Apple Tree

There are things you want your children to get from you. Your vanity wants them to look like you more than they look like the other person in your elected (or, in post-Dobbs America, increasingly unelected) duumvirate of procreation, sure. Even if you're a sad, ugly bastard, somehow knowing there's one other person stuck with that distressed hairline and impractical overbite will make you feel less alone in the world. Plus you'll know exactly what to say when they come home shunned by the playground monsters in their peer group. Societies changes in lots of interesting ways, but at least we can count on the consistency of children's inhumanity to children.

Humans are animals and all animals really want are a) a reliable source of snacks and b) to propagate the species. The food thing I sorted out by being born in late 20th century America to lower middle class white people, which in the scope of all of human history, is like winning the lottery. There were loads of people wealthier than us and we even dipped our toes in being full-on poor for a while, but compared to a early 20th century Russian peasant or something, we were skating. A week's worth of Top Ramen meals sounds depressing but only when you compare it to sporadic servings of warm beets or the occasional treat of shoe-leather soup.

It's definitely true in the final debunking of the lie that was the Baby Boom mindset and postwar America, infinite growth is not possible, no matter what the private equity fund that just bought your kids' school distressed school district try to sell you. As GenX became parents and the Millennials became adults behind us, it became pretty clear to everyone pretty quickly that the expectation that every generation was going to be materially better off than the previous one was just another advertising slogan sold to us by General Motors, in the days before General Motors had to change its name to Motors Liquidation Company for a while. The 21st century, it turns out, doesn't know who you are and doesn't give a fuck who your daddy is. If it can't eat you now, it will continue to pummel and tenderize you until you are thoroughly edible, just like everything else. And your kids are next.

They have to figure this shit out on their own, which I'm happy to help with, as much as I can, but it's the wild fucking west out there. My oldest lives with me, even though he has a full time job, because apparently this is the worst time ever to be under 30. There isn't anything that doesn't cost like 300% more than what it did in, like, 2015 and oh by the way, the air is on fire.

You do what you can. You help out where it's feasible, without being too co-dependent. You give advice when asked, or with passive-aggressive noncommittal grunts when they don't, because some traditions should be honored. Did you say "blockchain" to me? Hm. Uh-huh.

Whatever your intention, they're going to ape what you do to some degree anyway, for better or for worse. They might have learned to drink from the bad-seed kids in the neighborhood, just like you suspected, but you know them being beer-drunk at 10 am on a football Sunday is more familiar--literally familiar--than you'd like to acknowledge.

At the point of implementation, of manifestation, nature vs. nurture ceases to be a relevant question. There's just the way things are and now we gotta figure shit out. No matter what your intentions, no matter how much therapy you do or how hard you run in exactly the opposite direction from the nightmare ghouls you got stuck with for parents when trying to model behavior for your own kids, there are going to be cracks. And no matter what else you present, those cracks are sometimes going to be the only interesting thing they see on you, so they home right in, study, absorb, until you see the same faint fault lines forming on them.

Like for me, and I say this with some shame, I went out of the country (Switzerland) last year, first part of July. Had a great time, but came back with goddamned COVID. This year, what do all three of my kids do? Travel out of the country (Japan), first part of July, come back with goddamned COVID.

You can only do your best, but all parenting is failure to some degree. Cycles of dysfunction aren't impenetrable, but the vigilance and intervention required to break them are beyond us in every single instance. You can keep them from becoming gambling addicts like your dad or from the irredeemable mistake of joining a college improv troupe like your grandma did, but you're not perfect. You can't be. The other part of parenting is acceptance. They're here to replace you. And when their own kids go to, I don't know, New Zealand for two weeks in some future July and come back with some future COVID, all you can do is be there and tell them: you know. They did their best. It just wasn't that good in the end, really.