The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

The role of being a good parent brings with it one large and very tricky
requirement: to be the constant bearer of deeply unfortunate news. The good
parent must be the defender of a range of the child’s long-term interests, which
are by nature entirely impossible for him or her to envisage, let alone assent to
cheerfully. Out of love, parents must gird themselves to speak of clean teeth,
homework, tidy rooms, bedtimes, generosity, and limits to computer usage. Out
of love, they must adopt the guise of bores with a hateful and maddening habit of

---

bringing up unwelcome facts about existence just when the fun is really starting.
And, as a result of these subterranean loving acts, good parents must, if things
have gone well, end up as the special targets of intense resentment and
indignation.
However difficult the messages may be, Rabih and Kirsten begin with a
commitment to imparting them gently: “Just five more minutes of playtime and
then the game is over, OK?”; “Time for Princess E.’s bath now”; “That must
have been annoying for you, but we don’t hit people who disagree with us,
remember?”
They want to coax and wheedle and, most importantly, never impose a
conclusion through force or the use of basic psychological weapons, such as
reminders about who is the older, bigger, and wealthier party and, ergo, who is
in charge of the remote control and the laptop.
“Because I am your mother”; “Because your father said so”: there was a time
when these relational titles alone commanded obedience. But the meaning of
such words has been transformed by our era of kindness. A mother and father
are now merely “people who will make it nice for me” or “people whose
suggestions I may go along with if—and only if—I see the point of what they’re
saying.”
Unhappily, there are situations in which coaxing won’t work anymore—for
example, on the occasion when Esther starts to tease William about his body,
and a gentle maternal caution goes unheard. His penis is an “ugly sausage,”
Esther yells repeatedly at home, and then, even less kindly, she whispers the
same metaphor to a band of her girlfriends at school.
Her parents try tactfully to explain that her taunting him now to the point of
humiliation might make it harder for him to relate to women when he gets older.
But this of course sounds weird to his sister. She replies that they don’t
understand anything, that William really has got an ugly sausage between his
legs, and that this is why everyone is laughing at school.
It isn’t their daughter’s fault that, at nine years old, she can’t begin to
appreciate the nature of her parents’ alarm (and, offstage, a little laughter, too).
But it’s still galling when Esther, having been told firmly to stop it, accuses them
of interfering in her life and writes the words 
Fun Spoilers
on little pieces of
paper that she leaves like a trail of bread crumbs around the house.
The dispute ends in a shouting match between Rabih and this incensed small
person who is, somewhere in her brain, simply lacking in the particular neuronal

---

connections which would allow her to grasp what is at stake here.
“Because I say so,” says Rabih. “Because you are nine, and I am considerably
older and know a few things you don’t—and I’m not going to stand here all day
and have an argument with you about it.”
“That’s so unfair! Then I’m just going to shout and shout,” threatens Esther.
“You’ll do no such thing, young lady. You’ll go up to your room and stay
there until you’re ready to come down again and rejoin the family for dinner and
behave in a civilized way and show me you’ve got some manners.”
It’s a strange thing indeed for Rabih, congenitally intent as he is on avoiding
confrontation of any sort, to have to deliver such an apparently unloving
message to someone he loves beyond measure.
The dream is to save the child time; to pass on in one go insights that required
arduous and lengthy experience to accumulate. But the progress of the human
race is at every turn stymied by an ingrained resistance to being rushed to
conclusions. We are held back by an inherent interest in reexploring entire
chapters in the back catalogue of our species’ idiocies—and to wasting a good