I’m so proud of my son -- warts and all
MY SON has reached the age at which society deems him mature: he’s 18 and has gone off to university. When i look back on his life, each and every experience makes him who he is. he wasn’t a perfect child because there is no such thing. And often, what he did was in the context of his peer group. Sometimes his actions appeared egregious, often recalcitrant, but he was nearly always remorseful when he chose to take action that in retrospect he regretted. At heart, he’s decent and likeable, and i hope he will continue to mature. But along life’s highway, he will encounter situations where he will make wrong decisions. i only hope he learns from these behavioural cul-de-sacs. But if i choose to remember his life only in the context of what i wanted to believe and mentally deleted those actions that fall below the standards that i, and society, expected of him, then i can’t know him. if he only sees his own life through rose-tinted spectacles, would he be able to change those aspects of his behaviour that don’t fit in with societal expectations? each person can only be seen through the totality of their life — no deletions, no embellishments, pure and raw. And when that life is lived, and people look back on it, will they choose only to remember the good bits? Because very often the good bits come from learning from the bad bits. The British empire, in all in its gore and glory, was a fact of history. Churchill was wrong when he alluded to looking forward 1,000 years and declaring what he thought was the country’s (or empire’s) finest hour. Perhaps more prosaically, he wasn’t right. We can only look back in 1,000 years from now. And we’ll judge it according to objective facts, unless we live in a totalitarian state where knowledge will be derived from subjective facts. i hope my son will remember his childhood with fondness. i might remind him he went through a time where his actions didn’t conform to convention. And i hope he reflects and doesn’t forget.
STUART RAE, St Albans, Herts.