One deer in a dark field this morning. Traffic was light.
Cold, cold and rainy. It felt almost like summer. The darkness shimmered, drawing me out, away from the back wall, towards the windows again.
When we were kids, we used to hold our hands in the icewater bucket when we were cranking ice cream in the summer, just to see who could stand it the longest. Yesterday, last night, I listened to Gamma’s Shakira CD all the way home.
The plot to a movie blossomed in my mind, starring Shakira. One-sentence summary: “Different enough from “Being John Malkovic” so they couldn’t really sue you.” And two short stories in progress developed a bit as well. Simmered. Bubbled in the crock pot of my head, with its matte no-stick surface.
This morning I listened to Shakira for a bit, then replaced her with the Clash. I thought about true love. I wonder whether the love of a parent for a child is the truest of all, because you don’t want anything from your kid, you only want good things for them. A partner, you want more sex from them or less sex, you want money or you want them to help out more with the housework or you want them to leave you alone or to say they love you. You want them to tell you more about their feelings or you want them to shut the hell up for once. Kids, all you want is their welfare maximised. You want them to study, but only because it will make them successful, and success you assume has a positive correlation with happiness.
And so on.
People who did not experience perfect love from their parents, or people who did: who is luckiest when they become parents, those who finally get a chance to create the perfect love they missed, or those who have half a chance of really managing it because they know what it is?
Only, does anyone get perfect love when they’re kids? Is any parent capable of giving the absolute love a kid needs? Are we all doomed to fall short?
Quarter-past eight in the morning and it’s still grainy grey out, drizzling and beautiful already.
Light, again
Posted in Metamorphosism
Ich kenne keine Statistik – aber wer bekommt schon ein Kind um des Kindes willen? Ganz ehrlich: Ist man nicht trotzdem entt
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.
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.
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.
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.
(gotta dig out my German-English dictionary to completely understand the first comment. At least I can muddle out some of it!)
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?
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.