I was talking to an adolescent therapist and a progressively thinking minister, recently The therapist works with the children in a school that serves a traditionally religious population. She was concerned that the restrictions placed on a comfortable adolescent sexuality; both had been raised in more modern families than my own. They were Second-Half-Third-Quarter Players and I'm well entrenched in the Fourth Quarter. I don't know that that made a difference. They had college aged kids -- one in the Armed Forces. I have my first grandchild leaving home in two months to be in school 200+ miles away from my youngest child.
In fact, thinking of that youngest child years ago ... deciding between a loosey-goosey school and one in which more or less everyone took the same Great Books program, she took the tighter route, explaining -- at least, as far as I can recall -- that the "tight" school in a sense offered a looseness that the "loose" school couldn't provide. After all, when she finished the limited requirements without having to flounder about, she was free to pursue her own academic and personal interests.
For me? I don't recall feeling restricted by growing up -- say -- under the rules of sabbath. Indeed, while some kids I knew had to decide what to go out and buy on the sabbath day, I and my sibs were free to play quiet games and read and walk to services. I don't know ... Loose? Tight? or Boundaried.
Made me think of the popular notion of "Unconditional Love." I think it was Jack London who wrote a short story about a man lost and frostbitten and frozen-wet in the North Country. His matches were wet and he was struggling -- in the good company of his pooch -- "To Build a Fire." The dog was faithful to his owner, until, that is, it became clear to el Pooch that in the absence of success in building that fire, his Master was determined to kill him and be heated in some manner .... As I remember it, the Dog runs off and the story ends, presumably, with the man succumbing to hypothermia and death.
No love is unconditional, to my way of thinking. The partner/child/parent who imagines that no matter what they do or say, Love will carry us through ... In sickness and in health? Well, yes! but everything has boundaries, in the end. I remember maybe thirty years ago speaking to a Tough Love group. I had been invited -- I came to quickly recognize -- to be roasted. As a member of the community of educators and mental health practitioners who had failed to get their kids not to make Mamas' and Pappas' lives unbearable, I was to be fair game in the basement of a local church ... with a podium far away from the door.
Before I started a canned talk that, I suspect, would have gone nowhere, a Mother interrupted me: What does it mean for our kids to be civilized?
"Cut the Bullshit, Howard ... and cut to the chase." I realized that it was not beyond reason that I could be emotionally hung ... drawn and quartered ... by the wounded and angry crowd whose kids had made their lives a living Hell. I settled on telling them that to civilized was the ability to stop in E. Rindge, New Hampshire, Population 75, at midnight at a red light. The crowd was quieted. (Maybe they thought I was psychotic.)
In any case, I was allowed to continue. Civilized behavior is not obviuously rational. Maybe their kids were rationally correct in arguing -- after their homes had been ransacked by search-warrant carrying police-folk -- that marijuana was safer than alcohol. But it thoroughly missed the point. Those of us who are civilized -- and may I add "loving" -- accept the maybe-less-than-rational boundaries ... such, as stopping at a Red Light when visibility clearly shows that no cars are coming cross-traffic for more than a half mile in each direction. No boundaries? No civilization.
The same applies to love relationships. While harshly-Conditional love, full of ultimatums and unreasonable punishments, leaves no room for love, a love that has no conditions ends up in Sado-Masochism. Sampson Raphael Hirsch, my memory tells me, wrote that Love was the sense that -- without the presence of the Loved One -- the Lover's life would be impoverished. But Love, to my way of thinking, has much to do with the giving up of the belief that my Lover's love will come in spite of whatever I do and that self-imposed boundaries that I place upon myself for my Lover are well-deserved gifts.
No ... I'm not speaking of accounting ledgers or spelled out quid pro quo's .... but of something else!
Time to begin Father's Day.
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