On Children

One day when i was a kid of 8 or 9 my mom came back from the grocer's shop and recited this poem to me and my brothers. She had written it on the backside of her shopping list, having copied it off a poster on one of the shop's walls while she was waiting for her turn. You know, one of those tacky posters with a sunset on the background and some text written in curly letters. It happened to be a fragment of Khalil Gibran's "The Profet":

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

These lines stayed with me for a long time, but it was only a couple of years ago, when a student lent me Gibran's book, that i discovered where they came from. The makers of the poster at the grocer's shop of my childhood had not bothered to mention the author, as i saw myself when it was my turn to go shopping. Yet, their spanish translation was faithful enough that when i came across the fragment in english, over 20 years later, i recognized it.

Then again today, while surfing on the net, i found Sweet Honey on the Rock's musical version of the text, and it brought the memory up again.

My mom did not have the opportunity to go to school beyond the 6th grade. She had to work from a very young age, and her parents couldn't afford, or didn't think it important enough, to educate her beyond elementary school. All her life she's had to fight against the disadvantages this meant for her. Her lack of a formal education could have made her deny it to us, perhaps, or become so obsessed with it that she pushed us towards the "good and profitable" fields of study, ways of life, worldviews...

Yet she and my dad always made it clear that we could choose what we wanted, even when it was obvious they didn't understand our choices. When i told them i was going to study literature they must have been scared shitless: that really is a starvation sentence in a small town in Argentina. When i came out to them (rather, when they figured out i was gay), the notion must have gone against everything they were brought up to believe, yet they dealt and are dealing with it. Two of their three children have emigrated, and the third will probably do so next year. If we miss them, i can't imagine how they must miss us.

Of course, parents have their own ideas about life and what's right, and you live by those when you're little... When you start to get older, some of their values and points of view have stuck to you, and even if you see things differently, there's a time when you're still sensitive to their preferences... Some of those you spend years trying to shed off, only to discover they've crept back on you when you least expect it.

I think about my mom going into that grocer's shop and coming across that poem on the wall. It must have truly spoken to her beliefs, for her to come back so excited and read the poem to us so enthusiastically.