The relation between parent and child has cruel moments for the parent
even when money is no object, and the material worries are delegated to
servants and school teachers. The child and the parent are strangers
to one another necessarily, because their ages must differ widely. Read
Goethe's autobiography; and note that though he was happy in his
parents and had exceptional powers of observation, divination, and
story-telling, he knew less about his father and mother than about most
of the other people he mentions. I myself was never on bad terms with
my mother: we lived together until I was forty-two years old, absolutely
without the smallest friction of any kind; yet when her death set me
thinking curiously about our relations, I realized that I knew very
little about her. Introduce me to a strange woman who was a child when
I was a child, a girl when I was a boy, an adolescent when I was an
adolescent; and if we take naturally to one another I will know more of
her and she of me at the end of forty days (I had almost said of
forty minutes) than I knew of my mother at the end of forty years. A
contemporary stranger is a novelty and an enigma, also a possibility;
but a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it
does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned:
the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is
beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact
in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and
weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning. If
I meet a widow I may ask her all about her marriage; but what son ever
dreams of asking his mother about her marriage, or could endure to hear
of it without violently breaking off the old sacred relationship between
them, and ceasing to be her child or anything more to her than the first
man in the street might be?
Yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent's
humanity, the parent can realize the child's; for the parents with their
experience of life have none of the illusions about the child that the
child has about the parents; and the consequence is that the child
can hurt its parents' feelings much more than its parents can hurt
the child's, because the child, even when there has been none of the
deliberate hypocrisy by which children are taken advantage of by their
elders, cannot conceive the parent as a fellow-creature, whilst the
parents know very well that the children are only themselves over again.
The child cannot conceive that its blame or contempt or want of interest
could possibly hurt its parent, and therefore expresses them all with
an indifference which has given rise to the term _enfant terrible_ (a
tragic term in spite of the jests connected with it); whilst the parent
can suffer from such slights and reproaches more from a child than from
anyone else, even when the child is not beloved, because the child is so
unmistakably sincere in them.