I just listened to Maggie Gallagher's talk on how she ended up starting the National Organization for Marriage. Her story of having a child with a man who ran away really resonates with me. I am a child of divorce. I don't hate my parents, but I hate what their divorce did to me and my sister. I have suffered as a result of not having a father nearby in my teenage years. My mother remarried and some of my relatives suggested that I treat her second husband as if he were my father, but it really wasn't possible for me to make the emotional leap. My stepfather was only with us for 4 years, but that experience perhaps developed in me a distrust of all men, bosses and people in places of authority.
We are in the process of creating a world of anachronisms. Today, we have to pay a premium to eat as peasants did two or three generations ago. A person's livelihood can be shipped around the world so that CEOs and shareholders can have a better quarter. Natural mom-dad families can be atomized so that parents can pursue careers or mistresses and kids are supposed to be resilient and thrive in such arrangements. Anonymous sperm-donors who donates to a lesbian couple creates a father-shaped hole that can't be filled easily.
Why have we chosen to reject what is natural so that we can create something unnatural and untested? Why can't we learn that there are some things that can't be improved upon?
