Baby shower

Parents! Let’s talk about your kid, your precious little oxygen mask for nuptial suffocation.

Said child has made a choice. A difficult choice. One you will not possibly like. Actually, you won’t like it. Your child is gay. No–worse. Your child has decided to make Art. For the rest of her life. Also, probably gay.

What can you do now? As a first step, nothing. That’s got to be the hardest, innit? To control your urge to dominate, decree, deaden. You know, to parent.

Your kid is coming to terms with this impassioned realization herself. Of having discovered the illogical. You won’t get it. I don’t get it either if we are being honest with each other for a second here. Writing just helps make my confusion look cool. I couldn’t care less for kids, much less yours, and yet here I am telling you how to raise one. That’s the kind of shit I get away with under art’s artifice. And while we are gazing into the looking glass, what’s success but an efficient way of lying to ourselves?

Anyway, back to your loser kid.

Everything you have done so far has followed the logical consequence of security, attention, and certainty. And you want those things for your kid too. Because what the world really needs is more people like you. Right? Parenting, most often, is plagiarism.

Your nervousness, while laughable, isn’t misplaced. Your need to pass on your ideas of what makes an acceptable life, while aggressive, isn’t wrong. But here’s what’s messing things up: you want to understand. You have lived all your life looking for understanding and so when your kid says, I want to make art, you go, “What the hell does that even mean?”

It means the illogical consequence of security, attention, and certainty. Love. I told ya: Gay!

I may not have a degree in diaper sniffing, but I sure know it takes a ton of love to bring yourself to do that. Parenting, as with art, is not something you get, or understand. The kind of sacrifices a person would make for something so useless (your kid, but also art).

Why?

As nauseous as it makes me, I am using the parenting analogy only because God would be a bit much. The moment you decided to become a parent, or when the condom broke, whichever was first, you decided to throw yourself—all of You—into creation. It’s why your child means the world to you.

But along the way, you saw the power in your decision and instead wanted to determine what the world means to your child. The story arc of religion. In this case, Daddy (Mommy) issues.

To be a creator is scary. And hard. Especially because destroying is so easy. And popular. Where you missed the point is when you thought you were God. Awwww. Nope. The child is. And you are doing everything you can to turn her into a good human being. Go vomit.

To bring art into the world is to undo that process.

Art is one more way to fling yourself back into creation. Into love. To ask Why is futile. Because what you are really asking is, “Why me?” The two words standing between you and God. The art and the artist. The parent and the child.