Monsters

This past weekend, when we were sitting down for movie night (manly monster fare - the Director's Cut of Aliens), Herself was a hair tired and just a smidgen crabby.  In response to the incessant chattering ("filling the air with noise"), Herself quipped, as she often does, that she was going to run away from home.  Offspring the Third promptly stated emphatically that he does not like when she says that, because it makes him worry that she won't come home.  Herself reassured him that she would, in fact, come home:  after all, she needed to take care of Ottoman-shaped dog, who requires insulin shots twice a day, and no one else knows how to do so.  (The practical and common-sense realities of daily life -- including pet care -- are reassuring to Offspring the Third.)

During the movie, main character Ripley learns that she has been in stasis for 57 years, and that her daughter passed away two years earlier at the age of 66.  Ripley murmurs:  I promised her that I'd be home for her birthday.  Her 11th birthday.   Ripley later makes promises to daughter-substitute Newt: I won't leave you. I promise.

Ah, the promises we make to children, trying valiantly to reassure them that they will not be left alone. 

Every now and then, though, we see a young dawdling child refusing to follow a parent out of a store, and we hear the parent say, "Fine. I'll leave you here then," and turn his or her back on the child and walk away. Such cruelty, to prey upon fear of abandonment in order to elicit compliance from an overtired and stubborn small person. Unacceptable.

It is a primordial fear, the fear of abandonment. Visceral, terrible, eternal. It haunts us even as adults, though we do not admit it; and so, we make pledges to children not only to comfort them, but also to convince ourselves that we will always, somehow, magically manage to be with them when they need us.  How we wish it could be so. How we fear that it will not be so.  We understand their terror far too well.