The downside of heredity

From health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety


The downside of heredity is that your kids not only inherit the good things from you—an interest in the arts, a tendency toward longevity—but also the stuff on which you’ve maxed out your therapy benefits—a reluctance to let people help you, absolute conviction in your interpretation of the world.

In mathematics, a double negative is a positive. With progeny, it just creates conflicts.

“Dad, I know how to do it.”

“I’m just trying to give you the benefit of my experience.”

“Let me do it my way.”

“What if there’s a better way? Wouldn’t you want to know that?”

“What’s wrong with my way? And you’re the one who’s always saying mistakes are how you learn.”

“But I want you to make different mistakes than I made. This is why they don’t have to reinvent the automobile every year, why we have shoulder belts and airbags now, why they don’t design the Chevy Vega every year—there are decades worth of mistakes they can look at so they don’t repeat the same ones over and over.”

“What’s wrong with how I’m doing it?”

“If you want nice even color over a big area, make sure you’ve got a long point on the pencil, and use the side of the lead, not the tip. When you use the tip, you get these hard marks and it looks all scratchy instead of soft and even.”

“Maybe I want it all scratchy. Maybe I don’t want it all soft and even.”

“Okay. I didn’t consider that. I was thinking about a traditional approach, and tried-and-true technique to achieve what I thought you were after, but I didn’t stop to consider that you may have had an entirely different vision, and there I was blindly trying to intrude.”

“Thank you.”

“I did have classes in colored-pencil technique.”

“Dad!”

“Okay, but there’s a vast store of knowledge here if you want to avail yourself.”

She stared at me, the green pencil motionless over the page, until I walked away.