Child-Blinded

American Pastoral makes me wonder if Merry’s change was inevitable– we see little of her childhood past the days of the stuttering diary before we skip to her agonizingly combative teen years. And then I wonder if it was even a change, rather than just a growth of her character, Merry as Merry, someone who had bombing in her blood. And if that’s true, then oh, poor Swede, poor Dawn, the poor Levov parents– what did they do to birth a child who grows up to bomb a general store and kill an innocent man? How does that happen to anyone who treats their kids right?

It makes me wonder if parents sometimes become blinded to their children’s faults by the simple fact that they are their children– beings that they have created and brought up, and so, like the Swede says, of course they are perfect, of course Merry is perfect, for how could she be otherwise? I don’t know– it’s the way the Swede reacts to Merry’s psychiatrist telling him why she stutters: “She is an extremely bright and manipulative child… stuttering can be an extremely manipulative, an extremely useful, if not even a vindictive type of behavior.” (p. 96) He explodes. He argues with the psychiatrist, defending his child as a perfect one, saying that she stutters because “her brain is so quick, it’s so much quicker than her tongue” (p. 97) and inwardly calling the doctor a “stupid bastard”, a “cold, heartless bastard”– despite the fact that all evidence points to Merry’s stuttering as, most simply, a cry for attention, and at most a manipulative tool against her mother.

Parents give most everything to their children, and not just materially and monetarily but emotionally, too. To have a child is to be willing to give up a part of yourself (biologically and mentally) and donate it to another. Everything the child learns, for the first couple years, is from you. That’s an enormous responsibility and a really horrifying prospect– but it makes sense, then, that you would always want to believe in the best of your child. The question “did I raise my kid wrong?” is not an easy one to ask.

I know that sometimes it is very easy to lie to my parents, generally because they want to believe I am being honest. And it is pretty evident that their view of me can be vastly different from how I see myself, depending on what they’re looking at. And I’m not saying my parents believe me all the time– they’re quite good at picking out the half-truths from the truths… so good that lying to them is just generally a really bad idea. But the fact that sometimes it works… that is frightening. Is that what you sign up for when you become a parent– becoming child-blinded? Becoming complacent with always believing in the best of your child and ignoring the worst– the very worst– until it smacks you in the face? I’m not Merry Levov. Few teenagers are quite as angst-ridden and disturbed as Merry Levov. But the blindness is still sometimes there with my parents, sometimes their ignorance is bliss, and the sad thing is that no matter how much it disturbs me I’m not going to change it.

It does make the idea of having children quite terrifying, though.