How to Love a Child

HOW TO LOVE A CHILD The Child in The Family For to be born is not to be raised from the dead; the coffin may give us up again but it will never gaze like a mother at us. ANHELLI4 1. How, when, how much — why? I am presentient of many questions awaiting answers, of doubts seeking explanation. And my answer is: "I do not know." Each time you put aside a book to spin the thread of your own thoughts, it means that the book has served its purpose. Whenever you skim over the pages, seeking rules and ready prescriptions, frowning at their paucity — you should know that if you do find counsels and indications, that this has happened not only despite but even against the writer's will. I do not know, and cannot possibly tell, how parents unknown to me can rear a child likewise unknown to me, under conditions unknown to me; I repeat — can rear, not wish to or should rear. "I do not know" — is in the realm of science like an emerging nebula, a nebula of looming new ideas, ever nearer the truth. "I don't know" is to a mind untrained to scientific thinking a tormenting nothingness. I should like to teach others how to understand and love that wonderful effervescent creative "I don't know" as regards contemporary knowledge of the child replete with dazzling surprises. Let me emphasize that no book, no physician, can replace one's own keen thought, own attentive perception. One frequently comes across the opinion that motherhood ennobles a woman, that on first becoming a mother she matures spiritually. Yes, motherhood does, indeed, 4 A poem by the outstanding Polish poet — Juliusz Slowacki (1809-1849). 93 kindle a flame of problems embracing all spheres of extrinsic and spiritual life; but those problems may pass unnoticed, or be cowardly shelved for solution in some distant future, or one may grow angry that the solution cannot be bought. To demand that anyone should provide processed thoughts is like asking a strange woman to give birth to your own child. There are thoughts that can be born only of your own pain, and precisely those are the most precious ones. They will determine whether you as a mother will give your baby the breast or the udder, whether you will bring it up as a human being does, or will bring it up as a female rears her youngs, whether you will guide it or drag it along on a leash of compulsion, whether you will play with it as long as it is little, finding in fondling it a complement to your husband's perfunctory or unwanted caresses; and, later, when it gets somewhat older, whether you will let it loose or even turn against it. 2. You say: "My baby." If ever, it is only while you are pregnant that you have the right to use that term. The beating of the tiny heart, no bigger than a peach stone is but an echo of your own pulse. Your inhalation provides it with air to breathe. The same blood runs through its and your veins, and not a single drop of your red blood knows whether it will remain yours or its, or will be spilled to perish as a toll collected by the mystery of conception and delivery. The bit of bread that you are munching is the building material for the legs on which it will toddle along, for the skin that will cover them, for the eyes that will see, the brain which will be illuminated by a thought, arms which it will be stretching out to you, and the smile to accompany the cry: "Mama". You two are predestined to spend a crucial moment together: together, in a single bath of pain, you both will suffer. The chimes will strike the hour — the signal: "On the mark." And simultaneously it will say: "I want to live my own life" and you will say: "From now on, live your own life." By mighty contractions of your entrails, you will expel the child, oblivious of his pain, and he will break through firmly and inexorably, oblivious of your pain. A brutal act. No, far from it — the two of you will perform a hundred thousand throbbing movements, imperceptible, subtle and wonderfully dexterous so that, in taking your share of life, neither of you should take more than is due you by law, universal and 94 eternal. "My baby." No, it is not yours, not even during the months of pregnancy or in the hours of childbirth. 3. The child you have delivered weighs ten pounds. There is eight pounds of water and a handful of carbon, calcium, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus and iron. You have given birth to eight pounds of water and two pounds of ash. And drop by drop what goes to make your child has been cloud vapor, snow crystal, mist, dew, the mountain spring and the scum of a city gutter. Every atom of carbon or nitrogen has been bound into millions of different combinations. You yourself have taken only that which was to be gotten. Earth suspended in infinity. Its close companion — the Sun — fifty million miles away. The diameter of this minute globe of ours is just three thousand miles of fire with a thin, ten-mile deep, cool crust. Spattered upon that thin crust stuffed with fire amidst the oceans, is land. Upon land, amidst trees and bushes, insects, birds and animals men swarm like ants. Amongst those millions of men, you have brought forth one more — is it not so? — something infinitely minute, a speck of dust — a nothing. It is so fragile that it may be destroyed by any bacteria which, even when magnified a thousand times is but a dot in the field of view. But that "nothing" is the brother, the flesh and blood, of every sea wave, of the wind and the thunderbolt, of the sun and the Milky Way. That speck of dust is the brother of every ear of corn and blade of grass, of every oak and palm of every chick, lion cub, colt and pup. There is something within it that feels and scrutinizes — suffers, desires and rejoices, loves, trusts and hates — believes, doubts, draws close and turns away. That speck embraces in thought everything: the stars and oceans, mountains and abysses. And what is the substance of its soul if not the universe, though dimensionless? Herein is the contradiction in the human being, raised from dust, which God has made his dwelling. 4. You say: 95 "My baby." It is not. The child is a common property, he belongs to the mother and father, the grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Some distant "I" that was dormant in an array of forefathers, the voice of a disintegrating, long forgotten coffin suddenly begins to speak through your child. Three hundred years ago, in war or peace, someone possessed someone else, in the kaleidoscope of crossing races, peoples and classes — with consent or by violence, in a moment of horror or amorous intoxication — someone committed adultery or seduced, nobody knows who and when, but God has written it down in the book of destinies, and the anthropologist tries to divine it from the shape of the skull and the color of the hair. Sometimes a sensitive child fancies that he is a foundling in his parents' home. It may be so: his begetter died a century ago. The child is like a parchment densely filled with minute hieroglyphs, and you are able to decipher only part of it, another part you can but erase or strike out and fill with a content of your own. A ghastly law? — No — it is a magnificent law. It makes each child of yours the first link in an immortal chain of generations. Seek in that stranger that is your child the dormant particle of yourself. Perhaps you will perceive it, perhaps you will even develop it. Child and infinity. Child and eternity. Child — a speck in space. Child — an instant in time. 5. You say: "He should be like ... I want him to be ..." You search for a model, whom he should resemble, you search for la life that you desire for him. It matters not that there is mediocrity, and plainness is all-encompassing. It matters not that everywhere is grayness. Men strut about, busy and exert themselves —petty worries, mean aspirations and pedestrian aims.... Unfulfilled expectations, gnawing anguish, eternal longing.... Injustice prevails. 96 Arid indifference cuts like an icy wind, hypocrisy stifles. Anything that has sharp teeth and claws, attacks, and everything that is timid, must lie low. And men not only suffer but also wallow in filth.... What is your child going to be? A fighter or just a worker, commander-in-chief or another rank? Or just happy? Where and what is happiness? Is there anyone who knows it? Will you be able to cope? How can you foresee everything, how can you shield the child? A butterfly above the turbid torrent of life. How can you provide him with steadfastness without lowering his flight, to temper him without fatiguing the wings? By example, by a helping hand, by counsel or word? And if he turns his back on all you offer? In fifteen years time — he will be looking into the future, and you — into the past. For you — memories and habit, for the child — instability and arrogant expectation. You doubt, while he looks forward and is confident, you fear while he is fearless.

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