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Well, my Son is to be 18 in a few days and off to college in a few months. I'm even kinda hoping he'll choose to go stay with his sister in San Antonio for the summer.
Truth be told I'm fed up with raising children. And, despite the face that mine have some admirable characteristics, looking back on it now I'm of a mind that it was no where near as rewarding as I thought it might be. And, it was certainly not as rewarding to me as it was to the wife.
All my kids went through and maybe are still going through their teenage years, even though in a few days all of them will be adults. And, I assure you those have been very rough years...for them and for me and my wife.
For the life of me, I can't understand and surely can't justify why teenagers, and not just mine, tend to treat their parents with such disrespect and dismissal given all the great sacrifices parents make and the deprivation we endure on their behalf.
In science and health care, we're taught that the end result is what's important in deciding if an effort was worthy. By that measure, I guess it was worthy if only because they're well-educated, honest and responsible and caring citizens.
But I can't help feeling that for me and my wife it was 99% sacrifice and 1% reward. A thank you would have been nice once in a while. Maybe some of you know what I'm talking about.
And, there are even dark days in, well, mid-winter when I question even that 1% and lump the whole effort into the thankless category. I'm in that kind of funk now. And, when I'm there I recall some unflattering things others have said about children and teenagers.
In King Lear Shakespear wrote:
"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child."
During an annual insurance review an expatriate Polish customer of mine on the occasion of her last child leaving and on learning that I had teenagers remarked:
"Don't do anything nice for them. They'll only remember the things that piss them off."
A bit of Old-World wisdom, I suppose.
While it is true that with careful upbringing and with prudent rewards and punishments some children can achieve a level of interaction with adults that approaches gratitude, most children seem innately predisposed to an infuriating level of ingratitude. And, when they're teenagers their behavior often rises to a level of seething resentment and manifests itself almost as a burning desire to disassociate themselves from their parents and their siblings as if a decade or more of carful nurturing was, in fact, a disservice to them and that we should always remember that they didn't ask to be born.
My wife likes to remind me that it's too early to "call the game". She says it's important for them to go out and experience the trials and tribulations of life before they give credit to not only what we've done for them, but also, that what we told them about life and what they apparently never conceived could be true was exactly that, true in the most cruel fashion.
But for me that's cold comfort if comfort at all. Frankly, there's so much discontent and trouble for so many years that I'm going to have trouble forgiving it or forgetting it. I'm confident that I'll be more comfortable in having great distance between me and them. Indeed, were I asked today I'd say I had no particular interest in seeing them again and, given our experience with them, I don't hope for grandchildren.
You know, marriage for a man (or at least for me) is kinda like a young man's purchase of his first new sports car. The car is as lovely an object of lust and affection as ever there could be. And, that emotion carries you easily through the initial purchase and the false pride of ownership carries you though the first few years. Then the realities of the obligation you've entered into become obvious.
The shiny red sports car turns out to require substantial maintenance just to keep it running, a moment's inattention results in a minor accident that costs dearly and when the insurance goes up for years you're realize that absolution for that misjudgement is going to be a long ways off. Then if anything at all happens to your income, the same income you stretched so far with fanciful rationalizations for the purchase, that same highly desireable sports car quickly becomes a yoke around your neck.
Given the way I feel about it now and if I'd have known then how I'd feel about it, I'd never have gotten married in the first place. I'm now more than a quarter century older, not only in poorer shape but also in poorer health, I never achieved the level of financial security that I'd have liked because of the expenses associated with the kids and I can but look forward to a substantially lower standard of living in old age. Pity that.
At this point, I can't imagine why I made so many sacrifices for people who caused me so much trouble and grief. I grieve for the now misspent decades, the denied excitement and adventures of life that were dutifully avoided and for the romance and closeness of my marriage that was sacrificed for trivialities such as playing taxi driver and bank account to people who turned out to be so unthankful.
Not too many years ago my son, ever-thoughful, asked me what I thought a good father was. We're close, I suppose. So, I didn't think he was trying to be critical or asking me to reflect and repent. I just assume and correctly so that he was pondering his role as a father in the future. All I could muster was to say, "Son, a good father is the guy who stays when he'd rather go." For me, at least, that's just how I felt and feel now.
The only saving grace is that it is finally over. FINALLY!!!!
I told the wife last night that my intent was to diminish my commitments to the children from their current and past level of about 60 - 70% of my energy and finances to 0.6 - 0.7% now. I told her that the level of sacrifices we'd made over these decades was tantamount to have had the very blood leached from our veins. And, I told her I was intent on returning to a time when we mattered more to one another than we did to the ungrateful.
Finally, I told her that if this didn't suit her and if we were going to go down different paths on this, we were surely going to go down different paths period. I was surprised that those words came out of my mouth. But mostly I was surprised at the level of sincerity of my tone.
I guess changes are a-comin'.
LF
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Originally Posted by clt_capt
