A hero’s retreat

Fri, 23 Feb 2001 20:07:00 +0000

They say that parenthood is about choosing your battles. So is childhood. The only difference is that parents can choose from a more extensive set of weapons than children. Parents have words. They have money. They have brute strength. They have power. Children are like occupied territories. Their claims to autonomy often exist at the whim of what can seem like imperial potentates who set their bedtimes, choose their clothes, control their whereabouts and set their limits. And, like residents of occupied territories, children learn that the more oppressive the state, the more will and ingenuity it takes to find liberation. Even then, you sometimes need a miracle.

For my father, parenting wasn't about choosing battles. It was the battle. He was a soldier descended from a long line of soldiers and heroes. His ancestors fought in the Revolution. They fought in the Civil War. His father, a general, was the first American officer to arrive in Munich during the Allied invasion of Germany.

Like his three younger brothers, my father enlisted in the Army; but he had the bad luck of serving during the late 1950s -- peacetime. By the time I was born in 1965, he worked as an electrical engineer for Sylvania Electric. He made televisions. At least that's what I believed, and that's what I told the polite grown-ups who asked.

Salon.com > Margaret Finnegan

A hero’s retreat