And the house of cards collapses; aka: Definition of "the best"

 

Your mother is recruited to babysit her friend’s five-year-old son. When alone with the child, she screams hellfire at him for leaving his toys on the floor, makes him clean his bath­room spotless, spanks him and sends him to his room without dinner for lying about homework. Confronted later by the boy’s parents, she fully acquits herself: “I did the best I could.”

Your father, after a long period of unemployment, gets a job with Lyft. He drives drunk with his terri­fied, outraged pas­sengers; gives a pedestrian – an elderly nun – the finger; after mid­night runs out of gas near the Stratosphere and orders his teenage patrons to get out and walk. Fired the next morning, he tells his boss: “I did my best.”

When adults are this miscreant, only comedians would suggest they “did the best they could.” Why, then, do we tend to think that parents who treat their chil­dren in similarly disrespectful and abusive ways are doing their best? Are there different planes of definition, different standards for human inter­actions, and sanity, in the home and in the outside world?

Parents don’t do the best they can. Personally, I don’t think anyone should do the best they can unless that’s an incidental result of great enthusiasm or is the product of a contractual obligation to a paying customer. “The best” is a meme dream that says we are acting beyond ourselves – adding a layer of artificial, dogged and grim determination – to apply a potentially limitless amount of diligence and energy (conceivably enough to kill or maim us) to a platonically ideal and probably unreachable goal.

What parents do is their feeling. They act from depression, anger, immaturity, love or what they tell themselves is love. They act from an amateur ideal based on their unconscious psycho­logi­cally limited world. They act from their own child­hood prison. Adult children who need to believe their parent showed “best” behavior are refusing to feel the truth. They are refusing to feel. Their mind has identified (conflated) “best” with love or care, which they needed as children and which, in its absence, they still need as troubled adults. It is a meme they would need to decon­struct to be able to leave their first home and live more substantially, and sanely, in the real world.