My father was kindly and gentle but distant. My mother was difficult, not affectionate, fiery tempered and controlling. She was an angry, frustrated woman, the sort of person you avoid. I was a late mistake and my mother used to say, “It was so annoying I got pregnant with you.” But we didn’t have a difficult relationship. She’d tell me: “I don’t have to worry about you. You’re as smart as a bag full of monkeys.”
She did teach me about love. She said that most people think what they feel in the first flush of a relationship is love. It isn’t. It’s infatuation. You can only talk about loving somebody when you’ve lived with them for 10 years, with the smelly socks and the quarrels. Only then will you know what you mean when you say you love them.
AC Grayling provides a worthwhile lesson on family and values in today’s Guardian.
Comments
3 Comments so far. Comments are closed.There are no more toxic relationships than between parents and children.
Your mother had no business and no right to say you were a mistake. What a terrible message this is to a youngster.
Words are powerful and words carry weight.
To clarify: the “mistake” statement is in a quote from Grayling’s article. Nonetheless, it’s true that the damage that can be done to a child by an uncaring parent is incalculable.
But apparently we homos — as opposed to all those incompetent parents, who need no qualification to breed besides functioning testes and ovaries — are the biggest threat to children and families.
… not to mention to the rain-forests, the entire planet, and 3 out of three of yer basic big-three monotheistic, penis-worshipping cults.
Grayling, to his credit, is not brainwashing his daughter (faith-wise) in either direction, and she’s insightful enough to see demonstrable value in the tooth fairy, as opposed to the “overheated imaginings” of a post-death, permanent vacation paradise for which payment in full and in advance is required.