My Wish

Hey Kid,

Every parent has dreams for their kid. I've been trying to keep mine to a minimum, just to keep you freed up for your own dreams. But yesterday I decided I could make one wish for you. Just one big wish, my main priority, and this is it: I want you to be yourself, unashamedly, so long as you're loving.

That sounds like hippie nonsense until you understand how far I'm willing to go.

It's got to be hard to be a parent. Hell, a person's only on her own for a couple of years, already plagued with her own failures, and suddenly she's got a fresh new person to fuck up. Why wouldn't you want your kid to somehow succeed where you failed? That's what I want. That would certainly prove I figured it out after all, wouldn't it?

My own parents played that game. My mom had a self-destructive period when she was a teenager and all she wanted was to save me from repeating her mistakes. She wanted me to be a good Christian who thinks the right way, because I know she felt that being a good Christian would have saved her from herself. But the funny thing is, the "right" thoughts weren't right for me. In fact, if I had kept on making myself think the "right" thoughts, I probably would have killed myself, because they didn't make sense to me. I don't know if they've figured that out yet. That would be hard for them to do.

Truth is, I really don't think you can keep from fucking up your kid. You just need to give them to tools to get past it once you're done.

But fucked up is fine for now. The world needs people who don't think RIGHT. It needs those people to shake things up, keep everyone from goose-stepping right over their own private cliffs. I don't just mean that the world needs non-conformists or artists or crazy people, although it does, but that the world also needs fundamentalists and policemen and politicians and schoolteachers and war-mongerers and people who pierce their penises and Swiss guards and little children who run around all day long screaming their heads off and women who sweat a lot and fat guys who watch too much TV and people who invent useless crap and it also needs me. And you.

Most of all, the world needs people who are willing to be themselves, because that's a brave thing, and we are full up with cowardice. It needs the kind of people who make up their own songs and sing them all by themselves in their own voices, who paint pictures that nobody else likes, who chase around a ball for no apparent reason, or who just lay down with no TV and nothing pre-recorded and dream up something that no one's ever thought of, just for fun. And I want YOU to be able to do any of those things if you want to--or just about anything else--which is why I plan to teach you that it's wonderful and goddamn miraculous to be yourself.

If I can offer you any one thing to aid that, you will know what love feels like--including the hard parts of love--because I think then you'll be okay. I ask myself, what if, in an extreme, you grow up and become a drag queen? What if I watch you face mockery at all sides, suffer alienation, perhaps die alone, perhaps of AIDS? If that day comes, I will tear at my face and wail and scream. But if I know you lived and died knowing who you are, acting on who you are, radiating love in whatever quiet way, then I'll have peace, knowing that your life made the world a better place.

I hope I have the strength to live these words down.

The world still wants its war-mongerers--I don't know why, but apparently it has decided that it does, because it keeps making them--and they change the world. But their deeds pale in comparison to those that love unashamedly. It's rare, but they do exist. I hope I can help you be one.

That's my one big wish.

I love you.



C.