They don’t have to be like me to be loved

As a holder of strong opinions, I’m aware that I need to be careful how I play them around my kids. Not perhaps so much the opinions — none of them are criminal or murderous, well, not many and not always — as how I broker the issue of disagreement. I suspect it can be a bit difficult for young children to differentiate between approval of opinions and approval of them personally. And in a relationship with parents, who amongst us is ever fully grown up?

There was a dinner table conversation about the tradition of a man asking a father’s permission to marry his daughter. I believe that this, like so many of the traditions around marriage, harks back to truly crappy days when women were chattel, possessions, without rights. Ergo, I think it’s nasty and if anyone asked her father, or me, for permission to ask the Girlchild to marry him, I would say no on the grounds of him being a total spanner.

Everyone else at the table disagreed with me (everyone else being said Girlchild, said father and unsaid Boychild). Time-honoured tradition they said. Um, people say that about FGM as well, and it’s a throwback to horrible rights-free times for wimmin, I said. And still they disagreed. I was baffled. It’s such a no-brainer for me, I don’t see the other side. I just think it is really and profoundly stupid. A dude who does that is to me, a moron.

But they disagree. And although I’m moderately horrified that they don’t think that dude is a moron, it’s not like I haven’t been indoctrinating — I mean chatting — to those kids since they were babies, I am rather happy they feel they can disagree. The indoctrination may have failed, dammit, but they seem to know that they are loved unconditionally. They don’t have to be like me to be loved by me.