"If you're not willing to stick your neck out and get your head lopped off for your child's welfare, then you shouldn't have procreated in the first place!"
That was me, in a recent phone call with a friend. We were discussing the dismay of divorcing adults who seem to find it impossible to keep their offspring's best interests at the heart of all their choices.
Yes. I get a tad harsh with my opinions.
And before you click away with disgust at my robustly hateful delivery, let me say that I'm daily aware of my own hypocrisy and humanity. That doesn't seem to put a dent in what spews from my mind, sometimes.
In her post, The Folly of Adults, Sharon Salzberg juxtaposes a little girl's prayer for "bad people" against the more usual grown-up behavior of objectifying "other" humans. From her recollections of the 2005 London Metro bombings to a trailer for a recent movie (Orphan), Salzberg connects the points of conspiracy in which we all engage, from insensitive to atrocious.
As Salzberg puts it, simply:
That kind of objectification lies at the heart of cruelty, heartlessness, and so much casual indifference.
Of course, the reasons we objectify other creatures -- who, as some faiths teach, are really not even separate from our own selves -- are so complex as to be nearly impossible to tease apart from our motivating drives. Nearly.
I have managed to create a family constellation that is different from the normal Divorced-with-Kids pattern. It was tough for most of our friends to fathom when I let my son's father, from whom I'd been divorced at that point for 5-ish years, move into the home that I shared with my boy and our menagerie. Fortunately, our closest friends and most of our fellow church-mates are rather wild and woolly, so they "got it" faster and with more ease than the neighbor-strangers who surround us in our conservative, middle-class enclave.
Trying to be mindful here of sounding self-glorifying, what it took for us -- me, the boy, and his father -- to meld our previously pain-filled existences into one relatively (and often discordantly) harmonious mix is simple: sacrifice.
In this household, we've all given up a lot. The point of our sacrifice is clear, however, and resonates like a dorje and bell -- our son has gained far more than we have lost. His "individual" prize expands to all around him in ways that are only partly evident now with hints of the greater good beyond.
My friend, the hapless bystander who witnessed my latest step into the chasm of un-right speech, recently declared with delight, "We are all brothers and sisters." There are no "others," though it is a frame of thought quite difficult to maintain when others seem determined to draw lines and pick sides.
Here I go with another mea culpa, and my own prayer.
