Friday 29 April 2011

Falling, Not Flying


Every day, Awesome Calamity, Tiger Mother, force-fed tears into her daughter’s well of happiness. These tears would sustain Awesome Calamity’s daughter on her path to true and meaningful and important and better-than-everyone-else enlightenment.
            Awesome Calamity had discovered the most important secret to successful and perfect and right and better-than-everyone-else parenthood. The most important secret to successful and perfect and right and better-than-everyone-else parenthood was this: the path to your child’s true and meaningful and important and better-than-everyone-else enlightenment began with the mortification of their childhood.
            Having discovered the most important secret of parenthood, Awesome Calamity, Tiger Mother, wrote it down in a book. “Kill Your Child’s Dream: Why a Child Should Only Be Able to Buy a Parent’s Love with the Currency of ‘A’ Grades” was the name of Awesome Calamity’s book.
            Within the book was Awesome Calamity’s plan to a child’s true and meaningful and important and better-than-everyone-else enlightenment. This was the plan:

Fail to get an A, fail to get a hug.
Ultra-study: how overwork leads to better-than-everyone-elseness.
Can Do Better! Must Do Better! Will Do Better!
Knowledge acquisition is everything.
Education = learning everything better than everyone else.
Make the grade! Make the grade A!
Understand how to pass tests of facts.
Perform better than everyone else in every test.

            The best laid plans of mice and men and, it so transpired, Tiger Mothers, gang aft agley.

                                                            *

As she stood at the top of the extremely tall building built by people who were unaware of the word hubris, Awesome Calamity’s daughter wrote the final entry – Mother said I must fly – into her “Success Journal”. A few seconds later, the pavement was covered in the success of Awesome Calamity, Tiger Mother.

Awesome Calamity’s daughter’s happiness had not existed.

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