 
                         20050713.01

     I think that criticism in any direction, be it of our
parents, of each other or of our individual selves, is very
much beside the point.  As long as I assign blame, I do not
understand; and once I understand, blame disperses like the
morning fog. Just as the obstetrician assigns blame for the
trauma of birth neither to the mother nor to the child, nor
to both, but to nature, or if you wish, in a dialectical
sense to God (Genesis 3:16) I consider my childhood
experiences a circumstance of nature; that is why I place
blame neither on my natural nor on my foster parents, and it
is to deflect blame from them, that I blame myself, partly
rhetorically and partly to savor the edification which
Kierkegaard described with the insight that as before God we
are always in the wrong.  And it is in this context, that I
contemplate the impossibility of the parents' task: on the
one hand to nurture and to protect the child, and on the
other hand to emancipate it to become him or herself:
distinct, separate and independent of the parents, who,
according to ones bias may invariably be blamed either for
overprotecting and withholding from the child its freedom
(and its patrimony) or for neglecting and abandoning it;
parents who must be concomitantly the objects of our love and
honor because they nurtured us or because they set us free or
both, even while these two modes of parenting are in direct
contradiction.  The fact is that we are alive, no matter how
oppressive or how painful our childhood.  The "right" course
of action, be it for the parent or for the child, is a
"golden mean", an Aristotelian ideal, which like the
reciprocal of a mathematical limit, vanishes the more
assiduously and conscientiously one attemps to seize it.

                          * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
