POSTS
Children's Blood Knows Its Parents' Hidden Truths
BlogI’ve started thinking that our blood talks to us.
I don’t mean this in a sign of impending psychological collapse, and I’m using “blood” metaphorically, of course, but I’ve started wondering whether epigenetic imprints influence us subconsciously. Was it my ancestors’ blood, made from the waters of the Hanseatic shipping lane, that set them to sea and called us both to New York? Did my blood help engineer decisions and yearnings that somehow drew it “North” and “to winter?”
In turn, my son’s blood saw this pointing and compelled him to lift his hand, point, and intone lowly: “buuuuuuu, buuuu.”
View of the harbor at Copenhagen at night
As I was recovering from my septoplasty and reading Steve Jobs biography, an idea kept playing in the back of my head that as we age, our parents’ truest version of their motivations become viscerally – quite literally in our guts, blood, and neurological knots – our own. They become understood and real in ourselves with immediacy, sans judgement, malice, or rationalization. Our blood whispers to us confidently in the sibilant serpentine hiss of our systole and diastole:
Yes, this is the truth of them, for it is your truth too and you know it: flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, blood of their blood. This is who you both are in a way that cannot be lied about, massaged, finessed or denied. They could have fooled others, but never you.
And if we had it for our parents, we can trust our children will have it for us. Are they born with an innate truth detector? Do our children recall our speech and deeds and, with our blood telling them the visceral truth running in their veins, think:
Yeah, no, that action/justification/rationalization was bullshit. What our blood wants was X, and expressing like that was just the socially-acceptable cover manners and society required.
I think the Jobs biography gave an object lesson in this dynamic as it asks:
Is it better to give our children the pleasant fiction of our motivations and our accounts of self that their blood will recognize as false, or the (potentially) ugly truth, that their blood will recognize and honor? And if we prefer fictions for our own egotistical comfort, what might we rob our children of?
The Steve Jobs Biography Example
In his life and in the biography’s narrative, Jobs left a lot of hurt people in his wake: “an enlightened being who was cruel,” per ex-girlfriend Tina Redse.
Biographer Isaacson documents these cruelties, their damage, and their fact. While no hatchet job, the book softens no sharp edges; it is, bluntly, rather cool on the man’s record as a decent human. Knowing oneself, and knowing one’s spouse, why would Jobs and wife Laurene Powell-Jobs consent to giving Isaacson unparalleled access while urging that these errors of Jobs’s humanity be truthfully and fully documented and shared? Isaacson relates it’s because they wanted the truth of the man to be durably set down in paper and ink for their children, so that they could know him and themselves posthumously when he couldn’t be there (he would die 58).
And I agree with their choice because it gives the children support and aid on into that time when we parents will no longer be there.
If a parent said “You’re the most important thing to me” and yet the parent routinely was at the office or off launching a product, the “blood truth” and the “narrative truth” would be out of agreement. The child then has to conclude that the parent was either deluded, hypocritical, or operated on different definitions than they themselves do. The child can’t find comfort or navigation when the agreement between blood-truth and utterance is broken.
But if the parent said (or had written in a biography): “I know I couldn’t make the soccer games, but I am pathologically unable to function unless I’m making things. I work late and am gone early because I simply can’t be otherwise, and I can’t make anything in my world more important than resolving that anxiety; yes, that includes some aspects of being a parent” and they don’t appear at the game, those statements are, at the least, while potentially hurtful, true and, arguably, better.
The child can say:
I see them truly; I might have liked life to be otherwise, but this is the truth, and I know who they were. I might choose to live differently, or I might accept that I, too, will act that same way because I, too, cannot do otherwise. But my bones and my memories agree, this is how that human was forced to experience life and I can have their lessons, true lessons, with me for the rest of my life.
I find it a profoundly brave, vulnerable, and generous thing to have chosen to do – not easy, but truthful; not flattering, but vulnerable.
Conclusion
I hope I’ll live truthfully in front of my son – but I also hope that my own accounts (in this blog, in dozens of notebooks, etc.) will give him a record that allows his blood to say:
You are like him; he was like you: you are both human beings full of awesome promise and terrible folly; and you are the same in this way. His verbalizations showed comprehension of his motivations and they are yours as well.
And as he travels into a future that I am not fated to see, I hope our blood comforts him so that he can walk tall, look himself in the mirror, and pursue his dreams.
And it requires the truth.