There are people out there who genuinely believe that parents should be parents and they’re not the child’s friends. I think that’s stupid. I hope it’s not true but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true for most people because most people are genetically stupid. It’s definitely easier to ensure a child doesn’t get spoiled by playing the role of a “bad guy”, but there has to be a better way. A lot of miserable and depressed people have no friends. Most of them still have parents. Wouldn’t their lives be much better if they had 1 friend? Also, while you’re friends with someone, you’re with them a lot more and you’ll have more opportunities to parent them. If anything, it just seems like more parents aren’t willing to put in the time and effort to do it right.
Without friendship, how can two people truly love one another? Most people I see seem to be playing the role of a good child or a good parent. They’re acting. They’re pretending. There’s no genuine relationship there. I’m not saying any of these people are assholes or anything. They truly want to be good parents and good children. But they’re not. The best they can do is pretend to be the thing they want to be.
I’ve been living at my aunt’s house lately and this whole acting thing is becoming more apparent to me. It’s not like I never noticed it before, but I just decided to write about it now. Without writing out everyone’s life stories, my uncle’s had cancer for years now and is very sickly and one of his daughters tries to be a really good daughter. She tries to do things for him like helping him walk and stuff. Let’s look at the walking. She holds him while he walks, which is a very good girl thing to do. Unlike some white families, Chinese families tend to have very little physical contact. She obviously doesn’t want to be touching him. Not because he’s sick or germy or anything. Touching’s just naturally a little uncomfortable to us because it feels alien. She wants to help and she wants to show that she wants to help, but the awkward touching probably does more harm than good. That’s not true. It’s probably not doing any harm, but it’s not doing much good either is my point.
She tends to him very well. An excellence performance indeed. But at the end of the day, how much does she actually care? My uncle spends the other 23 ½ hours sitting by himself with no one to talk to. Because they’re not friends, they cannot carry out prolonged conversations. She’ll try to include him when she talks about her day or something, but it’s not a conversation. I’ve seen my uncle talk to other people. It’s not like he doesn’t have the energy to talk. It does exhaust him a little to make sounds, but it’s at least more enjoyable than slowly dying. But he doesn’t talk much with his family, because they’re not friends, because it’s not worth the energy.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s genuine love there. If love means leaving the guy alone for most of his day and watching him die slowly, then I don’t want any part in that kind of love. I want more than that. If I ever have a child, I’ll make sure to do a better job. If I end up raising a fucked up criminal for a child, at least I’ll be friends with him/her.
