“It was not like that when I was a little kid,” she said as I mused about life, sitting on the sofa with my daughter watching some mindless movie on a Saturday morning.
I was musing that having friends means crushing expectation that you can’t possibly live up to, that empathy and kindness were a weaknesses and that when you can no longer contribute economically you are tossed aside for someone else who can.
I was fourteen when I started working full time to support myself. I am now well into my forties and have not had less than a full-time schedule of work since. Perhaps I am afraid if I slow down, the world will run me over and not stop to see if I am ok. Perhaps I am scared to ask if my value to everyone around me is solely economic. Perhaps I just don’t know what else to do.
Perhaps I should not be sharing these thoughts with my eighteen year-old daughter who should be seeing a bright, idealistic future and that makes me a bad parent. But I think she already knows the truth and that if I sugar-coat it, she would see through it anyway.
