The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

Before he became a father, he imagined the relationship as being like an intensive version of owning a pet. The child, he thought, was essentially passive, a vessel into which you poured your love. On TV that’s how it looked. Children were silent, dormant; you went into their bedrooms, gazed down at them fondly, drew the blankets over them as they slept. But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like – it was – living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.

I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common. We’re all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a much happier place.

there is an Irish saying, that even though a candle is not very bright, it is better to light one than if you do not light any candle at all, and then you are complaining because it is too dark.