Life's Not Fair

I was an overprotected kid.

Not by today's standards, of course. By today's standards--let's just say Children's Aid would have been around to confiscate me many, many times over. I mean, my God, I rode my bike all over town. Once I moved to London (1980, age 8), you couldn't contain me. London is a city made for cyclists: even that long ago, there were bike paths spanning most of its width. Most summer days I cycled twenty or thirty klicks. Alone.

Except for the "alone" part, I can't say this was by choice.

Just look at me: I'm obviously what you'd call an "indoors" sort of guy. I've always been this way. My rationale was simple, albeit simpleminded: the worlds in books far outstripped anything I might find in the "real" world. The "real" world was...dirty. In all kinds of ways.

I wasn't worried about getting hurt, which seems to be what terrifies parents now. Skinned knees, broken noses (I tripped on a sidewalk crack once and landed on my nose...the pain was so intense it was almost pleasant); I'd felt pain and it didn't scare me. But I didn't like getting dirty or making a lot of noise. Boys that age are noises with dirt on them, which means I had no interest in interacting with boys. Girls were much more attractive--so much more mature--but I got glasses in 1980, which meant girls suddenly had no interest in interacting with me.

I was a piece of work, let me tell you. This will be hard to understand, and probably hard to believe. At eight years old, I did not know how to tie my shoes.

Why would I? I had my mom to do that for me. It was an act of love for her, the same as laying out my clothes every day, cooking my meals, and working fourteen hour nights dispatching ambulances only to come home and drive school bus in the morning. Ends had to meet: in a single-parent family the ends rarely seem to come within shouting distance of each other. What little time there was, she determined to fill up with little acts of love. Like tying my shoes.

When my stepdad came along in 1980, he put an end to most of that right quick. I was told to "get outside and make some friends". I couldn't "make" friends any more than I could make duck à l'orange, but Hobson's choice, outside I went. That led to some truly pitiful scenes, in retrospect. Riding around for three hours, coming home, and making up a story about the baseball game I'd played, and all the people I'd met, people whose names conveniently matched the names of characters in my books. On at least two occasions, talking to dial tones for half an hour. (Younger readers: the modern equivalent would be carrying on a text conversation with yourself.)

But I was outside...sometimes on the other end of the city. I was told never to go east of Adelaide Street, so of course that was the first place I went. On my bike, on major arteries, without a helmet.

More than that: I was put on intercity busses, alone, either meeting my dad in Toronto or (horror of horrors) transferring all on my own and meeting him in Parry Sound. My mother had grave misgivings. This was many years before Vince Li, but I had long since shown myself to be an absentminded child who was also a stick-figure: easy pickings, in other words. But she sent me off, many times, alone, and I'm still here.

They arrest parents for that kind of thing nowadays.

I walked to school every day, almost always alone, starting in grade four. I would have walked earlier but I lived across highway 7 from the school and there was a bus. I didn't understand why I had to bus--there were traffic lights AND a crossing guard--but questioning parental decrees was unthinkable.

I know parents of teenagers who drive their "children" to school every day. Maybe it's similar to why my Mom tied my shoes every day: an act of love that's also an unwitting act of sabotage. Hey, we're all doing the best we can with what we've got.

Parents have convinced themselves that all the dangers are not just real, but omnipresent--everywhere, and yet somehow still avoidable. There are pedophiles behind every bush, just waiting for any kid who might come along. Your child has to wear a helmet to play in the yard, because otherwise he might get a boo-boo.

I got lots of boo-boos. I had a tire blow on Oxford Street at something like 35 or even 40 km/h and substantial parts of skin merged with concrete, quite painfully. Could have been much worse. I'm good at ditching a bike. I've learned to be. I've bruised, cut, scraped and punctured various things, all of them superficial and none of them permanent (other than the scars, of which I have approximately a metric buttload). A Honda Civic driven by a police officer ran me over with no lasting effects beyond being instantly and totally transformed into a law-abiding cyclist.

But most of my problems came from other kids, who saw the geography of my face and wanted to rearrange it. Back then, that was something you just put up with. Adults didn't, couldn't understand. Some of them told you to fight back, which was a laugh and a half: my cotillion always changed names with every new school (five elementary schools, one of them twice) but the faces never seemed to change and neither did the ham-sized fists. Some adults told you to ignore it, which in my case meant simply enduring it without protest,  hoping that this particular ham-fisted bully was the kind who would be satisfied with tears rather than the kind who needed to see blood.

It's weird. I've talked to parents who say that the kind of bullying I and many others dealt with has been all but eradicated. That's great, except like everything else in the world, it's migrated online.  Meanwhile, parents have done everything they can to minimize all the rest of childhood's petty dangers. Out of the best of intentions, they've been tying their kids' shoes every day.

It started with spanking. Now, I don't agree with spanking your kid: there are many other ways to get the point across, and it's not a great idea to teach a child that problems are solved with violence. If I had children, I would not spank them. That said...our parents were spanked, their parents were spanked, and their parents were spanked, all the way back into the mists of time. I was spanked: frequently. Often hard enough to redden the skin, though NEVER to draw blood and NEVER specifically to inflict pain. My stepdad put an end to that the same way he made me learn how to tie my own shoes.
I don't blame my mom one bit. Reason didn't work with me as a child. Even as a teenager, I learned to endure the lectures from my stepfather (who had the patience of Job), say the appropriately contrite words and in the appropriately contrite manner, and then go on living as before. It honestly must have been a real temptation for John to haul off and smack me one sometimes. He never did.

Kids nowadays may not believe this, but teachers spanked kids, too. It was called in loco parentis --"in the place of a parent"-- and it still exists. It's just that parents don't use corporeal punishment anymore, so neither do teachers.

Most of your spanked ancestors grew up to be fine upstanding adults (who admittedly spanked their children). But seemingly overnight, it became socially unacceptable to use physical force under any circumstances whatsoever. We went through this in the aborted adoption process. Your kid could be hurting you or another child--physically beating on someone--and you're  not to touch her.

Then again, this came from the same person who told us if our adopted child forgot her lunch on a school field trip to Toronto, we would be expected to drop what we were doing and bring the child her lunch.

I still shake my head at that. I forgot my lunch once on a field trip somewhere.  I was too ashamed to tell the teacher I'd been so stupid, so I lied and said I finished my lunch quickly.
If I'd had friends, I could have cadged off them; maybe the teacher would have paid for my lunch and got the money back from my folks. As it was, I went without. And it didn't kill me.

But I know parents who cook their darlings separate suppers. Not just separate from what the parents are eating, different suppers for each kid. Why? "Because Billy doesn't like ____." Not because Billy is allergic, because he doesn't like something.

This strikes me as patently insane. Growing up, I had two choices: eat what was on the table, or eat nothing. Fairly often it was something I liked. Sometimes it was something I hated. Liver. Blecch. Complaining was not encouraged: if I  tried -- probably invoking the "IT'S NOT FAIR!" statement of spoiled brats everywhere, I'd have been instantly met with the rejoinder "Life's not fair, Kenny-me-boy."

I have long been a proponent of fairness. It rankles me to no end, even now, that life is, indeed, not fair. I remember having an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object argument with my parents over car insurance, back when it was still a given I would drive a car. Boys pay more in premiums than girls, because boys are more likely to get into accidents and drive like assholes. While conceding this undeniable fact, I still argued passionately that all the underwriters in the world don't knoe every boy (or every girl, for that matter). I certainly wouldn't drive like an asshole: why should I pay the asshole premium? They kept falling back on statistics, and I kept falling back on righteous indignation, and neither of us budged.

I still haven't. In a sane world, we'd all pay the same premium starting out, and then we'd get hit with whatever asshole premiums apply, when they apply. Maybe the rates would have to be juggled to maintain reserves and the sacred profit margins. So be it. That would be...wait for it...fair.

But my parents were right, as parents almost always are, about life not being fair. I see it almost everywhere I look: unrequited love; well-thought-out positions drowned out by inarticulate ranting; most notably,  people who did nothing to deserve the pain they live with every hour of every day. (Sorry, I don't believe "capacity to carry pain -- the "ah, she can handle it! defence -- as a just excuse for randomly inflicted pain.) I've spent so much of my life trying to make a difference there, and the source of much of my own pain lies in my inability to do enough, or in some cases anything at all, for everybody else's.

Loneliness is the pain that calls out loudest to me. I want to heal it, by any means necessary, for whatever period of time is permissible. I've been profoundly lonely in my life, you see. Until you've experienced  not being lonely, loneliness is a default state; once you have, it's insupportable.

But I can't heal the world. I can't even heal my world. Because life's not fair.

What I do notice, though, is that we've reached a point where any kind of failure or injury at all is considered unfair and to be avoided at all costs. This is, it should be needless to say, unsustainable: eventually you WILL fail, you WILL be hurt both physically and emotionally, multiple times and in some interesting ways,  and you WILL have to develop the tools to cope with all of that. It takes a lifetime to develop those tools, for most people, and many parents have inflicted their children with delayed development.

I want to know where this came from. The kind of pragmatic tough love that many of us and almost all of our parents were subject to breeds self-reliance and resiliency...tools that have long been respected and highly valued. Mollycoddling and helicoptering does the opposite: it creates weak, dependant men and women who have no idea how to cope with adversity. Why those should be seen as desirable traits is a mystery for the ages.

You do want your kid to know how to tie his shoes, right?