love your children less

As humanity awakens from thousands of years of barbaric darkness, there are those who become enlightened long before the rest. The average person can only expand their understanding in teeny increments...and often, not even that. Visionaries have always had to live and die knowing that their validation would only come decades, centuries, or millenia after they became dust.

Here's a notion most of you won't be ready for.

We need to start loving our children less.

Not in general! In general, we need to love them much more. But as individuals, and specifically as parents relating to our own biological offspring, we need to learn how to love less. Of course, "love" isn't the right word. We need to learn how to be less attached to, and dependent on, them.

Many semi-enlightened folk in this day and age are ready to embrace the idea that we need to start loving all the children of the world as though they were our own.

But that cannot truly happen, without loving our own less. Partly because we each have only so much love to give, and partly because one of the things that prevents us from loving all the world's children is the "MY" sickness that permeates our society. This sickness makes us put inordinate pressure on our children to be like us...the extreme examples of this are unforgettable, but you don't need to be a Marvin Gaye scholar to know about parents' attempts to turn children into little versions of themselves (more than a few of you have lived some version of this drama yourself). Instead of helping our children grow freely, we try to turn them into mirrors by which our own life's success is measured. Beyond that, in this society, children function as a form of old-age insurance. A few parents you speak to will actually be candidly mercenary about this...and almost all of them are ready to take advantage of it. Who will care for us, during our enfeebling march to the grave? One of the essential credos of capitalist society is that if you don't take care of yourself, no one will. How horrific is that, at its most primal level? So society creates an escape valve. We socialize children into feeling a deep, lifelong obligation to those who raised them. This message permeates our aphorisms and mythologies. What's "thicker than water"? To whom does the prodigal child return? And the biggie - what image do we cast god in? Father.
Imagine a society in which the image of god is not father, but friend.
Wrap your mind around that.
Beyond being an insurance policy, our relationship with our children is fundamentally economic. Before humans had more stuff than we needed, nobody cared whose child belonged to whom, because every child belonged to everyone. But with the advent of agriculture-based surplus, came the notion of property. Soon after, we decided it wasn't enough to simply make as big a pile of stuff for ourselves as we could...we wanted to control what happened to that pile after we died! We wanted to be sure it went to someone who thought like us and was invested in preserving our miserable carcass. Bingo presto, biological parentage becomes vital. That's MY son, he'll get MY stuff. That other kid? Get him the hell out of here. What, woman? You fucked another man? Why don't i beat you until you almost die, then see if you try that again.
In the world of "my child/not-my child", it's far too easy to desensitize yourself to any amount of human (or infant) suffering. We'll never be able to care for all the children of the world, until we learn how to care for the ones in our own homes just a little less.

I mention all this because of a massacre of school students that happened this week in a place called Connecticut. In the wake of this slaughter, parents of similarly young children have been more visibly disturbed than many. Perhaps you've even heard a parent say that if it happened to their child, they would be devastated to the point of incapacity. One mother i know said she would have a breakdown requiring a permanent stay in some type of institution. She was, pardon the expression, dead serious.

I suspect that most parents, while perhaps not needing to evoke a sanatorium, can relate to these feelings.

It's one thing, however, to love your child. It's quite another to be permanently damaged should they come to a tragic end.
We live in a world of tragedy. It's one life constant that will never, ever change. No matter how advanced our medicines become, no matter how thoroughly we exert control over our environment, life will always be a manifestation of unpredictability. The specter of sudden, horrific death holds our hand every single step of our lives.
When i was a teenager, i had an unrequited crush on a girl who made me her close friend. She'd had a younger brother who'd been belly-riding his skateboard on the sidewalk, when a neighbor's car backed over him. He died. This happened long before i met their family. The event haunted them. Anyone care to wager on whether it haunts them still?
But tragedy like that is part and parcel of life. Many of us have the luxury of forgetting that, here in the United States of Affluence.
Any child you love today may be stone dead tomorrow.
If that death were to cripple you permanently, then somewhere your life went down a path it was never meant to go.
To this day, i reverse cars into driveways anywhere visibility is compromised. We do what we can.
What we can't do is plan for the senseless or horrific. When your time for grieving comes, don't hold back. Then remember that you're alive.
You can't go back. But you can be smarter about who you love, and how you love them.
If a random massacre of cherub-faced innocents makes you run to your own child and grasp them ever tighter until the demons fade, you're making the wrong choice. Think instead about a youth in Connecticut who picked up a gun. He was a child of us all, who offered up a measure of the loneliness and misery in his life. Try to figure out how you, and all of us, failed him.