The generations

Children make us think of family and the future. Have a child and you will never sleep the same way again. That’s what one learns over the years. Children signify change. They change very quickly in their early years. They change everything all about them. They bring about change wherever they are. It is not the child’s fault. The human organism is designed that way.

Otherwise, the human would be a shark, which, once born, is free to wander off on its own. Humans are like whales. Whales need to be nurtured and fed by their mothers months after they are born. They stay with the pod for most of their lives.

Humans are the same way. The human must be nurtured by its mother to survive for months after birth. In the years that follow, it must be taught the most basic lessons of survival. And because of this humans invent collective constructs like art, literature, culture, education and religion. They work like a complex fabric of relationships. Which is why a child coming into a family will change everything in that family.

The child changes as it grows in a way predictable only to some extent. The most fundamental are what may be predicted. The child must be fed. It must be cleaned on a regular basis. It has sleeping patterns that do not adapt to the parents’ needs and cycles. And so the parents themselves adapt to these. This would seem immediately difficult but not quite as difficult as when the child becomes more conscious of such a thing as its own will, and how it can affect this in its immediate environment. It is how it learns and grows.

A child must be talked to. It must be talked to even when it seems to understand nothing at all. It must be talked to so it can learn to speak. A parent can’t afford to go and say, the child doesn’t talk. Why should I speak with it? It doesn’t work that way. And yet when the child does begin to talk, seldom will it say anything that you expect. As one comedian once said, “Kids say the darnest things!”

Indeed, what a kid does say will change you forever. Before having your child, you could could put a distance between you and other humans, even your own spouse. But what distance will a child respect between it and the world all around? Not much. The human child expects to be loved, respected and tolerated as if it were its inherent right. It will presume that until it learns that it is not the right thing to do with a particular item, even a particular human, in its environment. And when it learns this, it will learn to keep a guarded and graduated distance between that and itself.

This distance is dynamic. It changes over the years. When children are only babies this distance is as thin and permeable as human skin. This distance can only increase over the years through adolescence and adulthood. This increase of distance is inevitable. And there would seem to be a sense of tragedy about it, a parent must have to learn to accept certain aspects of this as part of learning how to grow up as the father or mother of another human being. It is always a peculiar narrative.

The only time a parent can actually be physically intimate with another human is when that human is only a baby. There is a wonderful holiness about this closeness. Nothing smells better than a little baby after you have cleaned it from soiled diapers. Little by little, the little baby smells less nice as you both grow up. The smell is only a metaphor to other things. And when the child becomes another man or woman, there is a lengthening distance that must be expected and accepted, with the small note that this happens rather too quickly for most of us.

And then, you look behind you only to find how old you’ve both become. The child didn’t grow up as expected. It grew to be as hard-headed as you were. But you have less to worry about what it has or will become. It will become like you, but only to some extent.

This is how the generations turn and work their way into the years. And then you learn how the generations have little to do with things like family names and family fortunes. In the light of other things, these are only the mundane. The essential is how you both affected, even changed, each other over the years. And still continue to do so despite kilometers of distance between each other.