Debbie, for example, is afraid for her grandchildren because her daughter Mattie, and her son-in-law (Mattie's husband), are such martinets, and always yell at their sons (Debbie's grandchildren). Debbie said she's not afraid of dying for her own sake, but she's afraid of the consequences for her grandsons if one day suddenly she's no longer there for them. (To be clear, there's no imminent threat. Debbie's in her early seventies, and she has various ailments that are consistent with her age, including periodic bouts of long COVID and atrial fibrillation. She also has celiac disease, that seems to be slowly morphing into a more generalized autoimmune sensitivity. But she's not on a timeline, with "X years to live"!)
But then another member is worried about his children, too. (I'm pretty sure I haven't given him a name yet.) His kids—a son and a daughter—are legal adults but just barely. They were both adopted out of a dreadful situation, spent their whole childhood being oppositional, and regularly make terrible decisions. So their lives aren't going well, to nobody's surprise. And he's deeply troubled by this.
I think there was someone else too, but I forget the details.
Of course this is common. At some level, everyone who has kids wants those kids to have a wonderful life, free of the spectres that so routinely blight the lives of Other People. That's why I was so upset at the idea that Wife was going to live with Son 1: I wanted him to be able to have adventures in his life (if he wanted them, of course) and I figured there would be no adventures if he were looking after her. As a secondary concern, I feared that living with Wife would ruin his relationship with Wife, although I figured that he was honorable enough he would never throw her out on the street. (Turns out that I called that secondary concern exactly.)
And no doubt this is part of why Father was always so irritated by Wife. Of course there were a lot of factors there. Part of it was that Wife is just a very irritating person, tout simple. Part of it is that there was always some kind of weird competition between the two of them for my time and attention. But part of it must surely have been that Father wanted my life to be perfect: he wanted me never to be unhappy, and he wanted me to achieve all the dreams of greatness he himself had failed at. Well, it didn't take great powers of observation to see that Wife frequently made me unhappy. (He saw us a lot more frequently than my aunt, for instance, and she wrote this when I announced our divorce.) And it was easy to see that I wasn't achieving any Great Things in the World, a failure for which he blamed Wife. (It couldn't just be that I was feckless, unfocused, or indecisive, after all!)
So why didn't I feel like I had anything to add?
I'm sure there are multiple little reasons. These people don't know that I read Tarot, so I wasn't going to say, "Gosh, Son 2 is getting married but the divination doesn't look good!" And in general I don't want to say anything that reflects badly on a family member. Even saying, "Thank God Son 1 is finally moving away from Wife!" feels awkward to me.
But more than that, it feels like I have been distancing myself emotionally from all that for some years. I had always told the boys, as they were growing up, that I would support them through the Bachelor's Degree but not (necessarily) beyond. Now in fact I offered them both some financial support after they graduated. Son 1 lived with me for months. Son 2 was miles away, but I sent him money to pay his rent for several months until he got securely on his feet. And once each of them had successfully gotten a normal job, I told myself it was time to stop worrying and let them live their adult lives.
Of course I didn't stop worrying completely, or I wouldn't have worried about Wife moving in with Son 1. But I think that was the last major issue that I got upset over, and I spent a lot of time talking to myself about it. The fact is, I don't know what Son 1's life is going to look like. That's for him to figure out. Does looking after Wife for five years mean he'll never be Top Gun? He was never going to be Top Gun anyway. What other options might it have closed off? I don't know, but every choice closes off options. And it's not for me to worry about. It's his life, not mine. And he's a grown-up. If he sometimes makes choices that I don't like, ... well, I certainly made choices that Father didn't like. I still wanted the right to make them.
And here's the other point: Happiness isn't everything!* In many ways, my thirty years of marriage to Wife made me deeply unhappy. You know this, because you've been reading me for ... gosh, almost twenty years. But at this point I can't imagine giving it up. I learned so much, having to process that pain. It was tremendously educational. It left me a better man than I was before.
So when I listen to the stories from Debbie, or from others in Sangha, about the trials that their children or grandchildren are facing, I'm no longer so sure what to say as I might once have been. Of course I sympathize. Of course I listen deeply, and I'm sorry for their pain. But I can no longer tell whether it's a bad thing.
Of course on the surface it's bad! I recognize that. But will the children or grandchildren themselves—the ones who are suffering directly, after all—be able to transform their suffering into something of value? I don't know. Maybe. And if they do, that's wonderful.
If they don't, then they'll be unhappy. But that's more or less the normal fate of humans on earth, isn't it? That we are unhappy?
We tell ourselves and each other that we want to make progress.
- If I can overcome the mistakes my parents made in raising me, then my children will grow up with fewer mistakes in their background and therefore will be better human beings than I am.
- Then if they overcome the mistakes I made, their children will be even better.
- Pretty soon we'll have generations in which all serious problems have been eliminated!
But of course it doesn't work like that. Character flaws in one person are not necessarily caused by mistakes in his rearing or education. Some people are just rotten. And improvements don't build cumulatively.
For example: When I look at Debbie today, I see a "spiritual friend," a kalyāṇamitra, on the path of a bodhisattva. I've remarked before that I think she's a little bit of a saint. (Admittedly she lived through a lot of chaos to get there.) Her daughter Mattie, by contrast, is a martinet. The only thing that even begins to absolve her is that she honestly doesn't understand it: she takes it for granted that this is just how the world works. Naturally everybody follows all these rules fastidiously! How else could you live? But the fact that she is simple and honest doesn't really absolve her from being rigid, tyrannical, and cruel. And the point of the comparison is to refute the idea that we can build on our virtues, generation over generation, until we reach perfection.
It's not my problem.
In Epictetus's terms, it's out of my control.
So I don't need to worry about it.
And in fact, I seem to find that I worry less about my children's future than I used to. That's not because I think it will be all roses. But I'm willing to let it be however it will be.
It looks like I said something similar in this post from a couple of years ago.
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* See also this post.
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