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Parenthood and Perfection
I was speaking to someone about the kind of issues we often have with our parents and chanced upon an expression of the problem that I had not used earlier.
“I think my father has trouble dealing with the fact that I am not him,” I said.
My friend agreed. I feel a lot of people would agree. I think we all realise what the issue is. It has to do with the impulse behind reproduction and the drive behind parenthood.
Why do people have children?
At first glance, it is a biological impulse that is programmed into us through millions of years of evolution. At second glance it acquires, for lack of a better phrase, a cultural flavour. We spend time on our offspring, we teach them things, we try to make them into something resembling us.
Parenthood, it seems to me, is an extended cloning process. It is also a rather inefficient cloning process. The base material — the new being — isn’t a clean slate. It comes into this world rather soiled with preferences and personality.
It is not a clean sheet of paper on which the parent can write anything they like. They have to make do with writing on whatever space they can find. There is a lot of it in the beginning, but it shrinks with time and with life. The sheet gets stained and tears. Sometimes, the pressure of the parent’s pen causes…
