When you are a young adult, the clever and important question to ask is - "If x% of families are dysfunctional, what is the function of the family?" It is a time when you need to define yourself as an adult, as having an identity separate from the expectations and infantilizations of your parents. It is also a time of socializing with peers and learning that their families are as whacky and dysfunctional as your own.
By the time you are a parent, "what is the function of the family?" is an entirely practical and important question, and the answers are obvious, starting with the truth of this truism - "you don't understand your parents until you become a parent."
The function of the family is to raise children to adulthood. To protect and nourish children; to provide a safe environment; to educate and socialize children to function as capable adults. There must be something special at work that makes these commitments and obligations so compelling.
I have to believe there is some inheritance in the human genome that makes the attentiveness and constancy required for raising a child really, really rewarding. Intrinsically satisfying, so that even when you are tired, frustrated, exasperated, this is still what you most want to be doing. So that even when you don't have the energy for childrearing, you somehow have the energy for childrearing.
It feels like love. Love like you have never felt. Love to where you know that you would lay down your life, in a heartbeat, to save the life of your child.
Just the happy daily being-there-ness of loving your child feels intrinsically nourishing. And this is a good thing.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Sunday, May 12, 2013
What is power?
Most people have an intuitive sense of power and powerless. Power is that happy secure feeling of knowing that you are safe, that you have resources to ensure that your needs will be met, and that people will listen when you talk. Sometimes power is simply the self-satisfaction of lording it over someone, even if the stakes are not very high.
Powerlessness is the opposite - vulnerability about your physical and material safety, being unable to influence anybody or anything, and the humiliation of being subject to the will of others.
Michel Foucault defines power as "action upon the actions of others." For many, this definition is way too tame, because it makes no judgment about whether structural inequalities burden people with persistent and insurmountable disadvantages. Andrea Dworkin offers a starker definition - "power is the threat of violence and the sanction to deliver."
* * *
There is much more to say about all of this. But I need to take a long detour through parenting.
One of the first things I realized when Austin was a wee babe is that I do not have to dominate him. I need to elicit his cooperation. Of course, this also means me owning the frustration of my child being truculent and uncooperative and having a mind of his own; and there is me noticing when and whether this elicits anger in me, and why. And there is the fact of his power over me - Austin's claim to my attention and energy for all of his needs, and when and whether this is joyful, frustrating, poignant, empowering, humbling.
What becomes obvious after a while is that both of us exercise power and each of us is subject to the will of the other; and that fundamentally this is a relationship of cooperation rather than domination.
On the other hand, it is also true that as a parent I may deploy power in the sense of domination - as a threat of violence and the sanction to deliver. Parents are afforded a great deal of power and latitude, bounded by the governmental authority of Child Social Services and having the child removed from your home. Even far short of that extreme, I have never seen authoritarianism and violence produce an enduring or nourishing parent-child relationship.
* * *
Back to my central thesis, though - parenting has given me deeper wisdom about theories of power; wisdom about the experience of the exercise of power; wisdom about the meaning and the power of love; wisdom about the relationships and experiences that nourish life. And joy! Lots of it. I think this is the experience of parenting, and that my experience is much like the experiences of others who have chosen this path.
Powerlessness is the opposite - vulnerability about your physical and material safety, being unable to influence anybody or anything, and the humiliation of being subject to the will of others.
Michel Foucault defines power as "action upon the actions of others." For many, this definition is way too tame, because it makes no judgment about whether structural inequalities burden people with persistent and insurmountable disadvantages. Andrea Dworkin offers a starker definition - "power is the threat of violence and the sanction to deliver."
* * *
There is much more to say about all of this. But I need to take a long detour through parenting.
One of the first things I realized when Austin was a wee babe is that I do not have to dominate him. I need to elicit his cooperation. Of course, this also means me owning the frustration of my child being truculent and uncooperative and having a mind of his own; and there is me noticing when and whether this elicits anger in me, and why. And there is the fact of his power over me - Austin's claim to my attention and energy for all of his needs, and when and whether this is joyful, frustrating, poignant, empowering, humbling.
What becomes obvious after a while is that both of us exercise power and each of us is subject to the will of the other; and that fundamentally this is a relationship of cooperation rather than domination.
On the other hand, it is also true that as a parent I may deploy power in the sense of domination - as a threat of violence and the sanction to deliver. Parents are afforded a great deal of power and latitude, bounded by the governmental authority of Child Social Services and having the child removed from your home. Even far short of that extreme, I have never seen authoritarianism and violence produce an enduring or nourishing parent-child relationship.
* * *
Back to my central thesis, though - parenting has given me deeper wisdom about theories of power; wisdom about the experience of the exercise of power; wisdom about the meaning and the power of love; wisdom about the relationships and experiences that nourish life. And joy! Lots of it. I think this is the experience of parenting, and that my experience is much like the experiences of others who have chosen this path.
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