A letter from bitterly disappointed father

[Che -Guevara]

Dear All Three

 

With last evening's crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.

 

It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.

 

We are constantly regaled with chapter and verse of the happy, successful lives of the families of our friends and relatives and being asked of news of our own children and grandchildren. I wonder if you realise how we feel — we have nothing to say which reflects any credit on you or us. We don't ask for your sympathy or understanding — Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children.

 

Fulfilling careers based on your educations would have helped — but as yet none of you is what I would confidently term properly self-supporting. Which of you, with or without a spouse, can support your families, finance your home and provide a pension for your old age? Each of you is well able to earn a comfortable living and provide for your children, yet each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents.

 

So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgment to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.

 

In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn't for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.

 

I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children's underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don't want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes - it's not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace - far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won't do it by simply whingeing and saying you don't like it. You'll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn't possible, or you simply can't be bothered, then I rest my case.

 

I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

 

Dad

[Che -Guevara]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/27/nick-crews-email-disappointed-dad_n_2198135.html

[Malika]

Thats called tough love - I agree with him.

 

I think nature intended for children to grow up and carry on ...not to keep coming back to suck their parents blood with their nacnac..lol

[Che -Guevara]

^True and he doesn't blame them alone. Here's a bit about himself.

 

“I bought into the fashionable philosophy of not interfering; letting the children find themselves. When they were getting into trouble -- at school, or later with their relationships -- I would just bite my lip and tell myself, ‘Don’t butt in, it’s their lives.’ I was trying to express my frustration at these wonderful grown-ups who had yet to make the best of what they had. They have read the criticism, but not seen the enduring love through the lines.... I haven’t done well as a father, have I?”

[Malika]

^Indeed, I think thats where he went wrong, it wont kill a child to tell them a few home truths. I am a control freak as a parent, but is learning to let go to a certain extent [school is non - negotiable in my books] - so that the child can grow some wings, so to fly off one day.

 

I cant stand grown ups who still want to drain life out of their parents - just because someone gave birth to you, it gives you the right to torment them with your nacnac. Waliida waxyalo badaan ina laga ilaliyo- is what I believe. As a parent its so painful to see your child grow throught hardship, be any kind. Laakiin one has to try to avoid burdening their parents when one gets to a certain age.

[Che -Guevara]

^Kind wondered what kind parent would I be, tough job!

 

Some for reason this came to mind,

 

"I think God gives us children so that death won't come as such a disappointment." - Evelyn Harper,

[Malika]

^Parenting isnt a walk in the park dear, waa shaaqo adag!

 

ps. I am sure you would make a great dad to a young girl - your an at ease sort of a guy, girls like a chilled out dad.