You do your very best for your children and they grow up and turn out like that?! They leave you, forget you, leave you to rot in your old, cold home or in the old folks’ home. That’s gratitude for you. So, father and mother, where did you go wrong? But this question is framed by the State, and this author is not interested in blaming the victim.
Father and mother, it was not your fault, it is a fault in the structure. Every individual has a bias, another has a different bias. Two uniquely individual sets of baggage make up the two adults and there’s not that many things in either bag – limited life opportunities have seen to that.
Two bags collide. A relationship of two follows – a couple exists because nothing else is allowed to exist. Within the couple’s existence, patterns and routines of behaviour emerge. Life, which is supposed to be a road, becomes another roundabout.
And into this the child is born. The child grows up on the roundabout called routine and the child repeats the habits of the parents. Whatever happened time and time again in his parents’ life happens now in theirs.
Whatever else didn’t happen in their parents’ life doesn’t happen to them. In my case, after moving from home, I flirted with being what I wanted to be before I eventually found myself back at what I had been brought up to be. I inherited the wish to cut myself off, involve myself in nothing, be wary of strangers, introspective, tidy, TV-bound, health conscious – a limited subset of human behaviour arrived at by living with too few adults. Making me a very unique blue-print of human experience who found it hard to find anyone with a compatible outlook. Fortunately for me, I fought long and hard over two decade to mitigate the damage, to re-invent myself and to eventually find myself in a long-term loving relationship.
Brought up in such narrow environments, the human searches long, hard and far too often in vain for some-one like them. And so we arrive in the lonely world of unfulfilled adult existence, until we may evolve finally and be lucky enough to find another very unique other who happens to fit our own very peculiar shape. I see the same problem all around. However much we go out and meet new people, we mostly carry the same baggage from home. The same two bags that are 10 bags short of this thing we all wanted to inherit called the ability to be really fully rounded and fully alive.
And so I pass it on. I meet someone, form a couple and repeat the mistake with my own children, repeating the same mistake and remaining stuck in the tyranny of mono-culture offered by the State – nuclear family or nothing.
To break the chain, change the structure. Make bigger homes and wider definitions of family. Allow the child to see and learn wider experience from more adults – sustained contact with many related adults, not only two. The world will change in the time it takes for all now living to die – in three generations we can be invulnerable, and free.