June 04, 2009 - 8:42 p.m.
The Shape of the World
It has been so long that I have been away from here
The shape of the world has changed.
High school, she tells them, is the last place where people care about you: the last place where people will coddle you and hold your hand.
It is the last place where we seek to prepare people for the world, but teach unreality.
What will happen to these girls?
The ones whose perception of the world is coloured like fashion, changing to suit their mood, designed for them to prosper. What will happen when they have their first taste of a world that doesn't bend to their lipgloss and blonde hair tossing?
There is nothing quite like 'Oakville Parents'. They go for the jugular. They are like the unstoppable momentum of the antagonist in X-Men who hurls himself through walls, bashing his way through anything that dares to stand in his line of sight.
"I am a lioness for my children"
I have heard this before. In so many words. And phone calls. They have never learned to wait. Patience is a virtue unassociated with luxury and privilege.
These kids are learning to see the world as a place set up for them, with parents who have altered the shape of the world to fit their children, manipulating and stretching it to fit their wants and needs. What will they do when they encounter the first door that doesn't quiver and bust down at the sight of their rhinocerus parents?
What message are they sending? They are teaching their children that the way to get what they want is to force the hand, to threaten and thrust their jaw forward.
There are different kinds of child abuse.
These are step on the neck as if it were the rung on a ladder people, the kind whose world will shatter when, for the first time, their parent's threats don't land them a job, get them the degree, fix their relationships and protect them from a round world where their wants slide off the surface mingling with the wants of other people who are all the centre of their own world. And they will cry and wonder why they never knew this before.
