Tuesday, July 29, 2008

What should I tell my son?

I suppose it's possible that one day I might see my son again, and one day I may have the opportunity to counsel him on matters of the heart, marriage, and fatherhood. Probably, the best I can hope for is that this insane world will have seen the foolishness of handing over decisions on the future of children of failed marriages to bigoted control freaks who think "at least one parental figure" means "only one parental figure", that this one figure should be paid to take the child from the other and the other should otherwise just disappear into the night. I can hope for this, but acting as if the hope had some chance of reality would be pretty stupid.

So what should I tell my son? Be vewy, vewy careful? That wabbit you're hunting is actually hunting you, and has much bigger guns than you do? Should I spoil a young man's fun with that?

And what of marriage? Maybe I won't have to counsel him against it, given the way things are going. Most young people don't see the point, never mind the hidden danger.

Children? I'd like grandchildren, both for my son and for the hope they might give me at least a consolation for what has been taken from me. But there is another danger there, that those children, at the behest of their mother and the complicity of the courts, might also be turned into a painful, grinding millstone around the neck of my son. I'd then be torn between hoping he'd carry that millstone willingly, however heavy, as I have tried to do for him, and fear that he'd learn from what he has seen happened to me and make himself as scarce as possible as quickly as possible.