Personal Revelations

Jeffrey Zeldman—whose site always provides a good read—has been in a reflective mood recently. One article is a wonderful comment on divorce, an example of the most humane thing we can do under such an awful situation—and something that’s incredibly hard to do, of course.

The second article—Family Ties—is more gut-wrenching. A dispassionate reflection on our consistent inhumanity to those we ostensibly love, it brought up a lot of family memories of my own, stories related to me by those who dimly remembered them in the first place & that families prefer to keep buried. Many of us have little idea of the horrors endured by our own relatives, let alone more distant ancestors. But some of us do.

The stories I was told calcified into a big reason why I was so hesitant to have a child of my own—I worry how much rage and madness is within me & which I’ll pass onto my son. Nothing has yet happened. Yet. And that’s the worry, of course—you don’t know what, if anything, is dormant within you and your child & you’re not likely to know until it’s too late. My son is a phenomenally happy boy, but like so many others, he carries a heavy inheritance.