Comments on: Light, again

By: j-a

j-a — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 08:08:10 +0000

well, my mum said to one of my ex-boyfriends once this:
“you try really hard to look after your children, but you end up screwing them up anyway.”

i said: “thanks, mum.”

mortifying.

By: novala

novala — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 00:32:24 +0000

It’s more or less s.th. like: I don’t know any statistics – but who wants a child for the child’s sake? Honestly: Isn’t one disappointed if the child doesn’t return love the way you would love to get it?

By: sue

sue — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 05:11:34 +0000

(gotta dig out my German-English dictionary to completely understand the first comment. At least I can muddle out some of it!)

By: novala

novala — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 16:48:50 +0000

btw – my parents might not have succeeded a 100 percent in giving perfect love to their. But they have always been pretty close to full score. I am a lucky child.

By: eeksypeeksy

eeksypeeksy — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 16:45:31 +0000

When we raise kids, we are pushing ourselves into the future, buying an extension on oblivion. We love them as much as we love (or don’t love) ourselves because they are us. And we try to edit the past by making them better versions of ourselves, versions that brush their teeth properly and cross at the crosswalk and creat art and are, more than we were and are, lovable and loved and successful and happy.

Then the kid turns out to be a psycho (“He’s got his father’s eyes. No, I mean literally! He’s got his father’s eyes! Run!”) and you realize that you weren’t such a bad kid and that it was a good thing your parents didn’t make you get A in everything and join the football team, softball team, baseball team, hockey team, badminton team, curling team, orchestra, marching band, choir, church youth group, scouts, young embezzlers organization, math club, French club, Latin club, chess club, drama club, and junior geneticists.

So you ease off and let the kid waste a little time. With you.

Partners are another story: we want them to be the people we fell in love with, before we destroyed them.

Heh. I like typing.

By: mig

mig — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 16:08:43 +0000

Thank you, Novala, I’ll think about that.

And thank you for that link, Anne. Are we giving our kids what they need, or what we needed? It’s so tempting to see them as a second chance, isn’t it.

By: anne

anne — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 15:56:44 +0000

i’ve been thinking about precisely this fairly intensely for a while now. i mean about the perfect love/ child thing. kein wanted to have shakira as his second mother, and we thought about that for a while, but i think we’ve moved on.

anyway, i don’t think parents don’t want anything from their kids- i think a lot of the time what parents want for their kids is more demanding than what adults want from their partners, because to some degree we want them to have what our kid selves didn’t have, and that hunger can be much more consuming.

the lyrics to alannis morissette’s “perfect” can get me absolutely wrenched sometimes:
“we love you just the way you are when you’re perfect”
i mean, seriously, think about stage mothers. are they really any better than lady macbeth?

have you read this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26LIVES.html?ex=1097380800&en=395a8bd62707d79d&ei=5070&oref=login
“The longing not to hurt my children now feels a bit like the longing to stay young myself, to remain a child until I can fix what went wrong. Maybe it’s time to let go of my grievances, to
grow up, to give some new little person a chance to be young.”

thinking about it a lot. thanks mig for adding to the conversation in my head.

By: novala

novala — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:10:34 +0000

Ich kenne keine Statistik – aber wer bekommt schon ein Kind um des Kindes willen? Ganz ehrlich: Ist man nicht trotzdem entt