Welcome to Love

“I raised you, I fed you, I paid for the roof over your head, and from this you should respect me.” This utterance is often repeated from parent to child. It lacks a fundamental understanding of human necessity. It almost seems logical that the person who spends resources on another deserves unconditional respect. This is precisely the line of reasoning mentally manipulative parents push onto their children. When said by one who is in charge of raising another, the latter can be sure the first is manipulating.

We usually find the dumbfounded parent relying on this reasoning when a child is old enough to push back against years of unchecked tyranny. Here the parent is finally forced to come up with one good reason for all their past negative actions, and this is the final stupid answer.

The child begs for nourishment that was never received in the form of push-back. The parent, often idiotically shutoff from emotional reason, will rebuke (oppose, refute) their child’s push-back. Sadly, the child’s seed of discontent is their parent’s very own poisonous boomerang action, a revenant arrow. Though it appears to come from the child, the seed was truly planted by the parent, and as such the child only reflects it back; as they should. I find this remarkably beautiful.

At this point it’s often too late for the child to overcome this need because the parent is an unchangeable, tyrannical disaster. I have witnessed, as clear as day, adults who follow this tragic character arc. One after the other, they continue to go down this road, causing years of suffering for the ones they claim to love. In actual fact they risk putting to ruin the lives of their descendants for generations. 

Let me tell you how this arc often ends – the parent is given several warnings by those they are responsible for, they ignore and even rebuke them, and as a consequence the family unit goes up in flames. Naturally the parent loses what was dearest to them and finally dies from or with extreme guilt, regret, or the false belief that they were right the whole time, dying as a martyr for their viewpoint. This last stance is the improvable, immovable, undefeatable line of defense, for no one can argue against it. A martyr dies for a cause, the cause being irrefutable – even if the cause only proves destructive in nature.

Say a man wishes to start a business. He takes money earned from his savings and in addition obtains a loan. With his accumulated resources he begins a business. In the early days the fruitfulness of the endeavor are hard to predict since the business is being built and nearly no sales are made at this stage. As time goes on, success and failure occurs, and the man rides the wave of joy and frustration in turn. One day the business, once beaming with promise, now takes a sharp decline away from the expected upwards trajectory. For whatever reason – the business owner’s unfamiliarity with the market, the product, the clients, competitors, the limitations, scaling costs, lack of leadership ability, and so on – the entire enterprise sinks into bankruptcy. The business man, with all of his resources entirely spent, is left with nothing except disappointment and time lost without the desired return. Does he then turn to the business and scold it? Does he shout, “Why did you not succeed as I had desired? I sunk thousands of dollars, perhaps even hundreds of thousands into you! I’ve purchased an office to house your affairs and carry out your work! I have hired others to build and maintain you! And still, after all this, you fail, and bring me back nothing!” No, the business man can only blame himself for he decided to take on the endeavor and failed it.

As with the business, a child is not simply a receptacle of resources. It must be grown appropriately. Each parent has a duty to provide a set of obvious resources to their children; food to eat and grow (fundamental nutrition), a safe place to live which is devoid of physical danger (fundamental safety), and a set of parents which exude the warmth of the sun on a cloudless day (love). To love a child is not only to feed it and keep it under a roof – even monstrous kidnappers dispense these basic provisions to their victims. Food and shelter are survival mechanisms. Love is the mechanism of prosperity.

Imagine laying in the sun with your eyes closed, a slight breeze moving across your face, and the sound of trees brushing to-and-fro. The comfort and trust felt by the body and mind in that moment is what a child should feel from a parent. Further it is what each human should feel from each other. Unfortunately those parents who have spent their resources only to find their child despising them have missed the key resource, the key ingredient; the food of love.

I know a great many talented and brilliant youth in my life, ruined by the stupid tyranny of their caretaker – be it parent or superior. One is a young musician with a heart of gold, but a broken family follows her every move. What a useless endeavor it is for her to fight both the extraordinarily difficult trade of mastering her instrument, and the perpetual violent outbursts that continue to chip away at her sanity. There are those who say “Well, she can use this situation to become stronger, tougher.” Please realize in that process, some lose the battle because the pain is overbearing; the ones who make it only do so scarred. The outcome is frightening degrees of physical and mental strife the likes of which my eyes have well received. To believe the path to greatness is achieved through punishment is a suboptimal approach taken by those too cowardly to love.

I know another who has faced suicides, accidents, and wars that have betrayed her mind and body. And yet she is brilliant in her field of study. These tragedies have all but completely reduced her capacity to partake in them.

Another I know, along with her siblings, are beaten by an extremely aggressive parent. How can this person flourish their true gifts in such an environment? Their entire life is consumed in protection of their siblings, fear of abuse, and the mental anguish of this never ending trip through hell on earth. All this, provided by the one and only provider of resources – the parent. How ironic.

To properly nourish another we must act akin to the fertilizer that fuels the seed into a fruit-bearing plant of an extraordinary blossom. For optimal growth, the fertilizer must contain not just a fraction but all the proper nutrients. Any attempt to provide insufficient or wrong nourishment will simply burn the seed to a useless crisp. For humans it is not much different, only it is not in the form of Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium, light and water. Without love, the physical ingredients that nourish a human will largely have a subdued effect. Don’t mistake objects for love