On Oedipus (or, Giants And Blankets)

A little while back, I reread Oedipus Rex for the first time since high school. I sympathized with Mr. Oed a lot less than I expected to. He really was a wiener. But let's forget for now the hubris and the creepy mom stuff—which—seriously, dude, if you're that concerned about the prophecy, then how about just don't marry anyone older than you. We have a saying in America: Duh. But again, let's set that aside for the nonce. I want to talk about the other half of the Oedipal curse.

Freud, of course, argued that on some level, all children have this urge. I can't from personal experience speak to the inner lives of all children, but I can surely think of times when I wanted to kill my dad. He's a good father and a good man, and we get on quite well now, thank God; but we had some stony and tenebrous moments in the elder days. I fear that, shy of both of us immediately dying and going straight to Heaven when she's born, my kid and I will pass through a shadowed vale or two of our own before the end.

C.S. Lewis says somewhere that Nature compels us to invent giants: the mountains and the storms and the sea, and all the vastness and wildness that lurk beyond our walls. And he's not wrong, but it seems belated. Long before we have any sense of Nature, we're all surrounded by giants. Long before we have the words to encapsulate size and proportion, we know that Mama and Dada are bigger, titanically bigger than us. And the giants have absolute power over every tiny aspect of our existence. We eat what they give us, we sleep when they say, we wear what they put on our backs; we go to the schools and read the books and do the chores they choose for us. Granted that we would suffer a millionfold demise long before pubescence if it weren't for the giants. But they're still giants, and we're still swordless little Jacks.

The thing about being a parent is that sometimes you're going to be wrong. Depending on your efforts and proclivities, you may even often be wrong. And as a general rule, the child has no higher authority that he can appeal to. If you've promised him that he can, say, watch a particular movie, but discovered too late that it's about the exploits of a space pirate who does explicit things with a dozen different space women, then he has no recourse but to accept the breaking of your promise. He's too small to fight you, he's too poor to run, he has no grown-up words to argue his case. He can sit in his room and stew. And nothing breeds hatred like impotence. Glance through the imprecatory Psalms—137:9, for example—and you'll get a sense of how I sometimes felt about my perceived injustices.

Not getting to watch one movie is at worst an annoyance to an adult; but by definition, a child doesn't see the larger picture in which that annoyance is a tiny blip. Your sense of proportion is only as large as your experience of the world, and your capacity for suffering fills up a lot faster when you're very, very small. I surely don't want Sonya feeling murderous feelings towards me any more often than I can help; and if she does, I'd like her to be able to look back at them when she gets older and at least grant that for all my mistakes, I was doing the best I could.

I have to keep in the forefront of my mind that her reality is real to her, no matter how little it seems to me. If I'm forty years old and someone takes away a blanket that I like, then, well—darn. But if I'm three years old and this blanket has been a part of my waking and dreaming life for as long as I can possibly remember, if I can't exactly drive to the store and buy another one, if I've never seen pictures of Hiroshima and the Holocaust because I'm a freaking three-year-old, then in my pea-sized world, it's a big, big deal. So if grown-up me is going to take away a blanket that mini-me loves and cherishes, then I'd better have a damned good reason for it. I guess, at the end of the day, that's the best I can really hope to do.