Look on my kids, ye mighty, and despair!

For the better part of four months, I have been ignoring all work that does not relate to pursuing a career, which is unfortunately a side effect of our non-leisure-based economy. Seems I need to inherit lots of money to really contend in the marketplace of leisure. If only I had been born in an era and family that has either never existed or been statistically almost impossible to be born into.

I don't count time spent with my family as work, although I should--it involves many more strategic decisions and careful calculations than anything I do (or anyone else does) at the workplace. If we had wires attached to our brains that projected mental activity at all times, the time spent actually parenting would look like aurora borealis on the small screen. This is why Utah women have the largest amount of depression prescriptions--a good chunk of them choose to stay home to watch kids rather than have a "career," which means that they are doomed to spending the rest of their life producing rainbows on the MRI feedback screen. When I am at home, my brain always hurts, and it is not because I am tired from the day, it is because I have to deal directly with comments like this: "I should get dessert because Henry hit me but it was an accident, but I thought it was real so I hit him back but now he says that my hit was an accident and it is not that late." Deal with that--do not parse the sentence for meaning, although that is strenuous enough, but rather figure out what to do or say in response, knowing that your answer will produce a momentary life or death situation. Handling these kinds of utterances at a constant flow is completely disorienting, and I am glad my kids go to school during the day so someone can handle those comments for me, usually someone who gets paid less than a bus driver and has to deal with 24 kids simultaneously, all of them using a potent combination of crazy logic and extreme emotionalism.

So being with a family is work, and not very rewarding, if reward means something you get in return that you can control. If I am rewarded for my work, I get money or something, to be used at my discretion and under my command. There is no corresponding reward for being at home because the only "reward" that is recognized is a child's success, whatever that is. Is it a reward to have your child hug you and say "I love you" every night? I guess, but someone who can be completely satisfied with that as a reward must have trained themselves to cherish monotony and empty gestures. The "I love you" hug is usually performed in a really messy room an hour after bedtime. Besides, the kids' love for you probably has little correspondence to the amount of brain exertion you used in parenting them. Sometimes it is the opposite: the less work you do, the more they say it. Kids are their own: they are rarely concerned with our sense of reciprocation. No reward, no reciprocation, just response. If your reward is that your kid gets A's in school or is captain of the high school football team, that is not a reward for your efforts, that is just a kid who decides to do something well, or has good genes. Besides, that idea suggests that those parents whose kids are not A students or football players did not parent well, which seems ridiculous. In fact, just as often, the captain of the football team or the A student has crappy parents and the bad student that can't play piano has really good parents.

Some humans do things that are deemed successful and some humans do things that are not deemed successful. The strange combination of genetics, nurture, and soul that characterizes a child has ways of always moving beyond or around any logical understanding, and parents in search of markers of success are doomed to be annoying, and doomed to be doomed, not only because they talk about their child's "successes" more than they need to but also because they have put their faith in a model of recompense that is supposed to reflect back on them, only it will always fail.

A few days ago, I had a dream that I was in a hospital bed with all my posterity around me, and I looked out at my grandkids, and one of my kids (unrecognizable--it was a dream, so these kids looked like the adult children you see in the movies) said, "You see, Grandpa? Look at all this! This is your legacy! This is what you have left behind!" I looked at a bunch of strangers and nodded my head, unable to speak (again, it was a dream, and words don't come as quickly as images in dreams--again, like the movies). When I woke up, I realized I had had a nightmare. Who were these people that I called my posterity? Where they mine? Was anything mine? I kept thinking of Shelley's "Ozymandias":

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I wondered if any of the human beings in my dream, my posterity, were any indicators of success on my part. Rather, they seemed to stare back at me with the same unknowability with which I silently looked at them. I didn't know if they were successful humans or not--how would I even gauge that? Anyone can produce posterity--that is not necessarily anything special. I never think of myself as an indicator of a grandparent's or ancestor's legacy. I mostly think of myself as just another pox on that legacy. Have I been successful? If anyone had ever produced a definition of success that made sense to me, I might be able to answer that question.

What I love about "Ozymandias" is that it critiques our idea of legacy, of self-importance that comes from other selves that happen to share the same name or blood as us. My sense is that Shelley is playing on the idea of posterity being as numerous as the "sands of the sea" when he says the "lone and level sands stretch far away." That is, we can have lots of sand but it ends up flattening out into waste, covering over itself constantly. Our posterity as the sands of the sea, burying any sense of coherent success.

This sounds hopeless, doesn't it? But not really: let me turn it. About the dream: I recognized I had a nightmare of existential dread in the face of my posterity only after thinking about my dream. During the dream, I was really happy, at least until one of my nameless kids commented on the situation. The moment, though, in which everyone was together was great--could have gone on forever. It was only when I was asked to think of the implications of everyone being together that the moment was ruined. I don't want implications--I just want the moment! If I would have had my tongue in the dream, that is what I would have said. You see, all of those unknowable faces contained within them a series of choices made or choices yet to be made, emotions felt, experiences had, and all that. They were so different from me, and I from them, but I loved being in their presence precisely because they were all part of a thing that united us, however arbitrary it seemed at the time, and that thing brought us together to face each other.

My sense is that parenting has no reward other than itself. There is no reciprocal design here, only the opportunity to do something that requires more of our brain power than any other activity in the world, and do it in the presence of other brains working. Parenting is the art of experience, lived at such an intimate level that to think of recompense, "success," is to diminish the immediacy of it. I often wonder about all the reasons we are on the earth ("to be tested" is just a minor one of many, as far as I am concerned), and I am convinced that the experience of interacting with kids, or interacting with parents, or with spouses or siblings or friends, is, in its perpetual immediacy, the reason. There can be no simulation of those moments, and there certainly are no quantifiable results, and in order for those moments to work, you need bodies, minds, souls, and contexts that can never be duplicated. I have a sense we give short shrift to experience in favor of results, even when the results often belie experience. Life is not a sport, or maybe it is if the winning and losing was completely based on the team that was most self-conscious about its interesting and cool moments, and could understand them as important in real time.

Some of these thoughts came after having been taught a rather crude version of the "Plan of Salvation" by the local Elders. The lesson struck me as overly assertive, and different than the way I had thought of that plan. My own sense is that there is a plan in place, and the Mormons have the structure more defined than any other religion as far as I know, and I believe in that structure, but we don't know anything else of much consequence, and any pretense or supposed knowledge that "these people will go here and those people will go there" seems to me strangely preposterous. Think of it this way: rituals, like a baptism in water, have structure--in fact, they might be the only structured thing in a very unstructured existence, and that is why we need them, but all that goes into the performance of the ritual--how we feel upon performing them, where we came from, who we are thinking about, who is administering, what he or she is thinking about--those are all aspects of an unknowable universe that make life worth living and experience immediate.

I would love to tie all this up, but I won't. A friend of ours recently declared how her home-schooled kids read five grades beyond their age and do algebra and all sorts of stuff. The conversation was like an awful Christmas Card in performance, and we came away feeling annoyed and violated, and just a little sad that our own kids didn't read five grades above their level. There are a thousand questions that might put this mother's comments about her kids in perspective: aren't grade levels arbitrary in home schooling? Are they also operating at a sixth-grade level socially? What are they reading? Does their reading reflect on their interactions with others? With who? Is there a model of learning that they might be attuned to besides the home? bla bla bla homeschooling is weird. What lingered the longest from her comments, though, was the sense that these facts had been labelled "successes" that had very little to do with the children themselves. Those facts will soon be like "lone and level sands" stretching far away. I wish my kid could also read at a sixth-grade level, but why do I wish that? To say it? Am I Ozymandias: "Look on my works, and despair!"? Of course I want that, but that is because I have been indoctrinated by the priestcraft of success, progress, competition. I think I'd be much happier, and smarter, spending time parenting in the moment rather than Parenting with the capital P. Seems like the kind of parenting that has no telos is the anti-Ozymandias, and the greatest anti-depressant, unless of course it requires you to use your brain to such a degree that your brain hurts, and it does. There is no reward for parenting, and if you think there will be, then you already missed it.