To understand all is to forgive all - Being a better child

One of the first things you realise when you become a parent is how much you have to think about parenting. Unless you are a supremely indifferent parent, in every sense, you will worry, ruminate and dwell upon every single thing, little or large, from breathing to sleeping from schooling to breeding.

I thought very much about this recently when I saw Debra Granik’s ‘Leave No Trace’, a magnificent meditation on escaping from society.  This is not a film review but this work, about someone who can’t or won’t just settle down, is so sensitively handled.  Father and daughter live off grid in Oregon despite official interference could have been a bungled succession of clichés.  But like all the best directors Granik shows she does not tell.  And what she shows is the forest not as a forbidding place full of menace but of restoration and healing.  It is, of course, also a place to hide.

At the heart of the film is a father’s relationship with his daughter.  Neither mute nor weighed down with words theirs is a bond formed of teamwork living life as basically as the West will allow.  The father, a combat veteran, leaves one wondering not how combat prompts some to give up on other people but why it doesn’t cause everyone to do so.

The most moving part of the film comes right at the end and is what has triggered this short post.  Go to any bookshop and there are shelves of books promising skills and expertise in parenting.  The book has never been written however, so far as I am aware, about how to be a child.  Few people, if any, worry about whether they could be better at childing.

It’s true, if you are a decent human being, that you might worry about whether your parent is well or lonely. But that thing that constantly preoccupies parents, namely whether their child is being formed right is not often thought about by children.

Your parents were shaped before you were born; by good things and bad and in the same way that the world after us is unimaginable it is extremely difficult to see the forces that acted upon our parents.

Where Leave No Trace packs its greatest punch is in showing a daughter seeing her father’s wounds, acknowledging them and, with great maturity, firmly refusing to accept them as her own.  There is always a reason our parents are the way they are and if we don’t want to be the same way we must find that reason.  It is sometimes said that good parenting is about careful listening.  I would suggest that good childing is about careful watching.