This Sunday is Father’s Day. No doubt you’ll read many saccharine accounts of fathers and what it means to be a parent and to be parented. But reality is not usually as sweet. Sometimes the people in our lives cannot be summed up with sentimentality. One of my favorite poems is This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin because it views parenting as flawed at best. Of course it is overly cynical. Nevertheless, there is much truth in this jaundiced view of parenting as imperfect and … [Read more...]