Parent Worship Further Deconstructed

I hope you don't mind, but I would like to take my previous discussion about Mother's Day a little further. This subject really knaws at me and the more I think about it, the crazier it makes me, so bear with me. I'd like to examine this "worship your parents and be eternally grateful to them" ideology a little more closely because I think it needs to be critically deconstructed a bit more.

As I touched on in the previous post, our culture (and probably most cultures) relentlessly promotes this idea that parents, by nature of bringing us into the world and taking care of us, deserve undying gratitude and honor for all eternity. They are beings to be worshipped, respected and appreciated for all they have sacrificed for us. Parenthood is the highest calling in life, the greatest role one can pursue and so on.

I've already argued that excessive gratitude to parents for caring for their kids is uncalled for, since having a child is a choice, and once you have one you must take care of it. You are simply carrying out your duties.

My argument today is that all of this excessive worship of parents is misplaced because people have children and take care of them, not for selfless, saintly, self-sacrificing reasons, but to satisfy their own selfish desires - to fulfil wishes for all sorts of self-gratifying things - receiving unconditional love, feeling needed and important, enjoying the activities of "family life", carrying on a last name, gaining acceptance into society via conformance, feeling a sense of accomplishment (since having children is equated with "having it all" and accomplishment in our culture), having a caretaker in old age, and on and on and on - the list is truly endless. People do not have children because they are selfless beings who want to struggle and sacrifice themselves for the betterment of the world or to help a needy person. They may enjoy thinking of themselves this way, but parents are not Mother Teresa. A selfless being does not reproduce and bring more people into the world when the world is already overpopulated with millions of needy, homeless children rotting away in orphanages, clamoring for homes. A selfless being does not need a genetic mini-me who reflects herself back like a mirror for the purpose of self-admiration and worship.

Perhaps I am over-analyzing here, but to me this whole parenthood = sainthood ideology is such a ridiculous and obvious sham, it makes my head spin. It is particularly irritating to me as a childfree person because so frequently the childfree get slapped with the selfish label, while parents walk around wearing a badge of sainthood for this phoney, non-existent selflessness - taking care of the little creations they made to satisfy their selfish desires.

And let's not forget the fact that our self-congratulating parents never asked for our permission to bring us into the world, and yet we are commanded to be grateful that they produced us, as if life on Earth is the best thing going. Maybe it's not - we have no way of knowing. One thing we know for sure is that every human being who is born is born with a death sentence.

The bottom line is, people have children for themselves - for everything they will get out of it and for all the ways they think parenthood will benefit them and make them happy. So putting parents on this pedestal of sainthood for the purpose of expressing undying gratitude and appreciation is simply wrong on every level.

A Closer Look at Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day and across the nation, women are being worshipped and showered with love, praise, attention and gifts for no other reason than for the fact that they reproduced.

This has me thinking. Why is parenthood the only role that gets honored with a special holiday? I am a wife, a daughter, a sister, a niece, an aunt, a friend, an employee and the caretaker of 3 cats, and yet none of these roles has been deemed worthy for me to get a national holiday. Okay, I do get honored on my wedding anniversary, but that's by hubby only. There is no national holiday called "Wife's Day".

The idea behind Mother's Day and Father's Day is that moms and dads deserve to be honored because their role is the ultimate in sacrifice. They do so much for us that we must show our appreciation. A national holiday is in order.

I don't think anyone would disagree that parents do so much for their kids (if they are parenting correctly, anyway) but here's my question. Why should a person be honored and worshipped for taking care of their responsibilities? A person makes the choice to reproduce and bring another person into the world, so shouldn't it be expected that they will take care of the being they produced? It's not some heroic act of charity and kindness that propels them into caring for their children - it's duty. Do they really deserve a national holiday to thank them for meeting their responsibilities? We have 3 cats who we chose to bring into our household, so we take care of them. I feed them twice a day, hubby cleans their litterboxes and we give them lots of love and attention every day. This is the responsibility that comes along with having pets and we knew this going in. We chose to have them, so we must take care of them properly. That makes us responsible. It doesn't make us saintly or deserving of a national holiday to celebrate the wonderfulness that is the pet owner.

It all comes back to the persistent mythology in our culture which defines parenthood as the most saintly, selfless and important role a person can undertake in life. Because it often does not feel that way to parents (many of them are miserable, run down by the day-to-day grind of caring for kids, and know their motives for having kids were selfish and not saintly), this positive reinforcement is necessary to sustain the mythology, thus ensuring that more and more people breed and bring more and more consumers into the world who will eventually purchase lots and lots of stuff (Mother's Day cards and gifts, for example).