that giving is not getting. If we can acknowledge our envy and grieve for ourselves, we may learn to pity ourselves, not in the sense of looking down on ourselves, but by having compassion for the facts of our lives and respect for ourselves for facing them.
Our children will not thank us if we try to raise them without illusions.
We often desert our children when we are angry at them for worrying us, that is, for showing us how small we ourselves can be made to be in our mind’s eye.
When we discover that our parents are not on balance the kind of people that we are pleased to know, we must renounce a fundamental hope of confirmation from them. The skepticism we feel about them and their ways in life is always available to be turned back on ourselves, so that we are goaded on by intimate self-doubts that can be very painful but are also very helpful in preventing us from becoming complacent about our own ways. We look for alternatives and try to do our parents what honor we can by learning from them by negative example. In this quest for alternatives, we may even be able to discern a fugitive sense of their unrealized goodness, as we try to turn what might have been into what might come to be. We try to do them justice by trying to be better parents not only to our children but to ourselves in our minds and hearts. With time we may come to see them in a kindlier light, that is, with more pity and less regret and resentment.
Parents stand in for lovers until, sometimes after a very long delay, lovers arrive to stand in for parents. All this is very much on our minds and in our hearts as we cherish and release our own children.
If we are to get along with our adult children we must be able to be relativists as historiographers and accept that multiple perspectives are more enriching than they are embarrassing. We must remember that neither they nor we are who we once were or thought we were.
One of the most searching tests of our devotion to our children is our response as our children find others to love who are very different from us, even to the extent that these others may sometimes represent searching critiques of us.
We mourn our children’s growing as a prelude to our own slowing, our own going. This mourning lends our joy a delicacy to which it could not otherwise aspire.
Parents are ruminants who graze on worries about their children – grown children, too – because this reasserts the connection and makes the children available as alter egos, that is, devices for altering the ego and providing means for escape from the predicament of this mortal ego,
We hate our children for reminding us of what we can not quite manage to forget about ourselves.
A vital part of child rearing is to notice our children’s losses on a day by day, sometimes hour by hour, even minute by minute basis, so that we can be close as they simultaneously learn to grieve and retrieve themselves and provide us with a new course of instruction in the ubiquity and profundity of these processes.
As we say goodbye to our parents at the gate of the setting sun, we discover that their smiles have come to live on our lips, that the lines of their worry are traced on our foreheads as we gaze on our children.
A remote parent becomes a corrupt atlas of the secret geography of ourselves. In time, the editing of this volume can be confided to a remote spouse, to children, until the corruption becomes a tradition, so that disconnection acquires the flavor of connection and any effort at recovering more robust and frank connection gains the sense of impiety and revolt.
All too many parents are childless because they fail to recognize their children. Such parents want all the rights of parenthood without any of the responsibilities. Children of such parents are orphans, burdened with all the sorrows of being orphans without any way to make claims on the community’s solicitude and compassion except surreptitiously and, most often, guiltily. What is remarkable is that, even so, many of them are quietly adopted and find ways to love and be loved.