All the comments to yesterday's post have been just fascinating, and have given me lots to think about.
What I had started to think about, though, was that kids today--particularly our kids!--have it so easy! Why, when I was a lass, I had to walk to school in my bare feet. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways. As I recall, we lived in a muddy hole in the ground, got up before we went to bed, ate rocks, and were glad of it! Glad, I tell you! Rocks'll give you the energy you need for gold minin', which we did in frozen creeks, to keep ourselves in second hand rags!
teehee.
I think in this anxiety about the ease of Miss Baby's childhood, this slight wonderment at how I've moved up the ranks in life and thus moved her up in the ranks, I'm turning .... into my own mother and her parents before her. Toilets! Aren't you fancy!
I'm guessing this is just the grand march of my life from youth to parent. Now it's my turn to cluck at all the advantages Miss Baby has, that I didn't, and how she shouldn't squander them.
;-)
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Uphill, both ways ...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Oh yeah! I find myself saying and doing things that so sound like my parents. Stuff about working hard and wanting something badly so you really enjoy it when you get it. I do worry about the instant gratification we all seem to live by these days too...but that is another post.
I will say again how much I enjoyed your post yesterday.
Ah yes, I do this too. I also do the opposite. I've given you fucked up world politics, a broken planet...
As Margarent Laurence wrote in the Diviners, "the river flows both ways."
So I was thinking more about your post and all of the comments too...
From another perspective: our parents have succeeded at just what they had hoped all along. At giving their offspring more opportunities than they had. At giving their kids a "better" life. So really, we are doing just what they intended. No parent would hope that their child would continue with outhouses and illiteracy. So to those who went before us, it's really just about the fruits of their labor.
That, and not raising jackasses.
Oh, goodness. Being here, with my parents tonight, who are disappointed that I'm not a doctor and that people in my neighbourhood "don't care" about their homes and can't understand why Joe doesn't just go to teacher's college and become a music teacher (because that's what musicians do to make money), I am far too riled up to comment on these two posts with any kind of measured thought. But I will say that I think about this a lot, too, and I once wrote a post about how I went through this weird sort of mourning period when I discovered that I was not a carrier for the genetic illness that runs in my family because as much as I would never wish that disease on any one, let alone my children, I learned so much about life and understanding difference growing up with a brother with some special needs. Sort of analogous, right?
It's hard, watching our little replacements grow up and replace us, and I think that even us loving good parents feel some secret resentment, like "HEY! Why didn't I have the sophisticated professor parents? Where was MY pony?". And we also want our kids to be grateful for their privledges, to not be these horrifying jackasses with the inflated sense of entitlement, and how do we get there?
I don't know if I think kids today have it so easy, though - I look at these hard, hard little girls, these 11 or 12 year old blow job queens and I just feel overwhelming horror and pity. Each generation has its suffering, I guess.
I think that's right -- and there always seems to be two sides to every parenting angle, no?
The Boy was weaned on Starbucks. 'Nuff said.
Heh. Too right, we do turn into our parents. I'm brewing a post about cultural references becoming outdated like our parents' were, in fact... Ack!
Post a Comment