The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

If parental kindness were enough, the human race would stagnate and in time
die off. The survival of the species hinges on children eventually getting fed up
and heading off into the world armed with hopes of finding more satisfying
sources of excitement.
In their moments of coziness, when the whole family is piled together on the big
bed and the mood is one of tolerance and good humor, Rabih is aware that
someday, in the not too distant future, all of this will end according to an edict of
nature enacted by a most natural means: the tantrums and fury of adolescence.
The continuation of families down the generations depends on the young ones’
eventually losing patience with their elders. It would be a tragedy if the four of
them still wanted to lie here with their limbs enlaced in another twenty-five
years’ time. Esther and William will ultimately have to begin finding him and
Kirsten ridiculous, boring, and old-fashioned in order to develop the impetus to
move out of the house.
Their daughter has recently assumed a leadership role in the resistance to
parental rule. As she approaches her eleventh birthday, she starts to take
exception to her father’s clothes, his accent, and his way of cooking, and rolls
her eyes at her mother’s concern with reading good literature and her absurd
habit of keeping lemon halves in the fridge rather than more carelessly tossing
the unused bits away. The taller and stronger Esther grows, the more she is
irritated by her parents’ behavior and habits. William is still too little to cast such
a caustic eye at his carers. Nature is gentle with children in this regard, making
them sensitive to the full array of their forebears’ flaws only at an age when they
are big enough to flee them.
In order to let the separation take its course, Rabih and Kirsten know not to
become too strict, distant, or intimidating. They understand how easy it is for
children to get hung up on a mum or dad who is hard to read, scary-seeming, or
just not around all that much. Such parents can hook in their offspring more
tightly than the responsive and stable ones will ever do. Rabih and Kirsten have
no wish to be the sort of self-centered, volatile figures with whom a child can
become obsessed for life, and so take care to be natural, approachable, and even,

---

sometimes, theatrically daft. They want to be unintimidating enough that Esther
and William will be able, when the time comes, to park them cleanly to one side
and get on with their lives. Being taken a bit for granted is, they implicitly feel,
the best possible indication of the quality of their love.

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Sex and Parenthood
“Let’s do it tonight; what do you think?” says Kirsten as she puts on her makeup
in the bathroom before heading downstairs to prepare the children’s breakfast.
“You’re on,” says Rabih with a smile, adding, “I’ll put it in my diary now.”
He’s not joking. Friday night is a favored slot and it’s been a while.
On his way to work, he thinks of Kirsten’s dark, wet hair, which beautifully
offset her pale skin when she stepped out of the shower. He takes a moment to
appreciate his extraordinary good fortune that this elegant, determined Scottish
woman has agreed to spend her life beside him.
The day turns out to be rather stressful and it’s not till seven that he reaches
home again. He’s longing for Kirsten now, but he has to be diplomatic. There
can be no rush and certainly no demands. He is going to try to tell her with