You work so hard to provide your kids a better life. You saved up for that downpayment, you built up all that equity, slowly, month after month for years of payments. You worked so hard to achieve something, to build something—a name, a business, a life that you can someday pass to them. It swells you with pride to think of it: Soon this will all be theirs.
It’s what parents, what providers have been doing for as long as there has been civilization. Many of them, maybe even most of them have also been lying to themselves the entire time. This was a cover for their ambitions. This was a justification for their absence. This was compensation for the love or affection they weren’t giving.
The timeless and brilliant novel All the King’s Men (grab at the Painted Porch!) climaxes in a haunting scene at the hospital. The relentless, ambitious—and once decent—Willie Stark had neglected his family to become a powerful politician. He modeled the worst behavior for his son. He pushed him to play football against his wife’s wishes. And now their son has suffered a terrible, potential fatal accident on the field. As they wait for news from the doctor, Willie tries to console himself and his wife about the good that can come out of it. They can name a wing in the hospital after his son. They can make his memory live forever.
She stops him cold, finally telling him what he needed to hear long ago. “Those things don’t matter,” Lucy tells him. “Oh, Willie, don’t you see? Those things don’t matter. Having somebody’s name cut on a piece of stone. Getting it in the paper. All those things. Oh, Willie, he was my baby boy, he was our baby boy, and those things don’t matter, they don’t ever matter, don’t you see?”
Don’t you see? These things you work so hard on, of course they matter, but also they don’t. And they never have. Your babies do. They’re all that ever have mattered. Start acting accordingly.
