Hello, stranger.
People see having kids as a good or bad thing depending on how their own kids turn out. As long as all is going well, they congratulate themselves, privately and often publicly, for doing such a good job as parents. Bumper stickers that read, “My Child Is an Honor Student” have always bothered me. I understand that people who have them are expressing genuine pride in their child’s accomplishment, but I feel for the people driving behind them who might be having trouble with their own children. That bumper sticker must hurt — a lot.
Many parents go further than bumper stickers, however, continually making noises about the achievements of their offspring. Their kids’ successes in learning to read, in hitting home runs in Little League, acting in the ninth-grade production of “South Pacific,” starring on the 10th-grade debating team, excelling in the 11th-grade Model U.N., running up fabulous SAT scores, getting into the “right” college, landing the first “great” job, finding a life partner, having children of their own — and so on and so on — offer them ever-fresh opportunities to brag (under the guise of “sharing,” of course). When all is going well, hearing a friend say, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” makes a parent beam.
When things don’t go so well with a child, however, or when the child grows into a troubled adult, parents don’t want to hear anything about arboretums. Nor do they want to see one of those bumper stickers announcing someone else’s kid’s success.
In the face of problematic children, parents are miserable. The suffering and pain caused by the child becomes their misery and pain, and there is very little consolation in knowing that “they did their best.” Friends of parents with children who are having troubles, who themselves have children who are doing well, know better than to “share” with them the good stuff that’s going on with their own kids. As my sculptor-friend (who has four children) said to me once, “Having kids is a complete crapshoot.”
Probably there’s no formula for any of it. But we can at least get a hold of one part of parenting — the love of a parent for a child — by considering Aristotle’s ideas. According to The Philosopher, parents love their children more than children love them because children are a part of them. (Nobody ever says, “A block off the new chip.”) Children love their parents less because their love derives from owing their existence to their parents. It’s more gratitude — sometimes grudging — than anything else. They also love them less because they don’t begin to understand their parents until they, too, become adults.
I was shocked when I first encountered Aristotle’s ideas about the differences between parental and filial love. (I was full of myself about how much I knew and loved my own parents.) How could Aristotle have thought up such wrongheaded ideas? Wasn’t it self-evident that love between a parent and a child is equal in both directions?
But the more I thought about it over the years, and especially after I had a child of my own, I realized Aristotle’s observations are accurate. After all, what do children really ever know of their parents? Or perhaps a better question to ask is whether we children can ever really know them, in a deep way, at all.
A few years ago, I ran into a childhood friend I hadn’t seen in years. We chatted on the street, and a couple of weeks later I received in the mail a five-minute videotape (remember videotapes?) that originally had been made by his father as a 16mm film. (The son had transferred the home movie to videotape.) The subject was a picnic attended by several families in my neighborhood sometime in the mid-1950s.
I popped the videotape into my VCR (remember VCR’s?) and watched in amazement as a glamorous young woman — my late mother — laughed and joked with her friends. Everything was in color, albeit a little grainy. My mother was leaning back in a chair, smoking a cigarette, and wearing one of those long, white summer dresses that women wore back then. All the while, she completely ignored her children as they ran in circles around her. For a few moments, she had a life that had nothing to do with being a mother.
As I watched this unfamiliar woman enjoying a summer afternoon with her friends, I realized I didn’t know her at all. Aristotle was spot on.
(Image from Photobucket.com)
