On Parenting

Before I say anything, I must make one very clear and necessary disclaimer, I am not married and I am not a parent. These are just what I think being married and being a parent might be like. You should not approach these words hoping to learn anything new, the only hope i have is for them to resonate and confirm what you already do feel and believe. I count it as a success if they sound true to you. I hope no one walks away feeling like they have discovered any new truth here, because there are none. There are very few things worse than the evils of making great presumptions, conjuring wild imaginations and grand generalisations of what life is and what life can be, believing them and persuading others of it too. Yet, this might just be what I go on to do. 

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Sitting by the window, I see a mother bending over to see what her child is showing her. She seems intrigued by her discovery, a snail, something she has surely seen no less than a hundred times before. She is intrigued, or she might be pretending to, in which case she is a very good actress, but maybe all parents are good actors and actresses* (or at least they have learnt to become good actors and actresses). In the very least, she looks intrigued. Not in the snail. Well, not simply in the snail. She is intrigued by her daughter’s intrigue in the snail. I wonder how many times she has that experience, perhaps rarely, perhaps often, perhaps never before, perhaps never at all. In her intrigue in her daughter’s intrigue (the truth of which seems real, or in the vest least convincing, enough to me to be taken for granted), she has taken up the joys of her baby, her fiery and fierce as well as her fragility and fright. What brings joy to her baby brings joy to her. To frightens her baby frightens her too. Whatever her child is fiercely fighting against, she is in a fight against it too. Even though I think it is far from clear whether there is a symmetry on the child’s perspective — of whether they also take up their mother and father’s being. I don’t think they do. I don’t think I did as a child. I think they might grow into it and gradually graduate into it. I think I am slowly becoming that, slowly, trying with constant failings. Regardless, it seems evident to me that a part of this mother’s heart, this little girl, is walking outside of her. I wonder if that is scary. If she feels like the snail in some way, with a shell so brittle, a body so soft, moving so slowly through a world full of curious little girls and careless men in big hard boots. There are two snails in this picture. There is this babbling baby girl and there is the mother. In her love, she has embodied the fragility and vulnerability of her child. In her love, she has been transformed into something that is soft, that is brittle, that is exposed. In being a mother, the little girl in her, who, 20 years ago, stumbled and grumbled, cradled and babbled, bewildered, was brought forth too. I wonder, who, in their right mind, would choose to have one’s heart venture through this wild world like that little snail, knowing all its perils. Surely, only someone who is deep in love, so deep that there is climbing out of this well, this new reality, would. Surely, only someone who is so deeply in love with someone that is fragile and brittle, would, in their love, become such too—fragile and brittle.

 

Parenting, being a parent is to commit to having your heart not only be outside of you, but walk and run and jump and hike and adventure outside of you, ahead of you, beyond your range of vision, to go and not come back. To be there with them, in the land you have not set foot on, is both your most sincere wish and your most feared future. It is a reality that you work your hardest for, indeed harder for anything else in your life, but also a reality you cannot help but resist. You are split between the ages, between geography, time zones, and hopes and fears. It is a mistake to think that you are only living in one land but not the other. It also is a mistake to think that you are living in both. Because you are not, not equally. Of course you are resisting and of course you will resist. It is most natural to resist being split into two.