read this like a poet reading a random soliloquy

Usually on an otherwise fairly unremarkable day, two people, who probably hadn’t crossed paths too long ago, decide to mesh their bodies in conjunction. Between the two of them, their total personhood sum to exactly two, not more, not less. Yet somehow, the act of aggravated unison will cause one of their flesh to congeal and begin to delimit that sum to the right. Very soon, it equals three, and in the short period between conceivement and childbirth, the two collaborators find that they have very little time for estimating and preparing to support the load of another personhood: with (if everything goes right) five senses, four limbs, and a mind of its own. It is like two straight lines running alongside each other, and if they are slightly askew, they’ll meet at some point in space. As in a triangle, their projection will create a third line segment, fulfilling the purpose of the two lines’ intersection. A universal outcome, nothing fancy. With minimal diligence, it is even possible to predict the formation of the final line using Pythagorean mathematics. No surprises here either. However, representing human nature by anything close to straight lines has so far been difficult for even the extremities of scientific knowledge, the chaos being virtually irreducible. Thus, the third line, being born out of the transgressions of two irregular lines, assumes an equally chaotic and unpredictable shape. 

It is therefore an incorrigible truth that all parents, out of bravery (or from a different perspective, naivety) have written themselves to be responsible for an additional quantum of chaos in the universe. Maybe because no one in the history of linguistics or literature thought to properly attribute to human beings their fair share of chaos in the world, most people who decide to bear and raise children expect to have a much simpler task at hand. Hitler’s parents did not imagine the butterfly effect to have the consequences that it did, neither did Einstein’s, Beethoven’s, or mine. The child born to two parents is a whole new person, capable of winning the lottery, going to prison, or inventing the wheel. They might take on their parents and have a similar nose, become a surgeon, or make some of their parents’ mistakes. However, it is impossible for parents, and in my personal opinion, it is almost always a recipe for disaster, to model their offspring’s life after their own, for the homogeneity of the three of them ends exactly at intercourse. Creating a genetic clone will not give you a person with features in common with you beyond the surface of their skin: even medical intervention is not safe from birthing new identities. If the repetitions are so scarce and outcomes so random, why is it the case then, that of all pairs of people, one’s biological parents are deemed best fit to guide them into adulthood?

A parent’s love for their child, or vice versa, is seen as foundational to human society. It is the base element of all familial relations, and everything else that binds and unbinds communities could be seen as somewhat loose derivations of it. If one agrees, better even if they don’t, it begs the question, what are the other threads holding this tapestry together? Is it something innate, such as greed and hunger, or something learned, such as the pursuit of knowledge and civility? Then, if one thing is the matter, what is the anti-matter? The latter is perhaps a more interesting and less studied topic, since no one wants to look at the ugly in the face. Unfortunately, it exists, and humans are helpless in circumventing the ugly, because it is weaved into their path in life. Moreover, what exactly is the ugly? It depends. But I wonder if it could be my parents’ insolent lies to their adolescent? Or is it my father’s disproportionate anger towards my childish indiscipline? Or maybe my mother’s projection of her cynicism onto her child? To form a bigger picture, we can stretch the canvas beyond just mother and father. What really is the ugly, if not the glowing misogyny in the characters of the men in my extended family, or the pedophilic relative, connected to me merely by blood, who violated me before I was old enough to tell apart the assault from elderly affection? No but surely, this view gives too much power to the ugly than is necessary.

Perhaps what really is distasteful is that my parents’ playful dishonesty in my childhood makes me as an adult see the world in black and white, that my father’s temper has wired me to see cordial help as oppressive authority, or that my mother’s cautious attitude shaped the chronic people pleaser in her son. It has caused me enough trouble growing up that their genes could not give me straight teeth or perfect skin, it is even more shameful that I have been stunted in many a ways from stretching my hands and legs and growing into a full person under their commandeering, and it is inexorably hateful that I still have to carry in my selfhood the traits that count as flaws in my parents’ characters. I might give it to them that they had no chance at a trial run, that amidst the chaos whose existence I myself acknowledged earlier in writing, they had no handbook for perfecting me as a human. Regardless, for me to be 22 and at the mercy of the coarse footprints they left on my path and that I am trained to follow, with no tools to chip them away and navigate on my own, is what truly repulses me. To live with this awareness takes courage, and patience in abundance, towards yourself and your parents, and I am not the one to say I have not faltered in that regard.

In the end, what is left of me, save for a jagged line, a spasm of chaos. With all the courage and patience I am yet to muster, I can only place my faith in the Brownian motion of life to take me where it’s fit.