The end product of child raising is nut the child but the parent.
If whatyou are doing is not changing your life, don't expect it to change
theirs. Whatever else, be sure to praise their efforts.
"Children are life renewing itself, Captain Buffer. And when life
does that, danger seems very unimportant."
Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind
"Babies, war, and taxes! There's never a convenient time for any of
them."
Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind
Last week Justin Wesley Wagers, the first of what I hope will be
many grandchildren, was born. My wife Betsy and I went out to Boulder to
bond with him. I spent a week holding him and licking him and
understanding that people have children to get grandchildren. In due time
we turned Justin over to the alternate shift of grandparents, and came
back to earth. We had been transposed. We glowed in the dark. We had been
declared gods and turned into constellations. We were now
immortal--maybe, a little.
When people have children, there is this hope for some little piece
of immortality. Parents and grandparents don't actually become immortal,
but if they are paying attention, they do become part of everything that
has gone on before or that will go on after them. That is wonderful, but
it is even more wonderful if they fully realize that their children and
grandchildren (even those as perfect as my beloved grandson Justin) are
no different, no more special, than everyone else's children and
grandchildren, and that every other parent and grandparent is going
through the same thing with them.
THE MAGIC OF CHILD RAISING
Of course, having children has limited benefits at best, and can
even be an expression of greediness and narcissism, an imposition upon
one's neighbors and upon the planet itself. The magical experience,
rather, is raising children. People who want the pride, the potential
glory, and the self-expansion of parenthood without the humbling,
enlightening turmoil of hands-on parenting are not just missing the magic
but are cheating. Unless they are supplying much-needed children for
people who cannot create their own, people who create babies they expect
others to raise are like F. Scott Fitzgerald's spoiled-rotten rich kids
in The Great Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they
smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money
or their vast carelessness. . .and let other people clean up the mess
they had made."
Naive scientists trying to make sense out of human sexuality would
have us believe that childbearing is a biological imperative that stops
at the delivery-room door. They tell us that the human animal has an
overriding instinctive investment in the survival of its sperm and egg
cells, and is drawn to behaviors that will spawn the largest numbers of
fertilized eggs. But the human animal could not have survived, no matter
how many of our ignorant, immobile, dependent offspring were deposited on
the ground, if there were not parents around to raise them.
Human babies require parents not just for their physical survival
but for their humanity. Feral children, raised in the woods by wolves or
on the streets by peers, are not likely to be fully human--in large part
because they lack the experience of parents investing love in an organism
who is not yet able to give anything back.
The human species survived against all probability in a hostile
environment because there were people who valued us enough to join forces
and take care of us. Not just to feed and shelter us, but to teach us the
increasingly complex things we soft, slow, unarmed beings need to survive
and to serve our biological function of creating others--taking care of
them, teaching them what they need to know, and loving them enough to
make them yearn to love others and pass it on.
Child raising has always been the most important activity of the
human animal, male or female. But since the Industrial Revolution, the
outrageous idea has taken hold that child raising is women's work--that
men have something vastly more important to do than the care, feeding,
education, and emotional training of the next generation. (I can't
imagine what would be more important--war? business? government? sports
on TV? reassuring themselves of their masculinity by seducing other
women?)
The man who cannot be servant to a child, who expects his children
or those of other people to exist for his own glory or comfort, is the
center of his own universe and is unlikely to be capable of loving
anything outside himself. He may be stuck in the wrong generation.
Football, military school, prison, and war have been touted as the
experience that can turn a boy into a man. Nonsense! The experience that
makes a man is not insemination, but hands-on fathering. I have no desire
to shake the hand that has never changed a diaper.
WE NEED MORE PARENTS
If you need a baby, we already have all you could ever need. (They
may not come in your choice of colors, but that is your problem.) The
rest of us certainly don't need you to have babies unless you are willing
to dedicate your life to raising them, and to letting others share in the
process. If you are too selfish, childish, ill-tempered, or out of
control to share your life with a grown-up partner or a community of
other adults, please don't inflict yourself on a helpless child.
Tags:
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expectation,
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greediness,
having children,
imposition,
magical experience,
melanie wilkes,
o hara,
parenting,
parents,
paying attention,
pride,
rule,
technique,
wife betsy
