Your tea is cold now. You drink it standing up, and leave the house.

Some of you are going to dislike me after you read this.

I did not have a good Natal Family Experience. I am not one who has ever had an urge to buy little pillows that say, "My sister, My friend," for example. I do not feel, as some others do, an automatic visceral bond with blood relatives. I have not found that blood is thicker than water.         
I subscribe to the belief that friends are the family you choose. All of that is, no doubt, part of my difficulty in understanding the unquestioning parental devotion to offspring.

My coworker's cellphone rings every day at four o'clock, her eighteen-year-old daughter calling to say she's safely completed the five-minute trip from home to work. No matter what's happening in the office, that call is taken joyfully. A short conversation ensues, concludes with "I love you, Sweetie. I'll see you later." It is proper to think well of  such a connection. It's a good parent who is interested in and available to a child's report of where she is, what she's doing, how she's feeling. After all, we are all familiar with the sociologists' reports on the result of parents who lack any involvement in their children's lives. It augurs well for the child growing into an adult to have someone who is always delighted to hear his or her voice, always interested in the little daily events in the adolescent life.

Here is my shamefaced admission: Overhearing that daily phone call annoys me. 

Intellectually I know that such a connection is laudable and healthy. My emotional reaction is that it's silly and treacly. An eighteen-year-old ought to be able to make a five-minute trip without reporting in for grateful congratulation. At some point, it seems to me, offspring would become simply Other People, and I would be hard-pressed to receive, daily, a solicitation of my attention from some Other Person for a report on his whereabouts, particularly when the whereabouts are within five minutes of both parties.

Emotionally I cannot grasp how major life decisions . . . whether or not to take a well-paying job far from home, or whether or not to establish a new relationship with a completely suitable significant other, for example, can reasonably be driven by the effect it has on The Beloved Child. 

"I'm not ready to ruin my child's life." 

"What? Let the kid roll with it!" I want to say. 

God knows I learned to roll early enough and I'm still here to tell the tale.

Definitely a symptom of arrested development on my part, and mean-spirited perhaps, and  but there it is.

My coworker told me once, "Having a child is not like having a pet!  From the time they're born, you're responsible for keeping them alive!" I don't know how that differs from having a pet, but presumably that's because I don't have children. It is a whole category of existence unknown to me, a proud private club to which I am not admitted. The Good Parent's attitude seems to be that the offspring never becomes a being apart; the Good Parent never sees that the offspring is no longer six years old.

I know from whence my reaction comes, and what it signifies: It is envy.  Having grown up without that solicitousness, even at my advanced age, I still want to be the child who has One Person who lives and dies by the continuation of my respiration. I always wanted that, and I never felt that I was. So I'm jealous of such a relationship. But for whatever reason, I just don't get it.

I'll stand right here while you gather stones with which to pelt me into unconsciousness.

Post title from Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies by Edna St. Vincent Millay