My husband, children and I were with friends this evening for dinner. I was feeling fairly exhausted from a long week of travel for work and trying to stay focused on the dinner party conversation.
For a moment, I felt like I was in one of those romantic comedies where the girl or guy are in a group and get lost in their head. And at that moment, the camera zooms in to their expression and then out of the room and out of the house and then the camera is looking down at the neighborhood and then higher and higher looking at the city and then the world.
But the conversation was neither romantic nor funny. In fact, it was exhausting. And I found that I had a really hard time showing interest in the intense chatter about how smart their kid was and how their kid is going to a prep school and now has to work hard for once and because he is really smart he will have no trouble getting into this or that college and so on.
As a Type A person, I had had enough Type A chatter in my own head tonight, so this was either pure irritation from my projection as a concerned middle class parent trying to keep up with the Jones, or it was pure irritation, full stop. Either way, I was getting more and more annoyed by the notion that we are selfish human beings raising our kids to become selfish human beings. We do not gauge our child’s success on collective achievements, (barring sports to a certain extent) but we base them on their individual achievements.
No wonder we are living in a first world that doesn’t really see or recognize suffering around us – we live in our own movie, directed and presented by parents who are focused on their own children’s success. We cannot imagine how others live, or don’t live, because we look inward and perhaps lose sight of what’s really important in this big big world.
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