How to Raise

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” 

-Frederick Douglass.

If you want to have and drive a car in any given modern society, a license is required. You'll need to have a degree of knowledge in order to operate the vehicle, in order to navigate the traffic rules and regulations of the road ahead. 

You'll need not just the know-how but also a license certifying so.

Yet, when it comes to our children, which will one day take the steering wheel into the future, no such understanding is required; no written consensus on this matter necessary, which is mind-boggling, considering how much more significant it is. 

We can safely say that raising a child is far more a complex task than driving a car. 

How many people hold a parental certificate? Vocationally, yes, perhaps; but no one asks the potential mom-and/or dad-to-be about their credentials in raising a child. 

Wouldn't it be great if it was even proposed as a vocational alternative? It wouldn't require an intensive know-how, and the simple skills the potential new parents acquire will transform society as it is. 

The investment would be insignificant, it may even come out of the pockets of these would-be parents. If you think a little bit of time spent in know-how now is expensive, it is mere penniwise compared to the wastefulness a lifelong commitment to ignorance brings, which roughly speaking, amounts to more misery in the world.

We can't quantify human suffering. But it is, in the end, unavoidable. And a tiny investment in the tiniest versions of us will greatly benefit humanity, not just in the long run; its effect will be immediate. It may advert the end of so much unnecessary drama brought forth by psychiatric ailments in adulthood which stem from childhood. But it also may presently better assess the evils that dwell hidden in the psychotic collective best. 

The average irresponsible parent may be prevented from incurring in an unwanted pregnancy just because of this added layer of responsibility. And even if there's irresponsible behavior,  there'll be a way to correct further mistakes. See, an unwanted child suffers from before he or she is even conceived. Enlightenment greats the like of Rousseau's posited their diction on child welfare while at the same time putting his own up for adoption, and he was at the epicenter of Romanticism. My mother always was criticized for being a middle school dropout which were to blame, as the wisest of her brothers and perhaps the smartest man I ever came across her brother, for her awful parenting skills; while my dad was exonerated, held in high regard, for being the first to graduate from college in his numerous family. Mom, however "awful", stuck with her children. Dad didn't. It probably contributed to her decent into dementia many years later, as raising three kids on her own perhaps drove her a bit mad day in and out. Society had little to do with a woman who chose to be on her own, even if it meant raising three of her kids without much contribution from her husband, the man who bore her not one, but every last one of those kids. Her effort has been erased, she was called derogatory names by members of her family but a new age was dawning where women would be no longer subject to their name and no doubt, in my mind, she was a pioneer in it. 

As for my biological dad, it's all been forgotten. I'd say "forgiven" but therein, the act of forgiveness, is a slight shred of ego attached. And of course, we may think of unforgivable acts but especially because of their extravagant nature these should, above all, be forgotten. Forgiveness, like all things ego-related, is far more cumbersome: it absurdly elevates the absolved and puts the benefactor in a condescending position. 

It'a not that the wrong-doer doesn't deserve forgiveness, if sincere he or she may so, but regardless of the sincerity the recipient displays in the asking, nothing outranks the part played by the donor, and giving said "forgiveness" requires much to represent a good enough transaction, it reeks too much of egocentricity. The magnanimous godlike feeling that derives from letting the most heinous, abject occurrence truly slide requires a small enough runway to spread its wings, take flight and soar above like birds, not an apparatus airliner. Life's far too short to linger for too long on anything; it takes a masochistic streak to dwell on vengeful thoughts. You may feel the sting of the slight and suffer it whole like briefly touching an overheated pan by its metal frame if not "handled" properly, but the wisest instinct to follow is to just drop it. It is when you hold on to undesired proverbial pans that you continuously burn. The moment you catch your mind committing to it, you ought to drop it off mentally and maybe reenact the action of invisibly letting something burning hot fall off your hand. Physical wounds oftentimes bear a scar that if fresh may still hurt, but the hardened coal-burning sensation is all but gone and with it the need to relive the incendiary incident. In our social upbringing, we are dealt with resentment, with recurring elements that remind us over and again the affront committed, the futile exercise of guilt, the social condemnation of shame. There are guilt and shame societies: in guilt societies, like ours, the individual is to blame whereas in shame societies like China or Japan it falls on you or any member of your family. Therefore, it goes without saying that in guilt society we may see crimes more rampant since no one's coming to get a family member or a loved one to pay for our sins. In shame societies, criminality is far more rare, for the same reason, but not only does shame but also honor is bestowed upon your family if you, for example, excel. This makes sense in the long-term, since the family or clan, your loved and cherished kind, succeed if you do, as equally as your downfall impacts them.

No one deserves to be forgiveness is means of personal gratification or momentary relief, it may occur again, it may become an act, to be perpetuated again, and again. Forgiveness, as it is, is an act that absolves the one giving it, not necessarily the one receiving. Therefore, you ought to forgive because if you think about it, is a selfish action, aimed at absolving you from the pain and the need for another to repent for the slight committed is unnecessary. You give too much importance, far more than required, if you hold on to your grieving; absolve yourself from the psychological load, an act that may require some practice, but no witnesses or jurors, no spectators. The more you show how little you are invested in the small things, you bigger you become. The more that the big, hefty things become lighter, as it happens in weightlifting when your muscle mass increases and therefore your capacity for more as well, the less your load becomes, the bigger things you can take on. Exacting punishment is a waste of breath, a horrible investment of resources. 

Did I resent my dad? Not at all. Growing up, I heard mom complain excessively about him just not constantly, but I knew she had always been sort of a nagger, and rightly so. Instead, I agreed with her just to shut her up and held high my image of my father which did not match the real one, but was more apt a model than the one-sighted ill version mother showed. I was proved right one afternoon in Venezuela when I stayed with my dad. We were walking under a bridge filled with street vendors, and among them I devised a bookseller who had a huge Spanish language dictionary. I was seventeen then, and already a renown writer in high school as I had helped write papers for students, among which were some A.P. (Advanced Placements) ones. The vendor asked for far more than my father had and so he walked with me back to his apartment and brought back an encyclopedia he had since his college days to bargain with. He made a pretty penny in the exchange and we both got a piece of the parental pie, except mine was a bigger piece. And in that act of kindness, he absolved himself. It did not take long to intuit just how different life would've been if this man had been in my life all along.  

Mother was as perfectly capable of happiness as I can think any human being capable of. But always stranded for cash, and short of money, she was far from generous. She'd become friend with our friends, and played along with us as if she were one giant kid on the floor, eat off the same plate she fed us, be less a parent and more like an older sister, take time off motherhood to live her life for a few years in our childhood and listened avidly to any advice I gave her. It was because of me that she quit cigarettes. And I knew by the time I was eleven years old that I was the adult of the house.. Before she could bring us all under the same roof, she'd always keep in contact with her children, far more often than father did and showed a great deal of remorse for her absence. I made sure to nurture her guilt to make sure one day to fulfill her promise, as she'd promised to, come unite us all under one roof. She did, but not without paying the price of waking up each and everyday to figure out what to day in order for her to put food on the table. 

Nothing bothered her deeply, so I knew whenever she appeared shaken, it had to be something really big, bigger than me, so I learned to grow slightly faster. In the world she grew up, it was hard enough for a man to find employment, let alone a woman on her own with three kids. 

We tend to romanticize motherhood. They learn to make great sacrifices: panda moms always have twins, but out of the two, panda mom chooses to nurture only one of them, I had learned. By choosing her first born son, to the U.S., she may have felt like it was the sacrificial lamb, but I felt like the one sibling spared in a line of identically "loved triplets". 

As humanists, we have a long road ahead. Two thousand years ago, an ecological heartbeat away, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more outstanding philosophical figure like that of Seneca. Yet, in arguing against anger, this wisest among men of his age, exemplified how to keep your composure even while committing infanticide against your enemies. Biblical passages, likewise, truly make infanticidal references, so the subject is not uncommon in universal literature. It is only in modern times that the importance of the more defenseless among us get the praise and recognition deferred. 

Seneca's rhetorical excesses may have contributed to his demise under the rule of a tyrannical ruler he had helped tutor but not for this particular subject. Back in those days, life was far too harsh to consider raising ailing children (oto which the famed stoic did not oppose either). But we gotta think how economists determine unwanted pregnancies as cause for the rise in criminality. The argument is well documented; as for the remedy nothing more than abortion. We can do better than that. And of course I was far more liberal in my youth. But after having children of my own and experiencing in the flesh the ills of said folksy cures, I am far less to the left. But it doesn't make me right. It's easy to form opinions but at the core we ought to implement every plausible solution,  have the necessary infrastructures to aid those in need without righteousness. Incidentally, it was the right that started programs of assistance so as to sustain their claim for life. It is a sad irony, contradictory in terms, that you can be pro-life and yet for the death penalty. It should be plural: pros. For what are broken men if not lost children? 

Educate-mandate would-be parents, and see our world thrive. It is a disservice, not only for men but also mankind in general. Abandoning men, aren't we harming their children, too? Their families? Just like you can't make a good father overnight, it takes years and years of systematic neglect to raise a bad father. In the movie Desperado, there's a beautiful phrase that captures the essence of chaos: "It is easier to pull the trigger than to play the guitar." And it's true, it takes time to play the guitar but I'll argue that among men there are far more inclined to play the guitar than to pull the trigger. It's often the ones passing judgment on those who find themselves on the pulling-trigger side faster than a bullet. Because we abhor and condemn atrocities, we tend to be blinded and rush to conclusion; in other words, we "pull the trigger" beforehand. It's not like a man wakes up one day and decides that it is a good day to be either: a bad or a good father. Both good and evil take time, genes and grooming, nurture and nature.