Whining Parents

Posted on November 11, 2003 in Anger Sorrow & Regret

By the incremented rod of evolution, I am a failure. I have no children. I am not one of those people who calls himself “childless by choice”. I am childless by circumstance: major depression, diabetes, eighteen root canals, and the poor finances that attend chronic disease.

Last night I spent some time with a woman who complained to me at length about her son. She couldn’t understand why, living here in California, he couldn’t stand on his own, make child support, and look after what he had wrought. “You made your bed. Lie in it,” was the philosophy she espoused to me.

It does not occur to her that he may want his child — her grandchild — to have a good life.

Some people seem to think that their wombs are garbage cans and their penises pump sewage. I am sick of parents who complain that their kids “don’t know hardship”. Hardship never helped me become a better person. I am what I am because a woman has faith in me and stands by me as I struggle through life. Thanks to her, I am getting better, feeling better, stronger, more forgiving of myself when I screw up. I am even able to pay visits and help my mother who had a milder version of the “push-the-little-bird-out-of-the-nest” philosophy that was mentioned above. My wife’s support of me gives me confidence. Sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve this.

When I hear a parent complain about their child, I want to say “Fine. Give her/him to me. If you don’t want to love, then I will.” I face old age and emptiness. I give my love to my nieces and nephews when I can because they are the future, they are kin. What I have said about bad parents does not apply to any of my family that I know about. They are lucky children and doubtless will enter adulthood confident in themselves.

Someday, though, it may come to pass that I learn differently. When they come to me complaining about their sadness, I will not tell them about my difficult childhood, the things that were done to me, the things that I did not get to have. Or, if I do, I will do it dispassionately. I will be open to their pain. No one has a right to belittle the suffering of another no matter what they themselves have gone through.

To those of you who dream of luxury condos without the noise of your children about, I say that there are Iraqis who deserve those things more than you do. To those who slap their kids around to give them a touch of difficulty and pain to toughen them up, I say go to the prisons and to skid row. Look at the failures that live there. Look, if you want, at me and call me a failure. Then point the finger back at yourself, look in the mirror, and see the empty person standing there. Look them in the eyes and say “I did my part to help make this.” Because you share in the responsibility for what your children become. It is you who does not appreciate the good fortune that you have.

We should not praise parents who abandon their children, who shame them with tales of hardships wielded like a club. I know of parents in poorer circumstances than the woman I mentioned above who know that they have a gift. I had lunch with my friend Donna who told me that if she had had to sell everything and live in poverty to see her daughter get a university education, she would have done so. I saw another mother I know take time out of her work to comfort her adult daughter as best as capitalist controls allowed her. She looked at her with a mother’s love, wanting to exert the whole of the universe on the young woman’s behalf. Ultimately, she was only able to say “I know, Baby.”

It’s another example of the inexplicability that goes with the way that the world assigns resources. It’s the whirlwind, screaming in our ears and making no sense at all.