Baggage

 There's a classic This American Life segment that I recall hearing on the radio as a kid. The raconteuse was telling another story about her notoriously hard-ass father. When she was growing up, as she tells it, he never had a fun bone in his body. 

He pinched pennies with a morbid intensity, she says. He placed unrelenting pressure on her and her siblings to succeed academically. As she put it, he "believed all three of his children should get PhDs in engineering, or else they would starve in the street."

But somehow, she grew up to free herself of all this baggage. Though she got an impressive degree from CalTech, she proceeded to squander it by becoming a performance artist, who did things like play the piano next to the freeway as some sort of arcane statement. 

I found all of this empowering to contemplate as a kid. Here she had been through this excruciating childhood—but she came out of it with a sense of humor intact. She made a living telling stories about it. And she never let it constrain her freedom of choice. 

But then, decades later, I heard a podcast interview in which she was talking about her life as a mother. Now that she had kids of her own, she said, her biggest concern was finding the right elite college for them to attend—and, of course, the fear they might not get in.

I'm reminded of Orwell's observation about Dickens: namely, that the Victorian novelist wrote as indelibly as anyone ever has about the misery of English boarding schools—yet, when he became a father himself, he subjected his children to the same miserable ordeal. 

As Orwell puts it: "Considering the attitude to society that is everywhere implied in Dickens's novels, it comes as rather a shock to learn that he sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the ordinary educational mill." (Orwell knew something about miserable schools.)

Like father, like son, I suppose; like father, like daughter. Indeed, it seems, "man hands on misery to man," as Philip Larkin put it—from one generation to the next—"It deepens like a coastal shelf." The only way to break the cycle? He advised: "don't have any kids yourself."