The Limits of Love
Rabih and Kirsten’s first priority with Esther and William—it is ranked
infinitely higher than any other—is to be kind, because everywhere around them
they see examples of what happens, they believe, when love is in short supply:
breakdowns and resentments,
shame and addiction, chronic failures of self-
confidence and inabilities to form sound relationships. In Rabih and Kirsten’s
eyes, when there is insufficient nurture—when parents are remote and
domineering, unreliable and frightening—life can never feel complete. No one
can hope to be strong enough to negotiate the thick tangles of existence, they
maintain, without having once enjoyed a sense of mattering limitlessly and
inordinately to one or two adults.
This is why they strive to answer every
question with tenderness and
sensitivity, punctuate the days with cuddles, read long stories in the evenings,
get up to play at dawn, go easy on the children when they make mistakes,
forgive their naughty moments, and allow their toys to remain strewn across the
living room carpet overnight.
Their faith in the power of parental kindness reaches a pitch in Esther and
William’s
earliest years, particularly at those moments when they are finally
asleep in their cots, defenseless before the world, their breaths coming light and
steady and their finely formed fingers clenched around their favorite blankets.
But by the time each of them turns five, a more complicated and troubling
reality comes into view: Rabih and Kirsten are, to their surprise,
brought up
against certain stubborn limits of kindness.
One rainy weekend in February, Rabih buys William an orange remote-
controlled helicopter. Father and son spotted it on the Internet a few weeks
before, and since then they have talked to each other of little else. Eventually
Rabih caved in, even though there’s no impending birthday or gratifying school
mark to justify the gift. Still, it will surely provide them with hours of fun. But
after only six minutes’ use, as the toy is hovering over the dining table with
Rabih
at the controls, something goes wrong with the steering, the machine
collides with the fridge, and the back rotor snaps into pieces. The fault lies
squarely with the manufacturers but, sadly, they are not present in the kitchen—
so, at once and not for the first time, it is Rabih who becomes the target of his
child’s acute disappointment.
“
What have you done?
” shrieks William, whose sweetness is now very much
in abeyance.
“Nothing,” replies Rabih. “The thing just went berserk.”
“It didn’t. You did something. You have to fix it now!”
“Of course, I’d love to do that. But it’s complicated. We’ll have to get in
touch with the shop on Monday.”
“
Dada!
” This comes out as a scream.
“Darling, I know you must be disappointed, but—”
“It’s your fault!”
Tears
start to flow, and a moment later William attempts to kick the
incompetent pilot in the shins. The boy’s behavior is appalling, of course, and a
little surprising—Dada meant so well!—but on this occasion as on more than a
few others, it also stands as a perverse sort of tribute to Rabih as a father. A
person has to feel rather safe around someone else in order to be this difficult.
Before a child can throw a tantrum, the background atmosphere needs to be
profoundly benevolent. Rabih himself wasn’t anything like this tricky with his
own father when he was young, but then again, neither did he ever feel quite so
loved by him. All the assurances he and Kirsten have offered over the years—“I
will always be on your side”; “You can tell us whatever you’re feeling”—have
paid off brilliantly: they have encouraged William and his sister to direct their
frustrations and disappointments powerfully towards the two loving adults who
have signaled that they can, and will, take the heat.
Witnessing their children’s rages, Rabih and Kirsten
have a chance to note
how much restraint and patience they themselves have, without fully realizing it,
developed over the years. Their somewhat more equable temperaments are the
legacy of decades of minor and more major disappointments; the patient courses
of their thought processes have been carved out, like canyons by the flow of
water, by all the many things that have gone wrong for them. Rabih doesn’t
throw a tantrum when he makes a stray mark on a sheet of paper he’s writing on
—because, among other things, he has in the past lost his job and seen his
mother die.
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