I have this post germinating in my head about Blue States and the notion of “public tolerance, private discipline” as discussed in Cahn and Carbone’s celebrated Red Families v. Blue Families. But that’s the sort of post that ought to be written when one is more wakeful than I am now. I’m coming off five straight nights in which I’ve averaged four hours of sleep or less; HCRS has been fighting a cold and been up at night, and I’ve also had a particularly heavy workload. I don’t think or write as well when I’m this tired.
I’ve written a great deal over the years about my own turbulent and troubled life, particularly in my teens and twenties when I struggled with drugs and alcohol and mental illness. I’ve often written of the tremendous gratitude I have for the support I received from my family, especially my parents. Without them, the outcome for my story might well have been different. When I got sober, I made amends to both of them for the pain I knew I had caused them. They accepted those amends with cheer and with thankfulness for my recovery and transformation. And slowly, they worried less and less about me as time passed and it seemed my sobriety and conversion were genuine and enduring.
But it wasn’t until I became a father myself last year that I grasped on an emotional level the pain through which I must have put my mother and father. My protectiveness towards my child, my longing for her to be happy and safe and warm and fed, is more intense than I had imagined it could possibly be. Long-time readers will note I do not blog enthusiastically in defense of pacifism any longer; my parental gut will no longer let me issue blanket condemnations of state-sanctioned violence. (On the other hand, readers will also note that my views on sexuality and abortion and feminism have been reinforced rather than undermined by the experience of becoming a Dad and witnessing my wife’s pregnancy.) Yet among the greatest internal shifts I’ve experienced since becoming a father is an enormous increase in my understanding of my own parents, and why they did what they did and why they felt as they seemed to feel.
I’m not the first person to point out this consequence of reproducing. But as someone who has talked so often about how I “used to be” and how I “am now”, I’m freshly aware of the pain that the “used to be” caused those who brought me into the world. For years, I’ve accepted responsibility for the worry and heartache I caused mother and father through my years of using, suicide attempts, hospitalizations, and so forth. But it wasn’t until HCRS came into my life that I grasped, in my gut, just how great that worry and heartache must have been. I’ve told my mother this, and will keep telling her. I told my father as well, when I visited his grave in Santa Barbara last week.
It is not the job of a child to fulfill a parent’s fantasies. It is not the job of a child to behave in such a way that they never cause a parent a moment of fear. No child can succeed in doing either, though many try. But while a parent’s sacrifices are not a child’s obligation, the grown child can and should acknowledge the nearly unfathomable depths of love and worry that their parents nearly certainly — one hopes — felt. And until I became a Dad, and loved a small and vulnerable person as I had never loved anything before, I did not understand those depths.
Perhaps that’s one of the satisfactions of seeing one’s parents become grandparents. Now, they know that you know what they knew from the time you were born. That’s a good thing.
The pain that some kids cause their parents is no greater than what the parents caused the kids earlier. Still, I have enough other reasons to regret things I did when young. I was lucky and didn’t land in jail or in the hospital, but still.
I seem to remember you saying something to the effect that you (correct me if I don’t recall it right) would fight to the death to protect your child, and how that clashed with your general pacifist views. It made me think 1] I had one more reason not to reproduce, not to let anything pull me any farther from rationality than I already am, if it has that much effect on the brain; 2] I am glad not to have called myself an absolute anything; I never claimed to be entirely (or even very) pacifist. That said, I wish my mother had been as protective as you; as hard-as-nails as she can be, her instinct to keep me from undeserved, human-caused harm has been defective.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that “If x ever did y to my z when I was around, I’d kill them”, and I could not help wondering how true that was, how sure anyone could really be what they would do when fan met feces. I can talk a brave tough line with anyone, but I don’t know if I’d come thru or just be as stunned as I and a lot of others are at some outrage they see. But at least I would know what was wrong, what I or someone bloody well ought to do.
I hope you and your family are never in a position where blood has to be spilled.