Why Your Family Is Destined To Fail
Why Your Family Is Destined To Fail
If you didn't read Wanda's post about truancy, (un)excused absences, and taking care of oneself, go back there right now read it. Then re-read it and then learn from her.
And let me be the first to say Amen, Sister Wanda.
Kudos to you for understanding the most valuable thing a mother, single or partnered, can do for herself and for her children is nurture herself. The single most important lesson she can offer as a parent is to teach her children, by example, to do the same.
Girlfriend, props to you for having the balls to stand up and say it true.
It's not just the singe-parenting road that is so hard to hoe in our society, it's parenting period. I've walked both paths these past few years and it ain't no easier on the two-parent trail.
The constant, endless strain of doing leaves us with little to give our children and destroys many a marriage. Personally, it devastates my relationship with Sam over and over and over. It is so impossible to build a healthy, loving marriage and to simultaneously, constantly, compete with him for the time and space implicit in keeping sane.
Sure, there are a dozen reasons marriages tank, but here's the one I'm talking about: Our culture does nothing to support and nurture young families. Not a single freaking thing.
"Family Values?" What a crock of crap.
On the face of this earth 170 countries guarantee legislated paid family leave for birth, death, illness, caretaking of loved ones, and mental health. Ninety-eight of those nations offer a minimum of 14-paid-weeks leave. Sweeden grants it's new mamas more than a year of paid maternity.
Four, only FOUR, countries on this big blue ball provide nothing. Not one red cent: The United States of America, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.
For us, for We the People of the "free-ist," wealthy-ist, most resource-rich nation on the planet, properly caring for ourselves and our loved ones is a luxury afforded only to the richest.
There's the problem.
Our self-proclaimed reverence for "family values" and our "pull yourself up by your boot straps," puritanical, dog-eat-dog brand of over-idealized capitalism are mutually exclusive.
Our system is flawed to the core because it is built on the broken belief that we are playing on a level field, that given the same set of circumstances every free human being has an equal opportunity to thrive, the mantra that all men are created equal.
Thank God we are not. We are not all created equal.
In our differences — our blemishes and our flaws — lies our humanity. In our humanity lies the responsibility to nurture and protect especially the most fragile among us, those who struggle.
And yet, this deeply fractured system of capitalism and competition teaches us that what you don't have, you haven't worked hard enough to earn. And what I have earned is mine, mine, mine. It conditions us, rich and poor alike, to blame poverty on the poor and suffering, on those who struggle. Those who most need a village, we fail them and fail them again.
We imprison more of our own population than any other country on this earth and our prisons bulge with those whom our system has neglected. The poor, the minorities, the learning-disabled. Eighty-percent of inmates have learning disabilities for which they never received adequate support to understand, overcome, and succeed. Many of them brilliant. The statistic nearly as high among the working class poor, whose gifts we lose for lack of nurture.
Sam and I haggle over an hour here or an evening there, for the time it takes to go to the gym or grab a drink with friends, for the time it takes to nourish ourselves enough that we may in-turn nourish our children. We work constantly.
Still, I can seldom understand my poverty as anything less than moral failure, because all this wealth and luxury is mine to have, if only I'm willing to work a little harder for the right to relax, and the time care for my family.
The most astonishing statistic in our society is not how many marriages fail — mine included — it is that any family ever survives this atmosphere of unprecedented pressure and unattainable support.
Kudos, Wanda, for having the wisdom to value your childrens' well-being and your own above someone else's bottom line, for finding small ways — even when it means playing hookie — to nurture yourself and find balance in a society driven by profit margins and test scores at the cost of well being, at the cost of its families and of its children.
Thank you for having courage and the wisdom and the balls not only to do this, but to step forward and own it out loud.
May we all have the spirit and grace to do the same.
Comments
Post new comment