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Everything changes all the time, and the kid you know now won’t be the same kid you have in a few months—maybe even a few days.
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I was reading and teaching the excellent short story “Mono No Aware” by Ken Liu, and I got to thinking about the titular concept. Mono no aware is a Japanese term which means, basically, a gentle sadness at the transience of things, and Liu applies it to a science fiction story about some of the last remaining humans after a giant meteor destroys Earth.
When I considered the concept outside the confines of Liu’s story, I thought about all the ways it applies to being a parent. Because nothing shows you the impermanence of things like raising kids. (It’s not terribly different than a giant meteor hitting your lifestyle.)
Most notably this comes up in the cliché of kids, that everything is a phase. It’s a cliché for a reason. Kid not sleeping? Wait a few weeks, it’ll change. Kid not eating? In ten days she’ll be taking in calories like an endurance athlete. Kid’s just the sweetest thing ever? Yeah, until the next developmental leap.
Everything changes all the time, and the kid you know now won’t be the same kid you have in a few months—maybe even a few days. But that’s the obvious stuff, the well-document change in the children themselves. It’s supposed to happen, they need to grow up.
But then there’s the mono no aware of the things we share with our kids, the way culture is perceived as it’s passed down and, sometimes, built upon.
Movies are one of the best examples, since there are so many sequels and remakes right now. I know parents whose children prefer the Star Wars prequels. Lots of teenagers have no idea there was a Teen Wolf movie in the eighties. My daughter may think of Kristin Wiig when she hears Ghostbusters, when I’ll be thinking about Bill Murray.
Parents put in a huge effort in helping their kids grow up properly, they try to instill the proper values in their children, values it’s safe to say the parents themselves have.
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Books are another piece of culture that’s changed, at least as far as what’s consumed. When I was a teenager, everyone read books like Catcher In The Rye, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, On The Road—but not always for school. They’re just what you were supposed to have read. Now I routinely have classes full of college freshmen who’ve never opened any of those three books, but know the Harry Potter Series and the canon of John Green inside and out.
I’m not sure any of this is so bad. Well, maybe the John Green thing, but otherwise it’s silly to criticize your kids for not being like you. But there is a gentle sadness to seeing those differences, the way things change. Mono no aware.
In so many ways parents see children as reflections of themselves, and for good reason. Parents put in a huge effort in helping their kids grow up properly, they try to instill the proper values in their children, values it’s safe to say the parents themselves have.
And I think sometimes we parents conflate values with other, tangible things.
My daughter loves singing along to “Debaser,” by Pixies, but I have no illusions that she’ll be doing that when she’s twelve. She’ll probably be obsessed with some pop nonsense which drives me crazy.
But that’s OK.
That doesn’t make her a bad person.
Neither would preferring a new version of Ghostbusters. Or, so long as she reads, enjoying a different canon of books—even, gasp, John Green.
Values are abstract, and while we can reasonably expect to instill ours in our children, there are often lots of manifestations of those values, very few of which are even a little like the parents.
There’s nothing wrong with a gentle sadness in realizing that, but I also think there’s a larger happiness in seeing one’s children become their own, genuine selves.
And knowing that they’ll feel the same mono no aware in a few decades when we get so sit back and be grandparents.
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Photo: Getty Images