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Marriage and Parenting
By John Sammon
Marriage and parenting are among the few highly-challenging
skills for which there are no qualifications, and for which no
previous experience is necessary, and for which people just
assume they are doing it right, making much of it up as they go
along.
Sounds like government.
No knowledge is required. Okay, you take out a meaningless
marriage license, a bureaucratic scrap of paper, by paying a
small fee. But nobody asks you, “are you a moron?”
“Do you have an income?”
You're not required to pass a test, like you do to get a
driver‘s license.
For example, a multiple choice test like this:
1. If your wife overcooked the spaghetti, would you?
A. Beat her.
B. Yell
C. Say, “let's eat.”
D. All of the above.
No such test is required. Is it any wonder so many marriages
fail? You don't know what the hell you're doing. You probably
got married in the first place because you want what you thought
would be some steady, great sex. But sex alone won't keep it
going, and when children show up…?
In a one-child household, there's a real chance you'll both
spoil the kid and the child will play one parent off against the
other. If that child is a girl, she may become daddy's girl and
defy her mother.
If the child is a boy, he might become a momma's boy and compete
for the mother's attention against the father, the famous
Oedipus Complex.
The father could become exiled from the wife's attention as she
dotes on the kid, or visa versa.
There are a million combinations.
Since marriage and parenting can have a profound impact on not
only your life, but up to as many as eight others (if you want
more kids than this you're already insane), let's do something
similar.
Let's fly a space ship without any knowledge of the equipment.
It's a disaster waiting to happen.
Okay, call me a negativist, a pessimist. But before you do, how
many marriages last? There are some.
Okay! Here's something nobody, no marriage counselor, no priest
ever talks about….EVOLUTION. Your new spouse won't be the person
in twenty years that he or she is today. I'm not the same person
today I was in 1980.
NOBODY….I MEAN NOBODY…NEVER..SITS DOWN AND TELLS THE OTHER
PERSON WHAT THEY EXPECT FROM THAT PERSON FROM THE GET-GO.
And even if they did, how do you know what you'll want in twenty
years?
Couples grow apart, because they change. The dinosaurs couldn't
adapt to changing conditions. Can you?
Whatever attractions (mostly physical, sometimes money, not
usually heart or character) brought you together, will have to
withstand decades of shocks, family deaths, career failure,
alienation, overwork, substance abuse, heath problems, and petty
irritations that only grow with time.
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